SOMETIMES NOBODY IS RIGHT
Examiner.com
July 14 2009
I’d written a few days ago about the possible fallout in the United
Nations Security Council if Turkey, a non-permanent member, were to
introduce a resolution condemning the recent actions of the People’s
Republic of China in the Xinjiang Autonomous Province, home to most
of the Muslim Uighur population of China.
Now today, China’s state news agency, Xinhua, is accusing the Turkish
government of "twist[ing] the facts," given Turkish Prime Minister
Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s remarks that what the Chinese government is
doing in Xinjiang is "a kind of genocide."
This is humorous — or would be humorous, would it not for the fact
that people had been dying — for two reason: (1) China is in no moral
position to preach to anyone about twisting facts; and (2) Turkey is
the perpetrator of the first major genocide of the 20th century, and
they refuse to acknowledge it, going so far as to punish those that
would state it happened for the crime of "defaming the Turkish nation."
China’s fact-manipulation is as old as its communist régime. The
massive failures of the combined collectivized-farming and
industrialization experiment of the 1950 known as the Great Leap
Forward were kept a secret from the world until the death of Chairman
Mao in the mid-1970s. So too were the massive human-rights excesses
of the Cultural Revolution kept under wraps, and even when its crimes
were uncovered, Mao was let off the hook and the primary responsibility
put on the Gang of Four.
Any country in which the government controls the dissemination of
information is one in which Orwell’s dictum, from 1984 — "He who
controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past
controls the future." — is going to be taken to an extreme. However,
Turkey offers an example where a comparatively free press still is
held subject to Orwell’s formulation.
As I wrote nearly two years ago, Turkey needs to face its past and
its allies need to stop coddling it for fear that pressing Turkey
to acknowledge its genocide of hundreds of thousands of Armenians
during World War I will cause it to move geopolitically in a direction
unfavorable to the U.S., U.K., and Israel. So it rings a bit hollow
when Turkey then flings accusations of genocide at other countries.
Granted, I would say that what China is doing now and has been doing
in Xinjiang (and Tibet) constitute acts of genocide, although not
outright genocide. Furthermore, it’s clear that the desire of the
Chinese government to disseminate Han Chinese throughout its borders
in an attempt to make ethnically and religiously distinct regions
such as Tibet and Xinjiang "more Chinese" can be seen as a type of
ethnic cleansing.
Such allegations, however, are going to fall on deaf ears when they
come from the Turkish government. Part of the reason why Prime Minister
Erdogan’s excoriation of Israeli President Shimon Peres over the seize
of Gaza fell on largely deaf ears was that Erdogan’s accusations of
genocide against Peres’s country were coming from a man whose country
has committed genocide and refused to admit it.
Of course, few countries with any real power have not engaged in, at
the very least, acts of genocide. But at least if the United States or,
e.g., Germany attacks China for what it’s doing and throws out the "G
word" in the process, the accusation is then not coming from a country
that denies the genocides committed by its previous governments. We
in the United States, unless we are congenitally insensitive or
historically ignorant, know that our country was built on the bodies
of the indigenous population of this continent. Germany, for its part,
has gone out of its way to take culpability for the Nazi Holocaust.
But not so Turkey with the case of the Armenians. And, unfortunately,
this makes Turkey more like China than perhaps it would like to
admit. Sure, the Xinhua news agency’s accusations against the Turkish
government are ridiculous, but so are Turkey’s allegations when they
come from, well, Turkey — or at least from a Turkey that has such
a hard time accepting its own past.