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Scotland
Sunday Herald
October 13, 2007
By Trevor Royle, Diplomatic Editor
Killer blow could fuel Turkish war
Can history play any useful role in helping us deal with the problems
of today? It’s an old teaser and the answer to it depends on many
variables. Sometimes a knowledge of what happened in the past can be
useful, especially if the lessons have been learned and digested,
although that seems not to have been the case when the decision was
taken to invade Iraq. Did anyone in Whitehall or the White House
consider the ramifications of British and French meddling in the
Middle East in 1917 or was any consideration given to the reasons for
the bloodbath in Iraq in 1921? Probably not.
But there are times when the past can impinge on the present in an
unhelpful way. If age-old enmities influenced current policies Britain
would have nothing to do with France: since 1066 there have been 35
wars between the two countries and we’ve won most of them. (All right,
the majority were fought by the English and Scotland was often on the
losing French side, but the argument still stands.) That’s why the
issue of the Armenian genocide is such a vexed one and that’s why such
a big question mark hangs over last week’s decision by a US
Congressional committee to give it that status.
Nobody doubts that massacres on a huge scale took place between 1915
and 1917 when Ottoman forces systematically destroyed Turkish Armenia
and killed an estimated 1.5 million (the exact figure is hotly
debated). The orgy of destruction arose from a belief that the
Armenians had been helping Tsarist Russia and the Ottoman government
ordered the deportation of the entire Armenian population from the
northeast provinces to locations outside Anatolia in the Syrian
desert. Hundreds of thousands were killed or died as they made their
way through the inhospitable environment and even the Turks’ main
allies, the Germans, were shocked by the high attrition rate.
On that score at least the incident fits the UN definition of
genocide, which is described as any operation "intended to destroy in
whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group". In
vain do Turkish apologists claim that the massacres were exaggerated
by propagandists and there were sound military reasons for punishing a
group of people who stood accused of lending assistance to the enemy.
In an age when mass slaughter or attempted mass slaughter is regarded
as a massive crime against humanity the Armenian genocide deserves its
appellation.
So, there should be little fuss about what happened in Washington last
week. Except that it was not just about correcting an historical
wrong. The House Speaker Nancy Pelosi saw it is an opportunity to
embarrass President George W Bush, who has already said that he will
fight any attempt to put the matter to a full Congressional vote. He
doesn’t want to upset a major US ally at a time when the US is
dependent on Turkey to support operations in Iraq. He has good reason
to be concerned, as Turkey has already withdrawn its ambassador from
Washington and is making threats to deny the US further use of the
strategic air force base at Incirlik.
And this is where things get really murky. At stake are issues which
go beyond the historical bickering over what happened 90 years ago.
Today it’s about dealing with a country which could quite easily
destabilise the whole geo-strategic region. In what could be seen as a
reprise of past events the Turkish military is making ominous noises
about engaging guerrillas of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) who have
been attacking their forces in southeast Turkey. Forces have been
moved up in preparation for a cross-border strike and Turkish
commanders are said to be in a dangerous mood, anxious to give the PKK
a bloody nose.
If that were to happen it could be disastrous for Iraq, where the
Kurds already enjoy considerable autonomy. With the Turks anxious to
prevent any further expansion of Kurdish hegemony and the Kurds
equally eager to reinforce their independence, there could be a
showdown and the West would be powerless to intervene. The last thing
needed by Iraq is a breakaway Kurdistan getting into a new
confrontation with its touchy neighbours.
Turkey is now in that dangerous position where it feels threatened and
boxed into a corner. Such a situation will only give comfort to the
emergent nationalists who already believe their country has conceded
too much ground to the West for nothing in return. First they were
given short shrift in their application to join the European Union and
now they stand accused of a genocide which happened in their great-
grandfathers’ generation. Historical insults have a nasty habit of
breeding violence of mind: hitting back at the Kurds could just salve
that wounded pride.