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What's the Turkish for genocide?

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  • What's the Turkish for genocide?

    What's the Turkish for genocide?
    Ben Macintyre

    The Times, UK
    June 18 2005

    HISTORIANS HAVE become the moral accountants of our time, poring over
    the archives to establish, as nearly as possible, the unpaid debts
    still owed by the present to the past.

    In China there have been violent demonstrations demanding Japan's
    penitence for its wartime aggression. In Mississippi, an elderly white
    man and reputed Klansman has gone on trial accused of murdering civil
    rights workers more than four decades ago. The Argentine Supreme Court
    this week opened the way for a full inquiry into the crimes of the
    "dirty war" between 1976 and 1983. Even France, for so long in denial,
    has begun to address the unquiet ghosts of Vichy and Algeria.

    The process of historical self-examination is neither simple nor
    easy. In the wrong hands, history becomes a weapon of recrimination
    and revenge, intercepted by bigots who would use old battles to stoke
    new ones. Yet historical introspection is crucial to democracy. The
    fledgeling South African democracy bravely sought to cauterise a
    traumatic past through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The
    Bloody Sunday inquiry may have been expensive and lengthy - seven
    years, £155 million and 1,700 witness statements - but it was a
    necessary step towards freeing Northern Ireland from the locked grip
    of competing histories. Postwar Germany has confronted its demons in
    a conscious and continuing act of national catharsis.

    The alternative is self-delusion. Treat the past as self-serving myth
    and it forms a canker of moral equivocation.

    Amid the debate over Turkish membership of the EU, there is one matter
    that has hardly been raised, and that is Turkey's bitter and blinkered
    refusal to make peace with its past.

    In Turkish history, no event is more divisive and explosive than
    the "Armenian question", the long-disputed massacre of hundreds of
    thousands of Armenians during the First World War. Armenia claims that,
    as the Ottoman Empire crumbled in 1915, Turkish soldiers and Kurdish
    tribesmen were unleashed in a deliberate act of genocide that killed
    1.5 million Armenians.

    Turkey has refused steadfastly to accept that version of events,
    declaring that the Armenian death toll was far lower, and that the
    dead perished mainly through civil war, hunger and disease. This, the
    Turks insist, was not a systematic slaughter, but a bitter partisan and
    ethnic conflict in which Armenians sided with the invading Russians
    against Ottoman rule, leading to the deaths of at least 350,000
    Turkish Muslims.

    This month, historians at Bosphorus University scheduled a conference
    to debate the tragic events of 1915-1916. Turkish nationalists reacted
    with fury. Cemil Cicek, the Justice Minister, described the planned
    conference as "treacherous" and accused the historians of "preparing
    to stab Turkey in the back". With government pressure mounting, and
    nationalist students threatening to converge on the university campus,
    the conference organisers buckled. The event was cancelled.

    The argument, which continues to poison relations between Turkey and
    Armenia and destabilise the region, boils down to a single, intensely
    emotive word. As Caroline Finkel writes in her excellent forthcoming
    book Osman's Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300-1923: "The
    Armenian question today has come to focus exclusively on whether the
    massacres constituted genocide . . . and all other aspects of this
    acutely sensitive matter tend to be scrutinised for their value in
    clarifying this central point." But clarity is impossible in a debate
    that evokes such violent emotions. The Turkish Foreign Minister has
    dismissed the term genocide as "pure slander", and when the celebrated
    Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk dared to declare this year that a million
    Armenians had been murdered in Turkey, he received three lawsuits for
    "damaging the State" and a volley of death threats.

    To complicate matters further, much of the killing in 1915 appears to
    be have been carried out by Turkish secret societies, whose records
    have disappeared and whose relationship to the Ottoman authorities is
    unclear. Turks point out that there is no official document ordering
    the killing of Armenians. Armenians allege that the archives have
    been purged.

    The parliaments of 17 countries, including France and Russia, have
    already passed resolutions recognising the Armenian genocide. Britain
    and America have held back, wary of angering a powerful and important
    ally. But staying silent is not the act of a friend, and it is hard
    to see how Turkey can join the EU - an organisation founded on a
    determination to avoid repeating the mistakes of history - without
    first acknowledging its own bloody past.

    The precise numbers of dead, and the meaning of the term genocide,
    can be debated for ever, but of this there is no doubt: hundreds of
    thousands of innocent Armenians perished as a consequence of Turkish
    actions. Most historians outside Turkey now agree that what happened
    after 1915 constituted "ethnic cleansing", for which the Ottoman
    Government was ultimately responsible. Acknowledging this, while
    genuinely encouraging the widest and most dispassionate debate on
    the subject, would establish Turkey's commitment to freedom of speech
    and democratic ideals in the run-up to accession talks in October.

    So far, British officials have side-stepped the issue, insisting that
    the Armenian question is a matter for historians. As a country with
    its own ghosts, Britain has a responsibility to encourage Turkey to
    see it own history beyond confining notions of treachery or loyalty.

    Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish Prime Minister, while reiterating
    his belief that the genocide never happened, has called for a joint
    commission to look into the Turkish archives.

    But a far more emphatic demonstration of openness would be to revive
    the conference at Bosphorus University and open it to the widest
    possible range of scholarly opinion.

    "Who today, after all, remembers the annihiliation of the Armenians?"

    Thus spake Adolf Hitler, reassuring his generals that the Jewish
    Holocaust would be forgotten in the glow of Nazi victory. Ninety years
    after the killing, the Armenians remember one way, and the Turks
    another. The passage of time has calcified these rival histories,
    but Turkey's desire to enter the EU represents an opportunity for
    genuine historical reconciliation. The Armenian question may yet be
    answered, if Turkey can be persuaded to ask it.

    Join the Debate Send your e-mails to [email protected]

    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1068-1658993,00.html

    --Boundary_(ID_kzRK59ZhZeDtkgqc+eNmmg)--
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