Turkey’s War on the Truth
Washington Post
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, October 16, 2007; A19
It goes without saying that the House resolution condemning Turkey for
the "genocide" of Armenians from 1915 to 1923 will serve no earthly
purpose and that it will, to say the least, complicate if not severely
strain U.S.-Turkey relations. It goes without saying, also, that the
Turks are extremely sensitive on the topic and, since they are helpful
in the war in Iraq and are a friend to Israel, that their feelings
ought to be taken into account. All of this is true, but I would feel
a lot better about condemning this resolution if the argument wasn’t
so much about how we need Turkey and not at all about the truthfulness
of the matter.
Of even that, I have some doubt. The congressional resolution
repeatedly employs the word "genocide," a term used by many scholars.
But Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish emigre who coined the term in
1943, clearly had in mind what the Nazis were doing to the Jews. If
that is the standard — and it need not be — then what happened in
the collapsing Ottoman Empire was something short of genocide. It was
plenty bad — maybe as many as 1.5 million Armenians perished, many of
them outright murdered — but not all Armenians everywhere in what was
then Turkey were as calamitously affected. The substantial Armenian
communities in Constantinople, Smyrna and Aleppo were largely spared.
No German city could make that statement about its Jews.
Still, by any name, what was begun in 1915 is unforgivable and, one
hopes, unforgettable. Yet it was done by a government that no longer
exists — the so-called Sublime Porte of the Ottomans, with its
sultan, concubines, eunuchs and the rest. Even in 1915, it was an
anachronism, no longer able to administer its vast territory — much
of the Middle East and the Balkans. The empire was crumbling. The
so-called Sick Man of Europe was breathing its last. Its troops were
starving, and, both in Europe and the Middle East, indigenous peoples
were declaring their independence and rising in rebellion. Among them
were the Armenians, an ancient people who had been among the first to
adopt Christianity. By the end of the 19th century, they were engaged
in guerrilla activity. By World War I, they were aiding Turkey’s
enemy, Russia. Within Turkey, Armenians were feared as a fifth column.
So contemporary Turkey is entitled to insist that things are not so
simple. If you use the word genocide, it suggests the Holocaust — and
that is not what happened in the Ottoman Empire. But Turkey has gone
beyond mere quibbling with a word. It has taken issue with the facts
and in ways that cannot be condoned. Its most famous writer, the Nobel
Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk, was arrested in 2005 for
acknowledging the mass killing of Armenians. The charges were
subsequently dropped, and although Turkish law has been modified in
some ways, it nevertheless remains dangerous business for a Turk to
talk openly and candidly about what happened in 1915.
It just so happens that I am an admirer of Turkey. Its modern leaders,
beginning with the truly remarkable Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, have done a
Herculean job of bringing the country from medievalism to modernity
without, it should be noted, the usual bloodbath. (The Russians, for
instance, did not manage that feat.) Furthermore, I can appreciate
Turkey’s palpable desire to embrace both modernity and Islam and to
show that such a combination is not oxymoronic. (Ironically, having a
dose of genocide in your past — the United States and the Indians,
Germany and the Jews, etc. — is hardly "not Western.") And I think,
furthermore, that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi should have spiked the
House resolution in deference to Turkey’s immense strategic importance
to the United States. She’s the speaker now, for crying out loud, not
just another House member.
But for too long the Turks have been accustomed to muscling the truth,
insisting either through threats or punishment that they and they
alone will write the history of what happened in 1915. They are
continuing along this path now, with much of official Ankara
threatening this or that — crossing into Iraqi Kurdistan, for
instance — if the House resolution is not killed. But it may yet
occur to someone in the government that Turkey’s tantrums have turned
an obscure — nonbinding! — congressional resolution into yet another
round of tutorials on the Armenian tragedy of 1915. Call it genocide
or call it something else, but there is only one thing to call
Turkey’s insistence that it and its power will determine the truth:
unacceptable.
Source: le/2007/10/15/AR2007101501323.html?sub=AR