EUROPE: BLACKMAILING TURKEY
Karamatullah K. Ghori
Turkish Daily News
Nov 1 2006
PART I
Two events taking place simultaneously and seemingly carefully
calibrated don’t, necessarily, point to a conspiracy. However,
columnists are like sleuths who can always smell the rat in places
where regular people wouldn’t bother to look or stick their nose.
One can’t help getting a fishy feeling when these two events happened
in two European capitals boasting the heaviest concentration
of Armenian emigres; and especially when the target of these
extra-ordinary events happened to be none other than Turkey, loathed
and despised by the Armenian diaspora the world over as their bete
noir.
The first cut was made by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm charged
with awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature. In what smelled
shamefacedly like a political award rather than one conferred on
pure merit, the academy awarded this year’s prize to Orhan Pamuk,
the most controversial of Turkish writers and novelists. Pamuk was
adopted by the European conservatives and leftists alike as their new
"Salman Rushdie" the day he scorned his country and its history,
for its amnesia on the alleged "massacre," nay "genocide," of the
Turkish Armenian minority during World War I.
The second, much worse, and much more cruel, thrust came the same day
from the French parliament in Paris, when it adopted, with much elan
and bravado, a resolution calling it a crime to deny the Armenian
"genocide" at the hands of the Turks. Wonder of wonders, France,
the celebrated land of Liberte having such a massive hiccup over its
Fraternite with the Armenians as to be ready to discard one of the
cardinal pillars of the French Revolution.
This is the same French parliament that banned the innocuous Muslim
hijab from French government schools because that little piece
of cloth bruised the French national sensitivity on its treasured
trophy of Liberte. But sacrificing that icon for the Armenians is
apparently worth the price to the deputies in charge of the French
national conscience.
The mass-circulating Turkish national daily Hurriyet pithily
encapsulated the essence of French national somersaults when it intoned
in banner headlines on its front page that the national slogan of
France should henceforth be Liberte, Egalite, Stupidete.
But was it really a sudden groundswell of concern and camaraderie for
the Armenians, who have been around in Europe for almost a hundred
years, that moved the French parliament to legislate something not
only against the basic grain of French civil society but that may
sound to Turkish ears as a virtual declaration of war?
The Armenians have been flaunting their presence in Europe and
also abusing it with impunity, largely because of its governments
playing the Good Samaritan to them out of Christian fraternity against
Muslim Turks. Armenian thugs and hired assassins have stretched this
hospitality beyond the limits by targeting and assassinating Turkish
diplomats in Europe and around the world. No other diplomatic corps
in modern times has been made to pay a price like the Turkish Foreign
Service, which has lost dozens of its bright and intelligent people
to the bullets of Armenian goons and assassins.
And yet the molly-coddling of the Armenians never translated itself
into such a brazen act of re-writing history as the move last week
by the French parliament to denunciate Turkey for its perceived
"genocide" of the Armenians mandatory. Why?
It all fits into an emerging pattern of zeroing in on Turkey and
barricading it from all around now that it has entered the sensitive
zone of negotiations on the terms of its candidacy for the European
Union. Turkey is vulnerable and on the defensive. So the gloves are
coming off, one by one, and more than the gloves, it’s the knives
that are being sharpened to gore it, of which the French initiative
is the initial salvo, or only the tip of the iceberg.
The bottom line for Christian Europe is that it doesn’t want Muslim
Turkey to become part of Europe, which is at the heart of an ongoing
campaign to keep Turkey out of this exclusively Christian club,
notwithstanding Turkey’s nearly half-century-old craving to be accepted
as part of Europe. Ankara was the first to stand in the queue as an
applicant (or supplicant?) for European membership, as soon as the
Treaty of Rome was signed in 1960 to launch the European Community,
the harbinger of today’s European Union.
Europe’s allergy to Turkey isn’t of recent origin; it goes back
centuries, especially those centuries of Ottoman domination of the
European landscape, when half the continent owed allegiance to the
Porte in Istanbul. Europe has never forgiven Turkey for those Ottoman
centuries, no matter how modern Turkey may pretend to distance
itself from its Ottoman past. Seared into the European psyche are
those centuries when the Ottoman Turks laid siege to Vienna, not
once but twice, and lost their bid on both occasions, not because
of the bravery or tenacity of its European defenders but because of
the tactical blunders of the Turkish commanders and leaders, and the
treachery of fifth-columnists in their ranks.
*Karamatullah K. Ghori was Pakistan’s ambassador to Turkey until
2000. He can be contacted at [email protected].
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
