Armenian Genocide Update

[Turkey is crowing over this vote]

Hürriyet, Turkey
June 14 2008
Sweden rejects Armenian so-called "genocide" claim

The Swedish parliament rejected Wednesday a draft law proposing
recognition of the Armenian allegations regarding incidents of
1915. The parliament rejected the bill while 245 votes against and 37
for the proposal.


Turkey welcomed the decision. "Turkish public, with its government and
opposition, is grateful to all the political parties represented in
the Swedish Parliament for both their support to Turkey's EU bid and
their decision rejecting calls for recognition of Armenian
allegations," Egemen Bagis, Turkish prime minister's advisor and an
AKP MP, was quoted as telling reporters by the state-run Anatolian
Agency.

Turkey has long been facing a systematic campaign of defamation
carried out by Armenian lobbying groups. The Armenian diaspora has
lately increased its organized activities throughout the world for the
recognition of their unfounded allegations in regard to the events of
1915 as "genocide" by national and local parliaments.

Some 300,000 Armenians and at least an equal number of Turks were
killed in civil strife when Armenians, backed by Russia, rose up
against the Ottomans in 1915. However Armenians claim in a systematic
campaign of defamation some 1.5 million of their kinsmen died in
orchestrated killings during the 1915 incidents.

The parliaments of Argentina, Belgium, France, Netherlands,
Switzerland, Italy, Canada, Lebanon, the Russian Federation, Slovakia,
Uruguay, Greece, the Greek Cypriot administration [sic] , Poland, Germany,
Lithuania, Chile, Venezuela and the European Parliament passed either
resolutions or issued statements.

Turkey says parliaments and other political institutions are not the
appropriate for to debate and pass judgments on disputed periods of
history. Past events and controversial periods of history should be
left to the historians for their dispassionate study and evaluation.

However Turkey's efforts to carry a deeper investigation have yet made
a positive outcome. In 2005, Turkey has officially proposed to the
government of Armenia the establishment of a joint commission of
history composed of historians and other experts from both sides to
study together the events of 1915 not only in the archives of Turkey
and Armenia but also in the archives of all relevant third countries
and to share their findings with the public. Unfortunately, Armenia
has not responded positively to this initiative, yet. Turkey's
proposal is still on the table.
[at least they have moved away from their claim that they had not received any answer]

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TURKISH MPS, DUTCH MINISTER DISCUSS EU MEMBERSHIP, CYPRUS, ARMENIA

Ankara, 12 June: Dutch Justice Minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin met
members of Turkish parliament's EU adjustment and justice committees
in Ankara on Thursday [12 June].

EU adjustment committee's Chairman Yasar Yakis said during the meeting
that the support, which the Netherlands extended to Turkey's EU
membership process, increased when compared to previous years.

Yakis also expressed Turkey's views regarding Cyprus and Armenian
issues. He recalled European Council's decision to lift pressures on
the [self-declared] Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) in 2004
and said that this decision bound Greek Cypriot administration,
too. Yakis said that the Netherlands should put pressure on Greek
Cypriot administration to apply the decision.

Yakis said that Turkey was against qualifying 1915 incidents as
genocide. He asked the Netherlands to make Armenia accept Turkey's
conciliatory proposal about the issue. [eh?]

Justice committee Acting Chairman Hakki Koylu also said that although
PKK [Kurdistan Workers' Party] and DHKP-C [Revolutionary People's
Liberation Party - Front] were accepted as terrorist organizations in
the EU, Turkey's judicial demands against those organizations were not
met by several EU countries and other countries.

Ballin expressed pleasure over contribution of Turkish citizens to the
Netherlands in economy and culture.

Ballin said that the Netherlands supported direct trade between the EU
and TRNC, adding that direct trade between Armenia and Turkey should
be made, too.

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Globe and Mail, Canada
June 13 2008
High-school course on genocide draws protests

KATE HAMMER
June 13, 2008

A high-school course on genocide that has raised loud protests from
ethnic groups, one for being included and one for being excluded from
the core curriculum, was unanimously approved by the Toronto District
School Board last night.

About 50 protesters waved Turkish flags and picket signs outside the
school board's North York offices, objecting to the inclusion of the
Armenian genocide as one of the course's three core case
studies. Meanwhile, a group of Ukrainian-Canadians sat in the board
meeting's audience in support of an effort to have the Holodomor, the
1932-33 Ukrainian genocide, included as a core case study.

"I think some of the effect and the goodness of the curriculum has
been distracted by the controversy that has surrounded it," said
school trustee Gerri Gershon, who introduced the idea of a genocide
course after she visited Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. "It's
so important that our students understand history in all its bad
forms."

The board passed some minor amendments aimed at bolstering the profile
of the Holodomor in the curriculum, including a mandatory statement
that crimes against humanity not used as one of the three core case
studies were not of lesser importance than those that were, and that
other atrocities could be included as case studies.

Peter Sochan, a Ukrainian-Canadian who attended the meeting, said that
the amendments were helpful, but he was disappointed that the
Holodomor wasn't a core case study.

"It's important the these events not be forgotten," he said.

Board members expressed hope that the new course would help to promote
cross-cultural understanding and awareness of the dangers of
stereotyping and prejudice. But Turkish protesters said they feared
the curriculum would be corrosive to Toronto's multicultural fabric
because it engaged in "hate politics" by including an event that isn't
recognized by the United Nations as a genocide.

"This is really disappointing" said Mehmet Bor, vice-president of the
Federation of Canadian Turkish Associations.

"They pretend that they made the right choice, but I think they've
planted seeds of hate in Canada."

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The Non-Vote on Genocide 2007
by Daniel Smith


When does a massacre rise to the level of genocide and when does the
world render such a judgment?


Those are the unspoken questions underlying this month’s rhetorical
firestorm created when leaders in both the Senate and the House of
Representatives suddenly highlighted legislation that had been
discreetly buried in sub-committees since the middle of March. The
virtually identical non-binding resolutions (S.106 and H.106,
respectively) called for U.S. foreign policy to reflect “appropriate
understanding and sensitivity concerning issues related to human
rights, ethnic cleansing, and genocide documented in the United
States record relating to the Armenian Genocide” that occurred during
World War I in modern day Turkey – then the Ottoman empire.



The Turkish government went ballistic. Prime Minister Recep Erdogan
warned of serious consequences if either chamber of the U.S. Congress
passed its bill. The Bush administration warned that approval would –
not “could” but “would” – create a serious rupture with an important
NATO ally. Turkey is a vital link in the U.S. air logistics system
resupplying U.S. forces in Iraq. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates,
in the course of answering a question during a mid-month press
conference, noted that 70 percent of all air logistics for Iraq and
33 percent of fuel used in the war flow through or over Turkish
territory.


Secretary of State Rice took issue with the timing of congressional
leaders. All living former secretaries of state and national security
advisors registered opposition to the resolutions. Secretary Gates
also took issue with the timing, as did the Commander of U.S. Central
Command, Admiral William Fallon, who observed that “the resolution in
the House on the Armenian genocide…just sticks a knife in and just
runs it around” (New York Post, October 23, 2007).


Ankara’s reaction seemed disproportionately swift and severe,
particularly considering that the dates most often given for the mass
executions of Armenians are 1915-1918, years before the official
founding of the modern state of Turkey by Mustafa Kemal Pasha
(Ataturk). A quick search revealed that in every decade since World
War II, one or more congressional resolutions condemning the Armenian
genocide creates a stir and may even advance down the legislative
road – a sparsely-attended hearing or a sub-committee vote in the
House of Representatives.


Starting in the 1980s, Ankara upped the ante by hiring top-flight
Washington public relations firms to undermine congressional
sentiment for pursuing legislation. The significance of this
additional element suggests that by the 1980s, Ankara was no longer
on the psychological defensive – the “sick man of Europe” as it was
described in 1914. Although not initially alarming, the slow
emergence of the “new” radicalized practitioners of terror
transformed Turkey from a “marginal” player in any NATO-Warsaw Pact
conflict to a central position, as the only Muslim-majority and the
only “Oriental” member of NATO, in Washington’s (and a reluctant
European Union’s) efforts to reduce violence in Afghanistan, Iraq,
and other locales in the Middle East.

Still, this year’s response was so vehement that something else must
be in play. Without question, Turks believe they have greater freedom
to act in 2007 because the Bush administration has failed so
miserably in its “global war on terror.” And it has been only 55
months since the Turkish parliament voted against letting U.S. troops
cross Turkish territory to participate in the March 2003 invasion of
Iraq – and made it stick. Moreover, Turkey’s religious-based ruling
Justice and Development party has survived in power (and won 340 of
550 seats in parliament in elections held July 23, 2007) for more
than five years without a coup d’etat by the staunchly secularist
Turkish military is also a source of newfound confidence in the
country.


Both the government and the military also agreed on the need to
subdue the Kurdish fighters of the PKK who use the rugged terrain of
the Iraq-Turkish border as a base for rest and rearming. This part of
Iraq is controlled by the Iraqi Kurdish parties and defended by the
100,000-strong pesh merga. They have proved unable or politically
incapable of implementing promises to the Bush administration and
Erdogan’s government to halt PKK attacks that are creating a low but
constant death toll – similar to the American experience in Iraq –
among Turkish units on the border. In response to this failure, the
Turkish parliament approved legislation empowering the prime minister
and the army chief to send more Turkish troops into Iraq to destroy
PKK fighters and base areas.


All authorities in Turkey stress that they will act only if the Iraqi
and coalition forces fail to rein in the PKK. They are not keen to
become further enmeshed in going after the PKK given the history of
the Armenian suppression. When spelled out, the psychology of
repression is ugly, as the following thumbnail sketch of Armenia’s
history and a more general look at 20th century genocides reveal.

The History of the Armenian Genocide
At the end of the 19th century, the once-mighty Ottoman Empire was
struggling to control its restive Christian Armenian minority.
Estimates of the number killed in uprisings against the autocratic
ottoman sultans in the last decade of the 19th century run to more
than 100,000. Ironically, it was a group of army officers – the
“Young Turks” – concerned about the widening gap in capabilities
between Ottoman and European armies, who forced the sultan to accept
limitations on his power. Not content sharing power, three officers –
Mehmed Talaat, Ismail Enver, and Ahmed Djemal – engineered a coup
d’etat in 1913 and assumed total control of the government as well as
the military. The next year they took Turkey into World War I on the
side of the Central Powers (Imperial Germany and the
Austro-Hungarian Empire) – the losing side.


But the war also held promise to be an excuse for solving what some
in the new regime called the “Armenian problem.” The vision of the
triumvirate was a New Turkey – called Turan – stretching from the
Mediterranean islands off Turkey’s western flank all the way across
Central Asia to the Caspian Sea. Some 500,000 Armenians were in this
broad area whose boundaries included much of the historic Armenian
homeland. With the Eastern Front pitting Turks against Russians,
“special measures” were required to insure the integrity of the war
effort.


- All weapons held by Armenians were confiscated as the population
was considered sympathetic to their fellow Christians in Russia.


- The 40,000 Armenians in the Turkish army were disarmed and
converted to labor battalions.


- In April 1915, Armenian political, cultural, religious, and other
elites were seized in coordinated raids and then killed. Mass arrests
of Armenian men and their execution followed. Ironically, some Kurds
joined in the killing. The allied powers warned the Turkish rulers to
stop, but with the war grinding on, the implied threat was toothless.



- Undeterred, the three rulers initiated new measures against women
and children –forced marches with little food or water, with the
victims in some cases being marched into the desert.


- In May, 1918, Ottoman troops attacked eastward into the Caucasus to
destroy what remained of the Armenian homeland in their bid to reach
the Caspian Sea. The Armenians fought the invaders to a standstill,
and then the whole enterprise collapsed when, shortly before
Armistice Day (November 11, 1918) the ruling junta fled to Germany
where they received asylum. Despite more calls for a war crimes
trial, the three men were tried in absentia, found guilty, but never
punished.

Meanwhile, in Anatolia (Asia Minor) a more moderate group of “Young
Turks” took over. After lengthy negotiations, this government signed
in 1920 the Treaty of Sevres which reduced Turkey to a shadow of
itself, re-created a large Republic of Armenia, and called for a
referendum to be organized among the Kurdish populations in and
around Anatolia, Iran, Iraq, and Syria to determine if an independent
Kurdistan was desired.


However, the treaty was flatly rejected by another group of highly
nationalistic officers. Led by Mustafa Kemal, they successfully waged
war on France, Armenia, and Greece to force renegotiation of the
Serves treaty. The result was the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne which
effectively created the boundaries of modern Turkey, left a rump
Armenia as part of the emerging Soviet Union, and scuttled the
referendum on Kurdistan, leaving the Kurds the largest ethnic group
with no independent homeland.


Did the Ottoman Rulers Commit Genocide? This, then, brings us back
to the question of what makes mass murder or massacres genocide. The
distinction hinges on discovering or discerning the “intent” of those
doing the killing, as is clear from Article II of the 1948 Convention
Against Genocide: “acts committed with the intent to destroy, in
whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as
such….”
Arriving at a conclusion, unless proclamations or other statements of
intent have been published, can be problematical before the fact of a
genocide starting. For those with time and inclination, being
familiar with the circumstances of 20th century genocides and
massacres might permit earlier scrutiny of causes and processes that
led to the horrendous slaughter of civilian’s in that century and
that have carried over into the 21st century.


The first seven years of this century have already re-taught us the
basic lesson that naming an atrocity genocide – as the U.S. did in
the Sudan – does not prevent or stop the killing, even with the
possible penalties for any found guilty as described in international
law.

Certainly, time does not appear to be a factor. In Rwanda
800,000-900,000 ethnic Tutsis and ethnic Hutus who refused to
participate in the organized killing perished in the space of 100
days in 1994. But in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, the executions
and forced labor that eventually claimed 2 million intellectuals,
city dwellers, and “elites” ran four years (1975-1979).


The numbers who perish also is non-determinative as to whether
genocide has been committed. In 2004, Germany acknowledged as a
genocide the 1904 systematic destruction of 80,000 Herero tribesmen
in what was then called German Southwest Africa (today’s Namibia) in
retaliation for the deaths of 100 Germans killed when the Africans
rebelled against brutal German rule.


Contrast this event with what Joseph Stalin was doing in the Soviet
Union in 1932-33.

He purposefully condemned to death by starvation 7 million men, women
and children in the Ukraine where his program to collectivize
agriculture was being resisted, sometimes violently. Tiring of the
unceasing defiance, he ordered the Red army to seize every grain of
the harvest of autumn and winter 1932 and to completely seal
Ukraine’s border so no foodstuffs could enter Ukraine.


Furthermore, between 1934-1938, Stalin orchestrated a massive purge
of Communist Party, members, the intelligentsia, and army officers
whose loyalty to him he questioned. Some 13 million wee killed or
sent to gulags. In the army the purge removed so many experienced
officers that when the Nazis attacked in 1942, the Red army came
perilously close to total collapse – which, had it happened, would
have gone into history as one of the most egregious self-inflicted
errors ever made in warfare. (As it was, the Russian people bolstered
the army at both St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) and Moscow against
the efforts of the Nazi armies.)


In terms of the number of people killed, Stalin is surpassed only by
Mao Ze-Dong. Again, excluding the lives lost in Mao’s military
campaigns against the Chinese Nationalists and the Imperial Japanese
army in the 1930s and 1940s, the Chinese civilian population endured
three major assaults – the subjugation of Tibet (1949-50), the Great
Leap Forward (1958-1961), and the Cultural Revolution (1966- 1969) –
that claimed as many as 1.2 million, 43 million and 7 million
lives, respectively.


War, of course, offers the perfect counterpoint by which murders and
revenge slayings among civilians are concealed. The world knows so
much about the World War II Holocaust in part because the Germans
kept meticulous records on the 6 million souls – Jews, ethnic Poles,
Romas (gypsies), and “undesirables” – exterminated during the period
1938-1945.


In the Pacific, Japanese troops are believed to have killed 300,000
Chinese civilians and prisoners in six weeks (December 1937- February
1938) in what is called the “Rape of Nanking.” The broad consensus
today holds that over the entire 1937-1945 time frame of significant
combat in Asia, non-combatant deaths due to Japanese invasion,
occupation, and execution is approximately 6.8 million.


(In 1984, UNESCO estimated the total number of civilian fatalities
during 1937-1945 at between 21-27 million – nearly the same as
military losses.)


The World War II examples share a common characteristic: both
occurred within the conscious context of “low level” combat or
preparation for escalating armed conflicts when tensions already
would be high and moral restraints weakened. Yet while the deaths of
6 million at the hands of the Nazis earn the condemnation of
“genocide” by ordinary men and women, of religious and secular
leaders around the globe, most of the other atrocities – at least as
they are spoken of and written about – do not carry the stigma of
“genocide.”

Genocide: Avoiding the Specific (Turkey) While Condemning the
Universal
The Armenian genocide, for the Turks, arguably also shares this
association with war and “defense of the nation-state” against
internal subversion and should not be singled out as genocide. (The
U.S. internment camps in World War II are a less drastic example of
the same mind set.) As regrettable as the killings may be, the Turks
see the deaths as part of the larger war they were waging against the
imperial Russian army and, after Lenin’s successful revolution forced
the new regime in St. Petersburg to withdraw its army, were still
threatened by the new Communist regime.


The other and perhaps from the point of view of the Turkish people
the more significant reason for rejecting these events as genocide is
the belief that the reputation of Turkey’s “George Washington” –
Ataturk – and through him the honor of the entire Turkish people
would be sullied even though he did not emerge as the man in charge
of the residual Ottoman empire until he led the opposition to the
Sevres treaty during 19 20-1923..

In the end, the definition of “intent “ remains the key to unlocking
the legalistic straightjacket into which we have tie ourselves by a
misplaced sense of personal and national reputation, “honor,” and
latent nationalism.


What we are left with is the observation by U.S. Supreme Court
Justice Potter Stewart: “I know it when I see it.” But the world
must look and not hide its head in the sand. And by the way,
Congress may yet act on one or more of the pending pieces of
legislation.

About the author:
Colonel Daniel M. Smith graduated from the United States Military
Academy at West Point in 1966. His initial assignment was with the
3rd Armor Division in Germany. He then served as an intelligence
advisor in Vietnam, following which he earned a graduate degree at
Cornell University and taught philosophy and English at West Point.


Subsequent intelligence and public affairs assignments were at Fort
Hood, Texas; the Army Materiel Research and Development Command,
where he was speechwriter for the Commanding General; the Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA); and Headquarters, Department of the Army.
Six of his years with DIA were in London in the British Ministry of
Defense and n as Military Attache in the U.S. Embassy. Colonel Smith
retired in 1992. He joined the non-partisan Center for Defense
Information in April 1993 becoming Associate Director in 1995 and
Chief of Research in 1999.

Colonel Smith, a graduate of the Army Command and General Staff
College, the Armed Forces Staff College, and the Army War College,
joined the Friends Committee on National Legislation in September
2002 as Senior Fellow on Military Affairs.

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