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"WE REALLY MASSACRED THEM"
by Dyer, Gwynne
Lindsay Daily Post (Ontario)
October 16, 2007 Tuesday
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
that the mass killing of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during the
First World War 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.
Bush promises that it will die in the Senate, but by then the damage
will be done. The US-Turkish alliance will be gravely damaged, and
American use of Turkey as a major supply line for its troops in Iraq --
70 percent of US air cargo for Iraq goes through Turkey -- will be at
an end. "I can assure you that Turkey knows how to play hardball,"
as Egeman Bagis, an adviser to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyib
Erdogan, told reporters in Washington.
Turkey may also send its troops into northern (Kurdish) Iraq, thus
destabilizing the one stable and moderately prosperous part of that
country. But then, it might have done that anyway. Fifteen Turkish
soldiers and twelve civilians have been killed in the past week by
Kurdish rebels who are allegedly based across the border in Iraqi
Kurdistan, and the political pressure on Prime Minister Erdogan to
authorize another cross-border military operation is intense.
The United States will be the 23rd country to fall to the Armenian
campaign to link the Ottoman Turkey of ninety years ago with the
Nazi Germany of sixty years ago -- and, by extension, to implicate
the current Republic of Turkey in the crime of 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 young graduate student in Middle Eastern history, as a
translation exercise I was given the hand-written diary of a Turkish
soldier who was 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
suddenly ordered to march east to deal with a Russian invasion and
an Armenian rebellion.
And then, in the diary of this pleasant, rather naive young man,
I read the phrase "iyi katliam etmistik." Loosely translated, that
means: "We really massacred them" -- and he wasn't making a sporting
analogy. 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 somewhere on the Mediterranean coast. And just at that
point, Armenian revolutionaries (Dashnaks and Hnchaks) who had been
plotting with the Russians and the British to carve out an Armenian
state from the wreckage of the empire launched feeble, 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 in long marching
columns. Huge numbers were murdered along the way: at least 600,000
died, and perhaps as many as 1.5 million. It was certainly a genocide,
but it was not premeditated, nor was it systematic.
Armenians living in other parts of the empire were largely left alone,
and even in the war zone those with money to travel by rail mostly
reached Syria safely.
So why is the US Congress "recognizing" the Armenian genocide, but
not the rather more recent genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda? Because
there are not many voters of Tutsi descent in key Congressional
districts. This is all about domestic politics: alienating the Turks
doesn't cost much politically.
Today's Armenian activists aren't looking for "justice". They want
to drive the Turks into extreme reactions that will isolate them and
derail the domestic changes (including a gradual public acceptance
of Turkey's responsibility for the atrocities) that are turning that
country into a modern, tolerant democracy. They do not want Turkey
to succeed. And Western countries are falling for it.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles
are published in 45 countries.
by Dyer, Gwynne
Lindsay Daily Post (Ontario)
October 16, 2007 Tuesday
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
that the mass killing of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during the
First World War 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.
Bush promises that it will die in the Senate, but by then the damage
will be done. The US-Turkish alliance will be gravely damaged, and
American use of Turkey as a major supply line for its troops in Iraq --
70 percent of US air cargo for Iraq goes through Turkey -- will be at
an end. "I can assure you that Turkey knows how to play hardball,"
as Egeman Bagis, an adviser to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyib
Erdogan, told reporters in Washington.
Turkey may also send its troops into northern (Kurdish) Iraq, thus
destabilizing the one stable and moderately prosperous part of that
country. But then, it might have done that anyway. Fifteen Turkish
soldiers and twelve civilians have been killed in the past week by
Kurdish rebels who are allegedly based across the border in Iraqi
Kurdistan, and the political pressure on Prime Minister Erdogan to
authorize another cross-border military operation is intense.
The United States will be the 23rd country to fall to the Armenian
campaign to link the Ottoman Turkey of ninety years ago with the
Nazi Germany of sixty years ago -- and, by extension, to implicate
the current Republic of Turkey in the crime of 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 young graduate student in Middle Eastern history, as a
translation exercise I was given the hand-written diary of a Turkish
soldier who was 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
suddenly ordered to march east to deal with a Russian invasion and
an Armenian rebellion.
And then, in the diary of this pleasant, rather naive young man,
I read the phrase "iyi katliam etmistik." Loosely translated, that
means: "We really massacred them" -- and he wasn't making a sporting
analogy. 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 somewhere on the Mediterranean coast. And just at that
point, Armenian revolutionaries (Dashnaks and Hnchaks) who had been
plotting with the Russians and the British to carve out an Armenian
state from the wreckage of the empire launched feeble, 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 in long marching
columns. Huge numbers were murdered along the way: at least 600,000
died, and perhaps as many as 1.5 million. It was certainly a genocide,
but it was not premeditated, nor was it systematic.
Armenians living in other parts of the empire were largely left alone,
and even in the war zone those with money to travel by rail mostly
reached Syria safely.
So why is the US Congress "recognizing" the Armenian genocide, but
not the rather more recent genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda? Because
there are not many voters of Tutsi descent in key Congressional
districts. This is all about domestic politics: alienating the Turks
doesn't cost much politically.
Today's Armenian activists aren't looking for "justice". They want
to drive the Turks into extreme reactions that will isolate them and
derail the domestic changes (including a gradual public acceptance
of Turkey's responsibility for the atrocities) that are turning that
country into a modern, tolerant democracy. They do not want Turkey
to succeed. And Western countries are falling for it.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles
are published in 45 countries.