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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 150,0000ā?¦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.
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