THE ECONOMIST NEVER FORGET
April 16 2015
Forthrightness about a past atrocity provokes a strong reaction
Apr 18th 2015 | VATICAN CITY |
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IN 1915 Pope Benedict XV wrote to Mehmed V, the Sultan of the Ottoman
empire, saying that he could hear “the echo of the groans of an entire
people…subjected to unspeakable sufferings”. When the two leaders’
modern-day counterparts met last November at the Turkish presidential
palace outside Ankara, those echoes were still audible. According to a
new book by Franca Giansoldati, the Vatican-watcher of Il Messaggero,
an Italian daily, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president, “begged”
Pope Francis to refrain from openly characterising the Ottoman empire’s
slaughter of Armenians in 1915 as genocide.
The pope respected his host’s wishes then. But on April 12th he
abandoned tact and referred to the killings as “the first genocide
of the 20th century”. The Turkish government responded with outrage
and recalled its ambassador to the Holy See for consultations. A
vote in the European Parliament on April 15th, commending the pope’s
statement and urging Turkey to recognise the massacres as genocide,
further infuriated Mr Erdogan. “It is not possible for Turkey to
accept such a crime, such a sin,” he said.
Francis has used the same phrase before, most recently in 2013 when
he met an Armenian delegation. But that was scarcely reported, and
the Turkish authorities merely expressed “disappointment” and called
in the Vatican’s envoy for a ticking-off. This time, he was making a
much-awaited speech in front of Armenia’s president, Serzh Sargsyan,
days before the official centenary commemorations on April 24th.
Turkish diplomats are understood to have set themselves two aims as
the centenary approached: to stop the mass at which Francis spoke being
held on the day itself, and to prevent him from using the G-word. They
gained their first objective. In deciding to deny them their second,
the pope and his diplomatic advisers had to weigh opposing factors.
The Holy See has warmer relations with Turkey than any other Muslim
country. Vatican officials recognise that Mr Erdogan has gone further
than his predecessors in acknowledging the mass killing of Armenians.
Against that is their desperation over Islamist persecution of
Christians and what the Vatican views as Muslim clerics’ and
politicians’ failure to oppose it. Recent months have seen mass
killings of Christians by Muslims in Nigeria, Libya and Kenya. The
pope and his advisers believe that a decisive phase has been reached
in the eradication of Christianity from Iraq and Syria.
The Vatican has long been the venue of a tug-of-war between proponents
of careful dialogue with the Islamic world and advocates of bluntness,
who feel that tact has got Christians nowhere and that plain speaking
is needed, even if it causes offence. The plain-speakers had the
upper hand under the previous pope, Benedict XVI. Francis’s latest
comment suggests they are back in the ascendancy.
From: Baghdasarian