Ghosts
Of Massacred Armenians Could Haunt Turkey’s Chances
To Join European Union
By Sherwood Ross
29 November, 2006
Zmag
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 Dec. 14-15, 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 are backing 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 a
milion Armenians were 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 6th 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 U.S. Congress sought a resolution in 2000 to
memorialize the Armenian genocide, Turkey threatened to refuse the U.S.
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 Clinton informed
House Speaker /Dennis Hastert passage of the resolution could “risk
the lives” of Americans and that put an end to the bill. Like
his predecessor, President George 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
20th 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 U.S. 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 150,0000…there seems to have been about
1,000,000 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. “A 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” 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 nauseum. After all, there
are ghosts everywhere.
Sherwood Ross is an American
reporter and columnist. Reach him at [email protected]
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