TURKEY MUST END ITS 100 YEARS OF GENOCIDE DENIAL

Peter Balakian
Reconciliation with Armenia can only begin when Turkey roots out
institutional denial and owns up to this gruesome chapter of its past
A placard shows the images of the Ottomans believed to be responsible
for the Armenian genocide. Photograph: Mark Kerrison/Demotix/Corbis

Tuesday 21 April 2015 15.53 BSTLast modified on Wednesday 22 April
201500.09 BST

Exactly 100 years ago, on 24 April 1915, the Turkish government
arrested 250 Armenian intellectuals and cultural leaders in
Constantinople, so beginning the Armenian genocide.

>From late spring of 1915, massacres were carried out throughout
Turkey. The government organised the genocide by creating death squads,
passing laws to sanction deportation and confiscation, using the then
cutting-edge railway and telegraph technology, and wrapping the whole
thing up in the nationalist ideology of pan-Turkism.

The US consul in Aleppo, Jesse B Jackson, called it “a gigantic
plundering scheme, as well as the final blow to extinguish the
[Armenian] race”. By 1918, between a half and two-thirds of the 2
million Armenians living in their historic homeland in the Ottoman
empire had been annihilated. Raphael Lemkin, the legal scholar who
created the concept of genocide as an international crime, and was
in the 1940s the first to use the term “Armenian genocide”, put the
death toll at 1.2 million.

The roots of this slaughter began in the late 19th century, when
Armenian reformers began petitioning for equal rights for Christians
and Jews in the Ottoman empire, in which non-Muslim minorities were
legally relegated to infidel status. Largely peaceful activism for
change resulted in horrendous massacres of more than 100,000 unarmed
Armenian civilians under Sultan Abdul Hamid II in the 1890s. As Turkey
lost more of its territory in eastern Europe during the Balkan wars
of 1912-13, it became increasingly anxious.

‘Even at the time of the mass killings, Turkey’s interior minister,
Talaat Pasha, adamantly denied them’

When the first world war broke out, the Ottoman government (the
Unionist party) claimed that Armenians were a danger to national
security and would side with the Russians (some did defect to join
the Russian army). It put into motion a final solution.

In every city, town and village across Turkey, from Constantinople
to Ankara to the Armenian vilayets in the east, where they had lived
for 2,500 years, Armenians were rounded up, arrested, and either shot
outright or put on deportation marches. Most often, the able-bodied
men were arrested in groups, taken out of the town or city and shot
en masse. The women and children and the infirm and elderly were
told that they could gather some possessions and would be deported
to “the interior”. The Turks often told the Armenians, as the Nazis
would later tell the Jews, that they could return after the war.

Along the Black Sea region in the north, and from Adana and other
Armenian cities in the south, the massacre network extended to
the northern Syrian desert: east of Aleppo, in the region of Deir
el-Zor, more Armenians died (400,000 or more) than anywhere else. The
historian Richard L Rubenstein has described these events as the
“first full-fledged attempt by a modern state to practise disciplined,
methodically organised genocide”. Even at the time of the mass
killings, Turkey’s interior minister, Talaat Pasha, adamantly denied
to the press and foreign governments that massacres were taking place.

FacebookTwitterPinterest Soldiers standing over skulls of victims
from the Armenian village of Sheyxalan, during the first world
war. Photograph: STR/AFP/Getty Images

After the war, the denial of the extermination became, as the Turkish
historian Taner Akcam has put it, one of the foundation myths of the
modern Turkish republic. What happened to the Armenians was deemed
to be their fault, and the subject became taboo.

In Turkey’s state-mandated educational system, in which critical
inquiry is forbidden, the representation of the Armenian past is either
absent or reduced to a couple of sentences, in which the Armenians
are vilified. Turkey’s authoritarian curriculum dovetails with its
repression of intellectual freedom, giving it one of the worst human
rights records; in the past two years, according to the Committee to
Protect Journalists, Turkey has had more imprisoned journalists than
China and Iran.

The continuing denial is also linked to the fear of reparations. What
legal recourse will there be for the lost Armenian property and wealth,
or the 2,500 Armenian churches and monasteries and nearly 2,000 schools
destroyed? Turkey has elevated national pride over historical truth
and any ethical concerns. In 1997 the International Association of
Genocide Scholars unanimously passed a resolution stating that what
happened to the Armenians conforms to the UN’s definition of genocide.

Analysis The Armenian genocide – the Guardian briefing

Turkey has never accepted the term genocide, even though historians
have demolished its denial of responsibility for up to 1.5 million
deaths

Read more

There are a few academics whom Turkey has cultivated to support
its falsification of history. About these, the Holocaust scholar
Deborah Lipstadt has said: “Denial of genocide, whether that of the
Turks against the Armenians, or the Nazis against the Jews, is not
an act of historical reinterpretation … the deniers sow confusion
by appearing to be engaged in a genuine scholarly effort. The deniers
aim at convincing innocent third parties that there is ‘another side
of the story’ when there is [none]; denial of genocide strives to
reshape history in order to demonise the victims and rehabilitate
the perpetrators.”

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But Turkish denial comes in many forms. This year, one of its tactics
aimed at undermining the memory of the genocide includes holding a
centennial event for the Battle of Gallipoli on 24 April – the day
Armenians worldwide remember the genocide – rather than 25 April,
the usual Gallipoli commemoration date. The offence is compounded by
the attendance of Prince Charles and Prince Harry at this politically
concocted gathering.

That is why it was so important that last week Pope Francis affirmed
that the slaughter of the Armenians was the “first genocide of the
20th century”. He showed that he would not be bullied by the Turkish
state. Nor would he be cajoled by Turkey’s specious rhetoric suggesting
that if he used the word “genocide” he would create a crisis between
Muslims and Christians. The pope took the moral issue even further when
he addressed the corruption of Turkish denial: “Concealing or denying
evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it.”

On the centenary of the genocide, Turkey would do its national honour
well if it listened to him. There can be no reconciliation until
there is truth.

From: Baghdasarian