ARMENIA AND TURKEY, OVERCOME BY HISTORY
David Ignatius
Washington Post
/2010/04/armenia_and_turkey.html
April 23 2010
This week, the horrors of the past once more extinguished hopes for
the future, as Armenia and Turkey demonstrated that they have yet to
find a way to resolve the burden of the history they share.
Just ahead of April 24, the day on which Armenians commemorate the
genocide of 1915, Armenia announced that it was suspending all efforts
to normalize relations with Turkey. "We consider the current phase
of normalization exhausted," Armenian president Serzh Sargsyan said.
The opportunity to move forward had seemed tantalizingly close. Last
week, when the leaders of the two countries were in Washington for the
nuclear summit, President Obama tried to do some useful mediation and
pressed them to implement an accord they signed in October. "If you
pull out, you let the other side off the hook," I’m told he advised
Sargsyan, who indicated to the White House that he would stick with it.
Obama made a similar pitch to Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Recep
Erdogan, suggesting that normalization made sense as part of Turkey’s
policy of regional security. When I later asked Turkish Foreign
Minister Ahmet Davutoglu about the prospects for normalization, I
was encouraged. "We don’t want the politicization of history," he said.
"We want reconciliation of memories" of 1915, so that Turkish suffering
during World War I is recognized along with that of Armenians. Turkey
wants "zero problems" with its neighbors, he continued. "We want to
have a prosperous Armenia next to us."
Davutoglu’s comments sounded pretty sensible to me, and my reaction
was to think: Okay, now it’s time for Armenians and Turks to get on
with it and make normalization a reality.
What happened?
Basically, Sargsyan finally decided that he had waited long
enough. He had taken a political risk in even broaching the subject of
normalization. When he conceded to Turkish calls for an international
commission to examine the anguishing events of 1915, he angered many
in the Armenian Diaspora, who argued that the present government
had no right to barter over historical events for the sake of normal
trade and diplomatic relations. And when Sargsyan’s concession got
him nowhere with Turkey, the pressure on him increased.
You might think Turkey would have taken "yes" for an answer on its
longstanding proposal for the commission. But the Turks became irate
over a U.S. congressional resolution calling for recognition of the
genocide. They briefly pulled their ambassador from Washington and
let normalization with Armenia stall.
Tempers have since cooled, but Turkey has refused to move forward
on normalization until resolution of the feud between Armenia and
Azerbaijan over the status of Nagorno Karabagh, a disputed region
in the South Caucuses. Sargsyan, feeling pressure from all sides,
finally pulled the plug.
In this tug of war between the past and the future, my instinct is to
look ahead. I say that as a proud Armenian-American who lost members
of his own family in the genocide of 1915. I think America and the
world must call these events by their true name, which is genocide.
But history is not a weight that the living must drag along behind
them in perpetuity. The events of 1915 call for us to mourn, but also
to live.