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Commentary: Armenian Ghosts May Haunt Turkey's EU Prospects

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  • Commentary: Armenian Ghosts May Haunt Turkey's EU Prospects

    COMMENTARY: ARMENIAN GHOSTS MAY HAUNT TURKEY'S EU PROSPECTS
    Sherwood Ross

    Middle East Times, Egypt
    Nov 30 2006

    WASHINGTON -- 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 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 opposes
    all talk of membership. The Netherlands, Germany, Austria, and France
    are cool to admitting Turkey and support 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 1 million Armenians was 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 6 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 US
    Congress sought a resolution in 2000 to memorialize the Armenian
    genocide, Turkey threatened to refuse the US 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 Bill Clinton informed House Speaker Dennis Hastert that
    passage of the resolution could "risk the lives" of Americans,
    and that put an end to the bill. Like his predecessor, President
    George W. 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 nineteenth 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 US 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 150,000 ...

    there seems to have been about 1 million 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. "One
    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 novel 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 nauseam. After all, there are ghosts everywhere.
    From: Baghdasarian
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