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SELFISH INTEREST
Gwynne Dyer
Calcutta Telegraph
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1071015/as p/opinion/story_8434199.asp
Oct 15 2007
India
Nothing much will happen right away. The Turkish ambassador to
Washington has gone home for "consultations" after the Foreign Affairs
Committee of the House of Representatives approved a bill declaring
the mass-killing of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World
War I was a genocide. But he will come back to Washington, and it
will be weeks before the full House passes the bill. This will be a
slow-motion disaster.
The White House tried hard to stop this bill. President George W. Bush
declared that "this resolution is not the right response to these
historic mass killings," and all eight living former US secretaries
of state, both Democratic and Republican, signed a joint letter to
the Foreign Affairs Committee urging it not to approve the bill. But
it did, by a 27-21 vote, and next month, the full House will do
the same: more than half the members have signed up as co-sponsors
of the bill. The United States of America will be the 23rd country
to fall to the Armenian campaign to link the Ottoman Turkey of 90
years ago with the Nazi Germany of 60 years ago and, by extension,
to implicate the current Republic of Turkey in premeditated genocide.
Once such a law is passed, to question the Armenian take on what
happened is to become the equivalent of a denier of the (Jewish)
Holocaust. The Armenian desire to have their national tragedy given
the same status as the Jewish Holocaust is understandable, but it
is mistaken. The facts of the case are horrifying, and certainly
justify calling the events in eastern Turkey in 1915-16 a genocide,
but the key elements of prior intent and systematic planning that
distinguish the Nazi Holocaust are absent.
When I was a graduate student in Middle Eastern history, as a
translation exercise, I was given the hand-written diary of a Turkish
soldier killed during the retreat from Baghdad in 1917. "Mehmet Cavus"
(Sergeant Mehmet) was a youthful village school-teacher who had been
called up in 1914. At first he had a safe billet guarding the Black
Sea entrance to the Bosphorus, but in 1915, his unit was ordered to
march east to deal with a Russian invasion and an Armenian rebellion.
Diary of a nobody
And then, in the diary of this pleasant, rather naïve young man, I read
the phrase "iyi katliam etmistik". Loosely translated, this means:
"We really massacred them". The diary was written in the old Ottoman
rika, a version of handwritten Arabic script that never really served
Turkish well. So I asked my teacher if it really said what I thought
it did. "Oh yes," he said. "Those were different times."
That excuses nothing, but it explains much. The foolish young officers,
who led the Ottoman Empire into the war, panicked when they realized
that the Russians were invading from the east and the British
were about to land on the Mediterranean coast. Just at that point,
Armenian revolutionaries, who had been plotting with the Russians
and the British to carve out an Armenian state from the wreckage of
the Empire, launched futile revolts to assist the invaders.
The Turks responded by slaughtering many Armenians in what is now
eastern Turkey and deporting the rest to Syria. It was certainly a
genocide, but neither premeditated nor systematic. Armenians living
in other parts of the Empire were largely left alone, and those in
the war zone with money for rail travel reached Syria safely.
So why is the US Congress "recognizing" the Armenian genocide, but
not the more recent genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda? Because there
aren't many voters of Tutsi descent in key Congressional districts.
This is all about domestic politics: alienating the Turks doesn't
cost much politically.
Armenian activists today aren't looking for "justice". They want to
drive the Turks into extreme reactions, isolate them and derail the
domestic changes turning Turkey into a modern democracy. They do not
want Turkey to succeed. And the West is falling for it.
--Boundary_(ID_QrhzF7P9mImQBjToyjbstg)--
Gwynne Dyer
Calcutta Telegraph
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1071015/as p/opinion/story_8434199.asp
Oct 15 2007
India
Nothing much will happen right away. The Turkish ambassador to
Washington has gone home for "consultations" after the Foreign Affairs
Committee of the House of Representatives approved a bill declaring
the mass-killing of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World
War I was a genocide. But he will come back to Washington, and it
will be weeks before the full House passes the bill. This will be a
slow-motion disaster.
The White House tried hard to stop this bill. President George W. Bush
declared that "this resolution is not the right response to these
historic mass killings," and all eight living former US secretaries
of state, both Democratic and Republican, signed a joint letter to
the Foreign Affairs Committee urging it not to approve the bill. But
it did, by a 27-21 vote, and next month, the full House will do
the same: more than half the members have signed up as co-sponsors
of the bill. The United States of America will be the 23rd country
to fall to the Armenian campaign to link the Ottoman Turkey of 90
years ago with the Nazi Germany of 60 years ago and, by extension,
to implicate the current Republic of Turkey in premeditated genocide.
Once such a law is passed, to question the Armenian take on what
happened is to become the equivalent of a denier of the (Jewish)
Holocaust. The Armenian desire to have their national tragedy given
the same status as the Jewish Holocaust is understandable, but it
is mistaken. The facts of the case are horrifying, and certainly
justify calling the events in eastern Turkey in 1915-16 a genocide,
but the key elements of prior intent and systematic planning that
distinguish the Nazi Holocaust are absent.
When I was a graduate student in Middle Eastern history, as a
translation exercise, I was given the hand-written diary of a Turkish
soldier killed during the retreat from Baghdad in 1917. "Mehmet Cavus"
(Sergeant Mehmet) was a youthful village school-teacher who had been
called up in 1914. At first he had a safe billet guarding the Black
Sea entrance to the Bosphorus, but in 1915, his unit was ordered to
march east to deal with a Russian invasion and an Armenian rebellion.
Diary of a nobody
And then, in the diary of this pleasant, rather naïve young man, I read
the phrase "iyi katliam etmistik". Loosely translated, this means:
"We really massacred them". The diary was written in the old Ottoman
rika, a version of handwritten Arabic script that never really served
Turkish well. So I asked my teacher if it really said what I thought
it did. "Oh yes," he said. "Those were different times."
That excuses nothing, but it explains much. The foolish young officers,
who led the Ottoman Empire into the war, panicked when they realized
that the Russians were invading from the east and the British
were about to land on the Mediterranean coast. Just at that point,
Armenian revolutionaries, who had been plotting with the Russians
and the British to carve out an Armenian state from the wreckage of
the Empire, launched futile revolts to assist the invaders.
The Turks responded by slaughtering many Armenians in what is now
eastern Turkey and deporting the rest to Syria. It was certainly a
genocide, but neither premeditated nor systematic. Armenians living
in other parts of the Empire were largely left alone, and those in
the war zone with money for rail travel reached Syria safely.
So why is the US Congress "recognizing" the Armenian genocide, but
not the more recent genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda? Because there
aren't many voters of Tutsi descent in key Congressional districts.
This is all about domestic politics: alienating the Turks doesn't
cost much politically.
Armenian activists today aren't looking for "justice". They want to
drive the Turks into extreme reactions, isolate them and derail the
domestic changes turning Turkey into a modern democracy. They do not
want Turkey to succeed. And the West is falling for it.
--Boundary_(ID_QrhzF7P9mImQBjToyjbstg)--