MORE TURKS CALL FOR REASSESSMENT OF ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
Sandy Smith
HULIQ.com
May 3 2010
SC
A retired Turkish military judge and a columnist for Turkey’s largest
newspaper have added their voices to the small but growing number
of influential Turks who are calling on their country to formally
acknowledge its responsibility for the massacre of millions of
Armenians in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire."
In a detailed historical essay in the May 2 edition of Today’s Zaman,
Turkey’s largest English-language daily, retired military judge Umit
KardaÅ~_ suggests that Turks should condemn the actions of the "Young
Turk" government that led to the death march of 1915, an effort to
rid the country of its Christian population, most notably the large
Armenian minority that made up just about all of the Ottoman merchant
and professional class.
KardaÅ~_’ essay argues that the ethnic cleansing of the country’s
Christian populations was a betrayal of the early principles
of the "Young Turk" party, the Committee of Union and Progress,
and that Turkey remains a morally stunted country because of its
unwillingness to fully acknowledge the wrongs committed in 1915-16. "No
justification…can be offered for this human tragedy," he wrote. "No
technical term [like "genocide"] is vast enough to contain these
incidents, which are indescribable."
Kardas’ essay comes on the heels of a column by Mustafa Akyol in the
English-language edition of Hurriyet, Turkey’s largest newspaper,
calling on Turkey to express remorse for the Armenian slaughter on
grounds of Islamic morality. Citing some Muslim muftis in Turkish
provincial towns who opposed the forced deportations out of fear
of the wrath of Allah, he wrote, "Those God-fearing individuals, I
believe, were the best of my nation in 1915. And now more of us are
remembering their spirit, and even joining them in their tears." In
a followup column responding to widespread criticism of his first
essay, he defended his view by first dismissing the standard Turkish
explanations of the genocide as a defensive reaction, then saying,
"The fact that we Turks also suffered should not make us blind and
indifferent to the suffering on the other side, whose proportions are
undoubtedly much larger. The fact that we remember and honor our own
dead, in other words, should not prevent us from feeling mercy and
remorse for the hundreds of thousands of perished Armenians."
* Turkish Newspaper on Armenian Genocide: We Made A Terrible Mistake
Both writers back recent efforts to normalize relations between modern
Turkey and modern Armenia, including reopening the border between
the two countries with no preconditions. Turkey objects to Armenia’s
control of a portion of neighboring Azerbaijan that has an Armenian
majority; Akyol argued that this should not override the need for
remembrance and contrition.
As one respondent to the followup column wrote, "The debate [on the
Armenian genocide] is always twisted in Turkey. But at least it is
now opened."