ASTARJIAN: ‘TAMAMIYLE YALANDIR’
By Henry Astarjian
Armenian Weekly
December 24, 2009
Without batting a lash and without being ashamed, Turkish Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan answered thusly to Charlie Rose, in
visibly defiant facial and body language: "Tamamiyle yalandir!"
Charlie had asked him about the Armenian Genocide on his show,
which was televised a week or so ago. "Tamamiyle yalandir!" The
translator relayed verbatim: "It is completely a lie," he said,
"the genocide never happened." Charlie Rose’s face became mummified
instantaneously with disbelief. His eyebrows rose as if questioning,
and skillfully introduced another topic to discuss in order to save
the embarrassing moment.
That is what the prime minister of Turkey had to say, after his
government affixed its signature on the ill-fated Armenian-Turkish
protocols, agreeing to look into the matter with a fact-finding
committee-a concept which all Armenians, except a corrupt Armenian
clique, oppose. But that is not the issue now; the issue is the Turk’s
dishonorable tradition of not respecting their signature.
Deception on the spot! The man didn’t have to think for a moment
to distort the undisputed historic fact, in which his ancestors’
hands were awash with Armenian blood. Turks and Kurds committed the
genocide-period! It is a fact. My father said so, my grandmother said
so, Arnold Toynbee said so, Ambassador Morgenthau said so, the front
pages of the New York Times said so, and State Department documents
said so. They all said that there was a premeditated, preplanned,
meticulously executed genocide to free Turkey of its Armenian
citizenry. The Turks cannot get away with it! All the motives to
this crime were there. The Genocide, which started in 1915, did not
materialize overnight; it was breeding for decades. It was the product
of 1) the Turk’s fanatic Islamism, xenophobia, feeling of Uber Alles,
and chauvinism, and 2) the Kurd’s tribal order of looting and killing
in order to survive.
The pogroms of Adana are a solid testimony to this fact: In April 1909
civilian Turks, not the Ottoman government, massacred some 30,000
Armenians for no reason other than hatred, jealousy, and religious
fanaticism. Armenians were the well to do, civilized infidels.
Children’s flesh was brutally macerated using cotton-picking tools,
making them die a slow painful death. The Armenian civilian population
was torched en masse while the English, French, Italian, Russian,
Austrian, German, and the United States navy, moored at Adana’s Mersin
harbor watched without interfering and rescuing the drowning. The
same happened in Izmir (Smyrna) when Ataturk’s forces tightened
the noose around the city from the north, the south, and the east,
then set fire to the city forcing the Greek and Armenian population
to jump into the Mediterranean, while the English naval officers
were sipping four o’clock tea and eating crumpets and "samwiches" in
deference to the tragedy taking place, right before their eyes. His
Majesty’s Navy did not raise a finger to rescue the drowning men,
women, and children. To add insult to injury, the navy violinists
played a musical score to that horrendous screen play, which four
decades later was repeated in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
In 1956, Ataturk’s "modern, secular, and democratic" government killed
and deported thousands of Greeks from Istanbul and set fire to their
shops in the famous Kapali Charshi Bazaar. I met two Turkish Greeks,
separately, in Athens: one a sea food restaurateur, and the other a
barber. They both told me identical stories about the brutality of the
individual Istanbulli, and the manner with which they were forced,
at gun point, to close shop and get out of town. They had started a
new life in exile, thanking God that their lives had been spared.
The crimes that the Turks perpetrated in the late 19th century and
the beginning of the 20th against innocent people in Hijaz, Allepo,
Cairo, Iraq, and North Africa could not be told in a few words. They
killed and raped and robbed the wealth from individual Arabs and
their countries. Reading about the Turks’ personal and public conduct
in lands that did not belong to them reminds me of Ali Baba and the
Forty Thieves of One Thousand and One Nights.
Many Turks have not changed since their occupation of Asia Minor in
the 15th century. Ataturk, who tried to Europeanize them, could do
so only superficially. Turkey today is as European as Kenya. Ataturk
himself was a chauvinist; he felt that he was Ubermensch and the Turk
Uber Alles. His logo was "Ne mutlu Turkum diyene" (How happy is he
who calls himself a Turk).
It is accurate to say that Kemalism led to a negative reaction amongst
the Turkish population. Today, like yesterday, it is countered, even
rejected by many Turks who have maintained their religious fanaticism.
They have shrouded themselves with a thin veil of modernity functioning
under Necmettin Erbakan and his protege Erdogan’s Islamic party
(AK). They have already dominated the political scene much to the
opposition of the military, which considers itself the protector of
Kemalism. In reality these generals are holding a vigil to a dying
regime that is hell bent on joining Europe, even as a cadaver.
There is a tiny group of intellectuals like Orhan Pamuk, Hrant Dink,
Taner Akcam, even Hasan Cemal, who are void of prejudice and deception,
but their survival in Turkey as a group, a movement, an entity,
is next to impossible.
Imposing restrictive laws that punish anyone who remotely criticizes
the regime as "insulting Turkishness" is proof positive of Turkey’s
chauvinism. Men like this, and dozens like them, stand persecuted.
Hrant Dink gave his life!
Article 13 of the Turkish Penal Code prescribes punishment to all those
who praise Islamic values and lifestyle; hence the animosity between
the chauvinist Islamist Turk and the chauvinist followers of Ataturk.
This is the truth, and to all this, Erdogan cannot look into my eyes,
like he did to Charlie Rose, and say "Tamamiyle Yalandir."