LOS ANGELES TIMES: AS CENTENARY OF ARMENIAN MASSACRE NEARS, ‘GENOCIDE’ DISPUTE SHARPENS
3:05 21/04/2015 >> SOCIETY
By Carol J. Williams
Los Angeles Times
The Turkish government on Monday offered condolences to descendants
of Armenians killed in 1915, when the Ottoman Empire embarked on a
campaign of terror and atrocity that many in the Western world have
deemed the 20th century’s first genocide.
As Armenians the world over prepare to mark the anniversary of the
beginning of the massacre that historians say took as many as 1.5
million lives, Turkey holds fast to its rejection of the label that
entered the lexicon of inhumanity only three decades later.
Genocide — from the Greek and Latin root words for race and killing
— was a term first used by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in his 1944
report on “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe,” which included proposals
for redress of the crime defined as “the destruction of a nation or
an ethnic group.” Lemkin used the word in reference to the Holocaust
but said the Armenian atrocities also came to mind.
Broader definitions of “genocide” suggest that such annihilations
are deliberate attempts to wipe out a population, the point where
modern-day Turkish leaders depart from the growing consensus that
their Ottoman forebears targeted Armenians for extermination. Ankara
officials have acknowledged that atrocities were committed in the
early years of World War I but contend that the Armenian death toll
has been grossly inflated and that most of those who died succumbed
to the brutalities of war and dislocation.
“We once again respectfully remember Ottoman Armenians who lost their
lives during the deportation of 1915 and share the pain of their
children and grandchildren,” Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu
said in his message of condolence Monday.
But he criticized what he cast as an Armenian lobby to brand the
wartime tragedies a concerted campaign of “genocide” for which today’s
Turkish leaders should take responsibility and make amends.
“To reduce everything to a single word, to load all of the
responsibility on the Turkish nation … and to combine this with a
discourse of hatred is legally and morally problematic,” Davutoglu
said.
As Christians in a predominantly Muslim empire, the Ottoman
Armenians were suspected of collaborating with pre-revolutionary
Russia when World War I broke out, provoking German-allied and
ultranationalist Ottoman leaders to declare them enemies of the
state. Savage village-by-village mass killings followed, as did the
forcible expulsion of the Armenian population from eastern Anatolia
that pushed hundreds of thousands into death marches into the Syrian
desert, where they died for lack of food, water or shelter.
Diplomatic records from embassies in Syria a century ago noted the
discovery of corpses strewn along desert paths from eastern Anatolia
and of the arrival of starved, sun-scorched and dehydrated stragglers
who survived what the Turkish government refers to as “resettlement.”
Pope Francis stirred the decades-old controversy with his reference
last week to the Armenian slaughter having been “the first genocide
of the 20th century.” Ankara recalled its ambassador from the Holy
See in protest of the pontiff’s description of the atrocities that
began April 24, 1915.
Twenty-three countries and 43 U.S. states have acknowledged the
Armenian massacre as a genocide, and the approaching centennial has
stirred indications that others, including European powerhouse Germany,
will follow suit before Friday’s memorial observances.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman said Monday that the
Berlin government would support a parliamentary resolution planned
Friday declaring that the slaughter of Armenians constituted genocide.
Most European states have already applied that term and condemned the
Ottoman crimes. Switzerland, Italy, Greece and Slovakia have made it
a crime to deny that genocide occurred against the Armenians.
As a candidate in the 2008 election, President Obama called for
recognizing the Armenian genocide but has refrained from applying the
term on behalf of the United States, in a bow to the sensitivities of
Turks who are key allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and
in the fight against Islamic extremism. But after the shifts indicated
by the Vatican and Berlin, analysts have predicted, Obama may yet refer
to genocide when remembrances for the victims get underway Friday.
From: A. Papazian