AFTER 100 YEARS, TURKEY SHOULD ACKNOWLEDGE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

12:39 21/04/2015 >> SOCIETY

Thestar.com editorial

After 100 years, it is now widely accepted as the first genocide of
the modern era. The killing of as many as 1.5 million Armenians in
Ottoman Turkey that began in April, 1915, was a stain on the conscience
of humanity, the first such horror in a century that would sadly see
many more.

Here in Canada, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government recognizes
the genocide, and Parliament passed resolutions more than a decade
ago condemning it as a crime against humanity.

As Armenians the world over mark the 100th anniversary on Friday of
the beginning of the “great catastrophe,” they know that the mass
slaughter and expulsion that their community suffered as the First
World War raged has gained iconic status as a crime of monstrous
proportions. Nazi leader Adolph Hitler may have believed that few
would remember the Armenian tragedy, but history has proved him wrong.

Just this past week Pope Francis used his powerful pulpit to urge
world leaders to recognize the genocide, saying that “concealing
or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without
bandaging it.” The Pope alluded, as well, to the current persecution
of Christians by Islamic State jihadists and other radicals in places
such as Syria, Iraq and Nigeria. Even so, his remarks predictably
infuriated Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government. It
recalled its envoy to the Vatican and accused the Pope of fanning
hatred with baseless claims.

As the Star’s Olivia Ward wrote on Saturday, the Turkish government
has always maintained the claim that the Armenian “tragedy,” while
terrible, has been exaggerated, and was a byproduct of an ugly civil
war as the Ottoman Empire disintegrated. But diplomats at the time were
shocked by the sheer scale of the suffering of two million Christian
Armenians in what is now eastern Turkey. They faced mass deportation,
death marches, starvation, executions, torture and rape.

To one American diplomat it looked like a systematic bid to crush
the Armenian race.

The Armenian tragedy proved to be just the first of several in a 20th
century drenched in the blood of two world wars and state-sanctioned
mass slaughter.

The singular evil of the Shoah, the Holocaust, towers above the rest.

Hitler’s Nazi killing machine murdered 6 million Jews seeking to
annihilate an entire people. But millions of Ukrainians died in
Joseph Stalin’s man-made famines. In Cambodia the Khmer Rouge killed
millions. And nearly a million perished in Rwanda and Bosnia.

Modern Turkey is a democratic, advanced state and a valued ally
of Canada and the rest of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
alliance. The Ottoman Empire is long gone and Turkish people today
have no such blood on their hands. With the hindsight of a century,
they should be able to come to terms with past events, however painful.

Yet, discouragingly, the Turkish government continues to attack any
and all who dare utter the word genocide. In Erdogan’s mind, “it
is out of the question for there to be a stain or a shadow called
genocide on Turkey.” That perversely casts Turkey in the role of
victim. That simply doesn’t stand serious scrutiny. Modern scholarship
has documented a campaign by Mehmed Talat Pasha and his regime against
the Armenians, who were regarded as pro-Russian enemies from within,
at a time when Turkey was allied with Germany against Russia.

Turkey’s current leadership, innocent of century-old crimes, should
recognize that their country’s international standing is suffering by
their corrosive refusal to come to grips with the past. The European
Parliament has just made that very case, urging Turkey “to come to
terms with its past, to recognize the Armenian genocide and thus to
pave the way for a genuine reconciliation between the Turkish and
Armenian peoples.” That reconciliation is long overdue. It’s time to
look history squarely in the face, or be haunted by a terrible wrong.