Interpress Service
October 17, 2007
TURKEY: POLITICIANS SEEK TO EXPEL ARMENIAN WORKERS.
Analysis by Jacques N. Couvas
ANKARA, Turkey, Oct. 16, 2007 (IPS/GIN) — The relationship between
the Turkish government and the legislature of the United States
hasmade a decisive turn since last week, when the U.S. House
Committee on Foreign Relations adopted a resolution about Armenian
history.
The resolution recognized as genocide the massive killings of
Armenians in 1915 and 1916 by Ottoman military forces in eastern
Anatolia.
Making reference to the Armenian genocide in Turkey is taboo and can
lead to legal prosecution. Nobel Prize novelist Orhan Pamuk and
editor-in-chief Hrank Dink were brought to trial and faced jail
sentences for doing so, and the latter was shot dead last year by a
Turkish nationalist.
After the U.S. House Committee passed its resolution, Turkish
politicians proposed expelling those Armenians who are employed as
clandestine workers in Turkey. It is estimated that 40,000 to 70,000
Armenians live in Turkey today.
U.S. Armenians have been trying for the last two decades to get
anofficial condemnation of Ottoman Turks for the atrocities
perpetrated nine decades ago.
Armenians, a Christian minority community which together with the
Greeks and Jews formed the economic backbone of the Ottoman Empire
for many centuries, were from time to time subject to pogroms, which
were often encouraged by the state. Persecution became systematic
toward the end of the 19th century, and large-scale massacres took
place from 1894-1896 and in 1909.
Following his defeat on January 1915 by the Russians in a World War I
battle at Sarikemish, Ottoman minister of war Enver Pasha blamed the
Armenians for "fifth column" activities that had advantaged the
enemy. In that battle in the Caucasian plateau, 85 percent of the
Ottoman force of 100,000 perished, chiefly because of Pasha’s
inexperience as military commander.
But it is also true that, as Russian forces were advancing into
Turkey from the East, Armenian factions had supported them, hoping to
gain independence for their ethnic group after the war.
In spring 1915, Enver and minister of interior Talaat Pasha rolledout
a program to deter Armenian villages from collaborating with
theAllies. The Ottoman Empire fought World War I on the side of the
Germans and Austro-Hungarians.
On April 24 of that year, 250 Armenian intellectuals and
communityleaders were rounded up, jailed and executed. In May, a
deportation law was passed, authorizing massive displacements of
Armenian populations and confiscation of their property. Conscripts,
serving in the Ottoman army, were summarily dismissed and used as
hamals, low-rankingmanual laborers in worker battalions. Most of
those who survived mistreatment and famine were executed or
disappeared.
Atrocities against Armenians in the countryside, particularly the
east, continued through the following year. Reports from the dozens
of British, German and U.S. consulates and missions spread throughout
Turkey at that time alerted the West about the violence taking place.
Henry Morgenthau Sr., the U.S. ambassador to Constantinople (the
capital of the Ottoman Empire) reported extensively to Washington on
the situation and pleaded to Enver and Talaat to use restraint but to
no avail. The United States remained neutral in the war until 1917.
Meanwhile, adventurer and author Gertrude Bell, on a mission in the
region for the British intelligence services, persuaded the
Britishand their allies to protest to the Turkish government.
Morgenthau’s and Bell’s claims have been used by Western historians
to assess the extent of the massacre, and it seems they have been
corroborated by records of German diplomats and senior military staff
posted in the Middle East during the Great War.
According to Western historians, up to 1.5 million Armenians,
representing the majority of the ethnic group’s population at the
time, were driven to a long march through Mesopotamia in extremely
harsh conditions.
A large number, the exact magnitude of which has never been
established, died. Survivors escaped to neighboring countries and to
the West. Kurdish tribes, enrolled as special gendarmes by the
Ottomans, raped, tortured and slaughtered the deportees.
The Turkish version of the events differs widely from that of the
foreign historians and the descendants of the Armenian diaspora.
Ankara has consistently minimized the gravity and size of the events,
describing them as an "Armenian incident." The number of victims has
periodically been revised downwards now to around 300,000.
Turkeyconsiders that this number is practically equal to that of
Muslims who died during the same period as a result of intercultural
clashes in that part of the country.
It is a fact that Armenians also stained their hands with enemy blood
during the 1918 riots at Baku in Azerbaijan, following earlier
massacres of Armenians by the Azeri population, which was allied to
theTurkish cause in World War I. Scholars of the Great War period in
the east tend to agree that the conflict brought out the worst of
humanbehavior in all factions.
To minimize the damage done to the image formed by international
public opinion, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government has in recent years
played a realpolitik card, admitting that atrocities, even
massacres,were perpetrated under Ottoman rule but arguing that they
are no longer relevant.
In a pre-emptive move, following repeated attempts in 2000 and 2005
by the U.S. Congress to pass a resolution using the term genocide,
the Turkish government has proposed that a mixed panel of Turkish
andinternational academics search official records and jointly
present their findings. "It is a matter for historians, not
politicians," is the official view.
Foreign historians have not been forthcoming, as it is known that the
Ottoman administration was frugal in keeping meaningful records of
population displacements or measures affecting religious minorities.
The U.S. has been hesitant over the past 90 years to take a firm
position on the issue. Forty of the states in the U.S. have already
passed legislation or proclamations qualifying the events as
genocide, but only two presidents, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan,
have used thisterm in public. All U.S. presidents, including George
W. Bush, have,however, used the Armenian-proposed figure of 1.5
million as the toll in victims.
Twenty countries and transnational organizations, including the
European Parliament and the European Council, have acknowledged the
genocide. The term was coined in 1943 by professor Raphael Lemkin,
who used the word to describe the slaughters of Assyrians by Iraqis
in 1933, the Armenian massacres of World War I and the Nazi
extermination of European Jews during World War II.
Retaliation by the Turkish government has been selective. Canadianand
Italian companies enjoy good business from the public sector,
although their respective countries have recognized the genocide.
France and Switzerland, on the other hand, have frequently been
excluded from such dealings because of their parliaments’ decisions
on the subject.
In 2006, protesters boycotted French products after legislators
passed a law forbidding denial of the Armenian genocide. France hosts
the second largest Armenian community after the U.S. It is estimated
that there are eight to 10 million Armenians living outside of their
country.
The World War I killings encouraged the Allies to grant Armenians
their own land in 1918. The young Democratic Republic of Armenia had
a short existence. Turkish troops invaded a large part of the
countryin 1920, but a swift attack by the Bolsheviks from Russia
threw themback. In 1922 the Democratic Republic of Armenia joined the
Soviet Union until 1991, when it recovered its independence from
Moscow.
Armenia staged a protracted war against the Azeris in the 1990s and
occupied the Nagorno Karabakh province, which was home to 150,000
Armenians. In retaliation Turkey closed its border with Armenia, and
the border remains closed to this day. Isolation from its western
flank, however, has not affected Armenian trade. The country’s gross
domestic product per capita is $4,250; though Armenia’s gross
domestic product lags behind Turkey’s, which is $5,400 per capita, it
is not badby regional standards.