COMMENTARY: ARMENIAN GHOSTS MAY HAUNT TURKEY’S EU PROSPECTS
Sherwood Ross
Middle East Times, Egypt
Nov 30 2006
WASHINGTON — Turkey’s bid to join the European Union could suffer by
its refusal to admit the genocide of its Armenian Christian population
nearly a century ago.
When European Union leaders meet in Brussels December 14 to 15,
the debate to admit Turkey likely will hinge on, among other issues,
its failure to open its ports and airports to Cyprus, which opposes
all talk of membership. The Netherlands, Germany, Austria, and France
are cool to admitting Turkey and support Cyprus.
Lingering in the background, though, will be the ghosts of the
Armenian genocide, a crime Turkey has denied at every turn and is still
"investigating" to this day.
As recently as March 2005, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
called for an "impartial study" into the genocide as if the facts of
the slaughter of 1 million Armenians was ever in doubt.
When the "Young Turk" nationalists created the Republic of Turkey
after World War I, they refused to punish the perpetrators of the
1915 genocide. Mustapha Kemal formed a new government in 1920 that
forced the Allies to sign the Treaty of Lausanne, ceding Anatolia,
home of the Armenians, to Turkish control. Two years earlier Anatolia
had been parceled out to Italy and Greece after the Ottoman Empire’s
surrender to the Allies.
As author Elizabeth Kolbert put it in the November 6 The New Yorker,
"For the Turks to acknowledge the genocide would thus mean admitting
that their country was founded by war criminals and that its existence
depended on their crimes."
"Turkey has long sought to join the European Union, and, while a
history of genocide is clearly no barrier to membership, denying it
may be; several European governments have indicated that they will
oppose the country’s bid unless it acknowledges the crimes committed
against the Armenians."
So opposed is Turkey to discussion of the subject, when the US
Congress sought a resolution in 2000 to memorialize the Armenian
genocide, Turkey threatened to refuse the US use of its Incirlik
airbase and warned it might break off negotiations for the purchase
of $4.5-billion worth of Bell Textron attack helicopters.
President Bill Clinton informed House Speaker Dennis Hastert that
passage of the resolution could "risk the lives" of Americans,
and that put an end to the bill. Like his predecessor, President
George W. Bush has bowed down to Ankara’s wishes and issues Armenian
Remembrance Day proclamations, "without ever quite acknowledging what
it is that’s being remembered," The New Yorker points out.
The cover up denies Turkey’s historic victimization of some 2 million
Christian residents treated as second-class citizens by special
taxation, harassment, and extortion. After Sultan Abdulhamid II came
to power in 1876, he closed Armenian schools, tossed their teachers
in jail, organized Kurdish regiments to plague Armenian farmers, and
even forbid mention of the word "Armenia" in newspapers and textbooks.
In the last decade of the nineteenth century, Armenians were already
being slaughtered by the thousands, but systematic extermination
began April 24, 1915, with the arrest of 250 prominent Armenians in
Istanbul. In a purge anticipating Hitler’s slaughter of European Jewry,
Armenians were forced from their homes, the men led off to be tortured
and shot, the women and children shipped off to concentration camps
in the Syrian desert.
At the time, the US consul in Aleppo wrote Washington, "So severe
has been the treatment that careful estimates place the number of
survivors at only 15 percent of those originally deported. On this
basis the number surviving even this far being less than 150,000 …
there seems to have been about 1 million persons lost up to this date."
In our own time, the Turkish Historical Society published, "Facts
on the Relocation of Armenians (1914-1918)." It claims the Armenians
were relocated during the war "as humanely as possible" to keep them
from aiding the Russian armies.
In 2005, Turkish Nobel Prize recipient Orhan Pamuk, was said to
have violated Section 301 of the Rurkish penal code for "insulting
Turkishness" in an interview he gave to a Swiss newspaper. "One
million Armenians were killed and nobody but me dares to talk about
it," Pamuk said. Also, Turkish novelist Elif Shafak was brought up
on a like charge for having a fictional character in her The Bastard
of Istanbul novel discuss the genocide.
Fortunately for him, Turkish historian Tanar Akcam resides in
America. His new history, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and
the Question of Turkish Responsibility (Metropolitan), otherwise
probably would land him in jail.
As there are few nations that have not dabbled in a bit of genocide,
one wonders why Turkey persists in its denials. After all, genocide
is hardly a bar to UN admission or getting a loan from the World Bank.
Turkey has every right to membership in the same sordid club as Spain,
Great Britain, Belgium, Russia, Germany, Italy, Japan, France, China,
and America. Why must it be so sensitive? Let them confess and sit
down with the other members to enjoy a good cup of strong coffee.
They’ll be made to feel right at home, as long as they don’t mention
Tibet, Iraq, Cambodia, the Congo, Chechnya, Timor, Darfur, Rwanda,
ad nauseam. After all, there are ghosts everywhere.
From: Baghdasarian