Sahin Alpay
It may be said that there is no controversy over the fact that hundreds of thousands of Armenians died due to hunger, cold or attacks and a great tragedy occurred in the years 1915 and 1916 when the Ottoman government decided to deport its Armenian citizens during the First World War. The controversy focuses mainly on whether the deaths caused by “deportation” can be called “genocide.” The holders of a widespread view among the Armenian Diaspora define the tragedy as “genocide” since the 1960s. Turkish Armenians call the tragedy “Metvocir / The Great Catastrophe”. Armenian governments since Armenia’s independence also call the tragedy as “genocide”. The prevailing view among Turkish historians and commentators is that the events constitute a great tragedy due to mutual massacres, and that the Armenian deportation has no similarity to the genocide aimed at the total annihilation of the Jewish people perpetrated by the Nazis in Germany during the World War II.
Meanwhile those involved in the controversy define genocide in many different ways. Let us assume that the definition given in the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide” adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948 is accepted. Genocide, according to the Convention, means: “acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such, (a) killing members of the group, (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to the group, (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, (e) forcibly transferring children of one group to another group. International Criminal Court which adopts the Convention’s definition of genocide, the crime of genocide has four elements: (i) The perpetrator has killed one or more persons, (ii) such person or persons belonged to a particular national, racial or religious group, (iii) the perpetrator intended to destroy in whole or in part that group as such, and (iv) the conduct … is aimed at extermination of the group.
International Center for Transitional Justice on the request of the Turkish Armenian Reconciliation Commission assessed whether the UN Convention could be applied to the events that took place in the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century. It concluded that: (a) no legal financial or territorial claim arising out of the events could be made against any individual or state under the Convention, and (b) the events matched the Convention’s definition of genocide.
But if the deaths of Armenians resulting from the deportation by the Ottoman State during the First World War can be defined as genocide according to the UN Convention, aren’t the massacres in those years of unknown numbers of Muslim Turks in Van, Erzurum, Erzincan and elsewhere in Eastern Anatolia by Armenian nationalist gangs fighting for the creation of an independent Armenia also genocidal? The Convention defines as genocide “acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group”. It is not at all important if the crime is committed by a state or not, and if the persons killed are many or few.
Is it not proper that we put aside the allegations of “genocide” in order for us to be able to face the great tragedy that occurred between 1915 and 16? What took place in history was a great tragedy resulting from the clash of two ethnic nationalisms. Is not the allegations of the “Armenian genocide” a tool used by ethnic Armenian nationalists to incite enmity? Isn’t it time we look at history, not as Turks or Armenians, but above anything else, as human beings?
April 7, 2004
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