Sherwood Ross Middle East Times, Egypt Nov 30 2006
WASHINGTON — Turkey’s bid to join the European Union could suffer byits refusal to admit the genocide of its Armenian Christian populationnearly 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 opposesall talk of membership. The Netherlands, Germany, Austria, and Franceare cool to admitting Turkey and support Cyprus. Lingering in the background, though, will be the ghosts of theArmenian 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 Erdogancalled for an “impartial study” into the genocide as if the facts ofthe slaughter of 1 million Armenians was ever in doubt. When the “Young Turk” nationalists created the Republic of Turkeyafter World War I, they refused to punish the perpetrators of the1915 genocide. Mustapha Kemal formed a new government in 1920 thatforced the Allies to sign the Treaty of Lausanne, ceding Anatolia,home of the Armenians, to Turkish control. Two years earlier Anatoliahad been parceled out to Italy and Greece after the Ottoman Empire’ssurrender 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 admittingthat their country was founded by war criminals and that its existencedepended on their crimes.” “Turkey has long sought to join the European Union, and, while ahistory of genocide is clearly no barrier to membership, denying itmay be; several European governments have indicated that they willoppose the country’s bid unless it acknowledges the crimes committedagainst the Armenians.” So opposed is Turkey to discussion of the subject, when the USCongress sought a resolution in 2000 to memorialize the Armeniangenocide, Turkey threatened to refuse the US use of its Incirlikairbase and warned it might break off negotiations for the purchaseof $4.5-billion worth of Bell Textron attack helicopters. President Bill Clinton informed House Speaker Dennis Hastert thatpassage of the resolution could “risk the lives” of Americans,and that put an end to the bill. Like his predecessor, PresidentGeorge W. Bush has bowed down to Ankara’s wishes and issues ArmenianRemembrance Day proclamations, “without ever quite acknowledging whatit is that’s being remembered,” The New Yorker points out. The cover up denies Turkey’s historic victimization of some 2 millionChristian residents treated as second-class citizens by specialtaxation, harassment, and extortion. After Sultan Abdulhamid II cameto power in 1876, he closed Armenian schools, tossed their teachersin jail, organized Kurdish regiments to plague Armenian farmers, andeven forbid mention of the word “Armenia” in newspapers and textbooks. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, Armenians were alreadybeing slaughtered by the thousands, but systematic exterminationbegan April 24, 1915, with the arrest of 250 prominent Armenians inIstanbul. In a purge anticipating Hitler’s slaughter of European Jewry,Armenians were forced from their homes, the men led off to be torturedand shot, the women and children shipped off to concentration campsin the Syrian desert. At the time, the US consul in Aleppo wrote Washington, “So severehas been the treatment that careful estimates place the number ofsurvivors at only 15 percent of those originally deported. On thisbasis 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, “Factson the Relocation of Armenians (1914-1918). ” It claims the Armenianswere relocated during the war “as humanely as possible” to keep themfrom aiding the Russian armies. In 2005, Turkish Nobel Prize recipient Orhan Pamuk, was said tohave violated Section 301 of the Rurkish penal code for “insultingTurkishne ss” in an interview he gave to a Swiss newspaper. “Onemillion Armenians were killed and nobody but me dares to talk aboutit,” Pamuk said. Also, Turkish novelist Elif Shafak was brought upon a like charge for having a fictional character in her The Bastardof Istanbul novel discuss the genocide. Fortunatel y for him, Turkish historian Tanar Akcam resides inAmerica. His new history, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide andthe Question of Turkish Responsibility (Metropolitan) , otherwiseprobably 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, genocideis 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 sitdown 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 mentionTibet, Iraq, Cambodia, the Congo, Chechnya, Timor, Darfur, Rwanda,ad nauseam. After all, there are ghosts everywhere.
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