CBC News, Canada
May 9 2006
A diplomatic war about genocide
CBC News Online | May 9, 2006 | More Reality Check
John Gray has worked for a number of Canadian newspapers, including
most recently more than 20 years with the Globe and Mail, where he
served as Ottawa bureau chief, national editor, foreign editor,
foreign correspondent and national correspondent.
On the distant matter of Turkey and Armenia there must be some
sympathy for the anguish of Bill Graham when he was Canada’s foreign
minister two years ago. At the time, Canada’s parliamentarians were
debating whether the mass slaughter of Armenians by Turkey between
1915 and 1923 could legitimately be called genocide.
The Liberal government of the day, like every government for decades
before, was trying to duck a decision on the question. As Parliament
debated the issue and the minority government wriggled like a worm on
a hook, Graham said plaintively, “We’d like our Armenian friends and
our Turkish friends to put these issues in the past.”
French President Jacques Chirac and his Armenian counterpart, Robert
Kocharian, at a ceremony in Paris last spring deploring the mass
slaughter of Christian Armenians by Turkish authorities in the years
following 1915. France is leading the fight for Turkey to publicly
atone for the atrocity, and Canada now appears to be adding its voice
to the fray. (Patrick Kovarik/AFP/Getty Images) In other words,
please don’t make us take sides. Let’s just all be friends together.
How forlorn! How Canadian!
But almost a century after that terrible slaughter, there remains an
uncomfortable immediacy. The Turkish government has just recalled its
ambassadors to Canada and France over it.
France has offended Turkey by introducing a bill that would make the
denial of the Armenian genocide a crime.
In Canada’s case, the complaint was that Prime Minister Stephen
Harper last month recalled that both the Senate and the House of
Commons had adopted resolutions recognizing the slaughter as
genocide: “I and my party supported those resolutions and continue to
recognize them today.”
Does it matter what you call mass slaughter?
In France, parliamentary recognition of the genocide dates back eight
years. One difference between France and Canada on the question is
that France has an Armenian population of about 300,000. Canada’s
Armenian population is just 40,000, although individuals like film
director Atom Egoyan have given Canadian Armenians an unmistakable
visibility.
The Turkish government said the recall of the ambassadors would be
for only a short time, yet there could still be serious economic
repercussions. Turkey cancelled a multimillion-dollar arms deal with
France in 2001, although economic relations appear to have returned
to normal in recent years.
Canada has not yet suffered anything more than harsh words from
Ankara, but there has been speculation in Turkish newspapers that
Canada will be – or perhaps has been – excluded from the bidding to
build a nuclear power plant in the Black Sea town of Sinop.
Of the two countries, it is France about which Turkey must be more
uneasy. France is one of the most powerful voices in the European
Union, which Turkey is desperately eager to join. And former French
foreign minister Michel Barnier suggested that Turkish admission to
the EU might be conditional on its acknowledgment of the genocide.
“This is an issue that we will raise during the negotiation process,”
Barnier said. “We will have about 10 years to do so and the Turks
will have about 10 years to ponder their answer.”
Putting pressure on Turkey
There is a temptation to believe that a dispute about a word is
really not much more than a dispute about a word, and that both
countries have locked themselves into a position from which they
cannot extricate themselves with any dignity.
Everyone agrees that there was a terrible slaughter; what is at issue
is the magnitude of the slaughter and the name to apply to it.
The Turks acknowledge that perhaps 300,000 Armenians, as well as many
Turks, died as a result of civil disturbances involving the Christian
Armenians, who had always lived in Turkey as second-class citizens.
The Armenians say that as a result of a deliberate campaign of
genocide, 1.5 million men, women and children were killed or starved
to death, and thousands of others were deported.
Historians tend to side with the Armenians. There have even been a
few Turkish historians who have called on their fellow citizens to
consider the Armenian case, but those are isolated voices in a
defiant land.
The United States, Britain, Israel, Georgia and Ukraine do not use
the word genocide about the Armenians. But in addition to France and
Canada, a score of European and Latin American countries have
officially recognized it as such.
It was Barnier, the former French foreign minister, who cast the
dispute in a much broader perspective. The parallel he drew was that
of the reconciliation of Germany and France after they had fought
three unimaginably terrible wars in less than a century:
“If, as I think, the core idea of Europe’s project is that all its
members should reconcile one with another – like France and Germany,
which have put reconciliation at the centre of their project – and
that each member state should reconcile with its own past, then I
believe that when the time comes Turkey, too, will have to come to
terms with its own past and history, and recognize this tragedy.”
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