WHY DOES TURKEY CONTINUE TO DENY ARMENIAN GENOCIDE?
13:00, 09 Mar 2015
Siranush Ghazanchyan
The Boston Globe has published an articpel by Armenian novelist
Chris Bohjalian:
One night in November, 2009, I heard Gerda Weissmann Klein speak at
the University of Texas. A Holocaust survivor, Gerda’s 1957 memoir,
“All But My Life,” chronicles her harrowing ordeal in labor camps and
death marches during World War II. During the question and answer
period, someone asked, “What do you say to Holocaust deniers?” She
shrugged and said, “I really don’t have to say much. I simply tell
them to ask Germany. Germany doesn’t deny it.”
I recalled that exchange last month when President Recep Erdogan
of Turkey was asked about the Armenian genocide. He responded,
“Let’s remove the 1915 events from the area of politics and refer
to science and scientists.” He then chastised the Armenian president
Serzh Sargsyan for rejecting his invitation to visit Turkey on April
24 for the centennial commemoration of the Battle of Gallipoli,
saying the rebuff “violated protocols of courtesy.”
Why did the Armenian president pass on the chance to join Erdogan on
the site of the battle? Because April 24 is also the centennial of
the start of the Armenian genocide, and he will be at the Armenian
Genocide Memorial that day. It was the night of April 24, 1915, when
the Armenian intellectuals, professionals, editors, and religious
leaders in Constantinople were rounded up by the Ottoman authorities,
and almost all of them were executed. In the years that followed,
three out of every four Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire were
systematically annihilated by their own government: 1.5 million
people. The majority of Armenians alive today are descendants of
those few who survived.
But Turkey denies the facts — as does oil-rich Azerbaijan. (Moreover,
some of Turkey’s allies, including the United States, find euphemisms
for the word “genocide.”) And while there are many thousands of Turkish
citizens who want their country to face its past and acknowledge
the crimes of its World War I leaders, no one expects Ankara to
follow Berlin’s lead anytime soon and build — to use the name of the
poignant and powerful Holocaust monument near the Brandenburg Gate —
a Memorial to the Murdered Armenians of the Ottoman Empire.
The reality is that for nearly a century, Turkish leaders have worked
fanatically to falsify the historical record. President Erdogan asking
scientists or historians to weigh in on the genocide is rather like
asking scientists to weigh on global climate change. They have. The
International Association of Genocide Scholars unanimously considers
the cataclysmic ethnic cleansing of the Anatolian Plains genocide.
Just last month, a Kurdish member of the Turkish Parliament, Ahmet
Turk, acknowledged his Kurdish ancestors’ role in the nightmare and
apologized to the Armenians for the “blood on our hands.” Even the
first postwar Turkish government convicted the three architects of
the genocide of “crimes against humanity” in 1919 and sentenced them
to death in absentia. It was not until the second postwar government
took over in 1924 — the government led by Gallipoli hero Mustafa
Kemal Ataturk — that Turkey began to rewrite history and sweep under
the rug the death of 1.5 million people.
And why do they get away with it? It’s not merely that our memories
are short and news cycles move on; it’s the political reality that
so many Western nations viewed Turkey as the last stop against Soviet
expansion during the Cold War.
Holding the Gallipoli commemoration on the very day that is
acknowledged by Armenians around the world as Genocide Memorial Day
is too offensive and obvious to be Machiavellian. It’s appalling. It
is emblematic of the Turkish government’s aggressive and insulting
approach to reconciliation with Armenia.
But it does raise a question: Where will our American leaders be on
April 24? Will they be in Armenia, standing in memory for those whose
stories were silenced in Der-el-Zor and Ras-el-Ain and the Dudan
Crevasse? Or will they be in Turkey, at a commemoration designed
specifically to keep those Armenian voices forever stilled?
Chris Bohjalian is the author of 17 novels, including one about the
Armenian genocide, “The Sandcastle Girls.”