Armenian Genocide News
(please ensure you read the last item written by a non-Armenian that
articulates the Armenian's thinking so well)
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Turkey and the Army
March 7, 2010
The recent arrest or detention of dozens of Turkish military officers
for alleged coup plotting could signal a significant shift in power
from the tarnished army to civilian leadership. These cases could
help strengthen Turkish democracy - provided the government and the
judiciary scrupulously apply the rule of law.
For most of modern Turkey's history, the army has been dominant,
and far too willing to use any means to keep Turkey a secular,
Western-oriented state. That included overthrowing four democratically
elected governments since 1960. As recently as 2007, the military
tried to block the selection of Abdullah Gul of the Islamic-influenced
Justice and Development Party (A.K.P.) as president largely on the
ground that his wife wore an Islamic headscarf.
The military's hold on political life has weakened steadily under
A.K.P. rule and pressure from the European Union, which has insisted
that as part of Ankara's bid for membership, the military must become
more accountable to civilian leaders.
The recent detentions and arrests came after a small independent
newspaper, Taraf, published what it said were military documents
from a 2003 meeting describing preparations for a coup. The military
acknowledged the meeting but said it was focused only on protecting
the country from external, not domestic, threats. Since the arrests,
the military's top leaders have shown welcome restraint.
Meanwhile, relations with the United States hit a new rut on
Thursday when the House Foreign Affairs Committee denounced the
World War I mass killings of Armenians as genocide. We think the
resolution was unnecessary, just as Ankara's denial of that tragedy is
self-destructive. Instead of threatening Washington with retaliation
for the vote, Ankara should focus on getting a normalization deal
with Armenia back on track.
The United States and other Western countries need to keep nudging
Turkey forward while keeping the hope of E.U. membership alive and
credible.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan needs to curb his own autocratic
tendencies and push for replacing the military-imposed constitution
with one that enshrines rights for Kurds and other minorities,
religious and press freedoms, a commitment to secular rule and a
law-based judiciary. And Turkey's military leaders need to continue
exercising restraint.
The recent arrest or detention of dozens of Turkish military officers
for alleged coup plotting could signal a significant shift in power
from the tarnished army to civilian leadership. These cases could
help strengthen Turkish democracy - provided the government and the
judiciary scrupulously apply the rule of law.
For most of modern Turkey's history, the army has been dominant,
and far too willing to use any means to keep Turkey a secular,
Western-oriented state. That included overthrowing four democratically
elected governments since 1960. As recently as 2007, the military
tried to block the selection of Abdullah Gul of the Islamic-influenced
Justice and Development Party (A.K.P.) as president largely on the
ground that his wife wore an Islamic headscarf.
The military's hold on political life has weakened steadily under
A.K.P. rule and pressure from the European Union, which has insisted
that as part of Ankara's bid for membership, the military must become
more accountable to civilian leaders.
The recent detentions and arrests came after a small independent
newspaper, Taraf, published what it said were military documents
from a 2003 meeting describing preparations for a coup. The military
acknowledged the meeting but said it was focused only on protecting
the country from external, not domestic, threats. Since the arrests,
the military's top leaders have shown welcome restraint.
Meanwhile, relations with the United States hit a new rut on
Thursday when the House Foreign Affairs Committee denounced the
World War I mass killings of Armenians as genocide. We think the
resolution was unnecessary, just as Ankara's denial of that tragedy is
self-destructive. Instead of threatening Washington with retaliation
for the vote, Ankara should focus on getting a normalization deal
with Armenia back on track.
The United States and other Western countries need to keep nudging
Turkey forward while keeping the hope of E.U. membership alive and
credible.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan needs to curb his own autocratic
tendencies and push for replacing the military-imposed constitution
with one that enshrines rights for Kurds and other minorities,
religious and press freedoms, a commitment to secular rule and a
law-based judiciary. And Turkey's military leaders need to continue
exercising restraint.
ROBERT FISK: LIVING PROOF OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
Independent
Tuesday, 9 March 2010
UK
The US wants to deny that Turkey's slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians
in 1915 was genocide. But the evidence is there, in a hilltop orphanage
near Beirut
It's only a small grave, a rectangle of cheap concrete marking it
out, blessed by a flourish of wild yellow lilies. Inside are the
powdered bones and skulls and bits of femur of up to 300 children,
Armenian orphans of the great 1915 genocide who died of cholera and
starvation as the Turkish authorities tried to "Turkify" them in a
converted Catholic college high above Beirut. But for once, it is
the almost unknown story of the surviving 1,200 children - between
three and 15 years old - who lived in the crowded dormitory of this
ironically beautiful cut-stone school that proves that the Turks did
indeed commit genocide against the Armenians in 1915.
Barack Obama and his pliant Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton -
who are now campaigning so pitifully to prevent the US Congress
acknowledging that the Ottoman Turkish massacre of 1.5 million
Armenians was a genocide - should come here to this Lebanese hilltop
village and hang their heads in shame. For this is a tragic, appalling
tale of brutality against small and defenceless children whose families
had already been murdered by Turkish forces at the height of the First
World War, some of whom were to recall how they were forced to grind
up and eat the skeletons of their dead fellow child orphans in order
to survive starvation.
Jemal Pasha, one of the architects of the 1915 genocide, and - alas
- Turkey's first feminist, Halide Edip Adivar, helped to run this
orphanage of terror in which Armenian children were systematically
deprived of their Armenian identity and given new Turkish names,
forced to become Muslims and beaten savagely if they were heard to
speak Armenian. The Antoura Lazarist college priests have recorded
how its original Lazarist teachers were expelled by the Turks and
how Jemal Pasha presented himself at the front door with his German
bodyguard after a muezzin began calling for Muslim prayers once the
statue of the Virgin Mary had been taken from the belfry.
Hitherto, the argument that Armenians suffered a genocide has rested
on the deliberate nature of the slaughter. But Article II of the
1951 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime
of Genocide specifically states that the definition of genocide -
"to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or
religious group" - includes "forcibly transferring children of the
group to another group". This is exactly what the Turks did in Lebanon.
Photographs still exist of hundreds of near-naked Armenian children
performing physical exercises in the college grounds. One even shows
Jemal Pasha standing on the steps in 1916, next to the young and
beautiful Halide Adivar who - after some reluctance - agreed to run
the orphanage.
Before he died in 1989, Karnig Panian - who was six years old when
he arrived at Antoura in 1916 - recorded in Armenian how his own name
was changed and how he was given a number, 551, as his identity. "At
every sunset in the presence of over 1,000 orphans, when the Turkish
flag was lowered, 'Long Live General Pasha!' was recited. That was
the first part of the ceremony. Then it was time for punishment for
the wrongdoers of the day. They beat us with the falakha [a rod used
to beat the soles of the feet], and the top-rank punishment was for
speaking Armenian."
Panian described how, after cruel treatment or through physical
weakness, many children died. They were buried behind the old college
chapel. "At night, the jackals and wild dogs would dig them up and
throw their bones here and there ... at night, kids would run out to
the nearby forest to get apples or any fruits they could find - and
their feet would hit bones. They would take these bones back to their
rooms and secretly grind them to make soup, or mix them with grain
so they could eat them as there was not enough food at the orphanage.
They were eating the bones of their dead friends."
Using college records, Emile Joppin, the head priest at the Lazarite
Antoura college, wrote in the school's magazine in 1947 that "the
Armenian orphans were Islamicised, circumcised and given new Arab
or Turkish names. Their new names always kept the initials of the
names in which they were baptised. Thus Haroutioun Nadjarian was
given the name Hamed Nazih, Boghos Merdanian became Bekir Mohamed,
to Sarkis Safarian was given the name Safouad Sulieman."
Lebanese-born Armenian-American electrical engineer Missak Kelechian
researches Armenian history as a hobby and hunted down a privately
printed and very rare 1918 report by an American Red Cross officer,
Major Stephen Trowbridge, who arrived at the Antoura college after
its liberation by British and French troops and who spoke to the
surviving orphans. His much earlier account entirely supports that
of Father Joppin's 1949 research.
"Every vestige, and as far as possible every memory, of the children's
Armenian or Kurdish origin was to be done away with. Turkish names
were assigned and the children were compelled to undergo the rites
prescribed by Islamic law and tradition ... Not a word of Armenian
or Kurdish was allowed. The teachers and overseers were carefully
trained to impress Turkish ideas and customs upon the lives of the
children and to catechize [sic] them regularly on ... the prestige
of the Turkish race."
Halide Adivar, later to be lauded by The New York Times as "the Turkish
Joan of Arc" - a description that Armenians obviously questioned -
was born in Constantinople in 1884 and attended an American college
in the Ottoman capital. She was twice married and wrote nine novels
- even Trowbridge was to admit that she was "a lady of remarkable
literary ability" - and served as a woman officer in Mustafa Ataturk's
Turkish army of liberation after the First World War. She later lived
in both Britain and France.
And it was Kelechian yet again who found Adivar's long-forgotten
and self-serving memoirs, published in New York in 1926, in which
she recalls how Jemal Pasha, commander of the Turkish 4th Army in
Damascus, toured Antoura orphanage with her. "I said: 'You have
been as good to Armenians as it is possible to be in these hard
days. Why do you allow Armenian children to be called by Moslim [sic]
names? It looks like turning the Armenians into Moslims, and history
some day will revenge it on the coming generation of Turks.' 'You
are an idealist,' he answered gravely and like all idealists lack
a sense of reality ... This is a Moslem orphanage and only Moslem
orphans are allowed.'" According to Adivar, Jemal Pasha said that he
"cannot bear to see them die in the streets" and promised they would go
"back to their people" after the war.
Adivar says she told the general that: "I will never have anything
to do with such an orphanage" but claims that Jemal Pasha replied:
"You will if you see them in misery and suffering, you will go to them
and not think for a moment about their names and religion." Which is
exactly what she did.
Later in the war, however, Adivar spoke to Talaat Pasha, the architect
of the 20th century's first holocaust, and recalled how he almost lost
his temper when discussing the Armenian "deportations" (as she put
it), saying: "Look here, Halide ... I have a heart as good as yours,
and it keeps me awake at night to think of the human suffering. But
that is a personal thing, and I am here on this earth to think of my
people and not of my sensibilities ... There was an equal number of
Turks and Moslems massacred during the [1912] Balkan war, yet the
world kept a criminal silence. I have the conviction that as long
as a nation does the best for its own interests, and succeeds, the
world admires it and thinks it moral. I am ready to die for what I
have done, and I know that I shall die for it."
The suffering of which Talaat Pasha spoke so chillingly was all too
evident to Trowbridge when he himself met the orphans of Antoura. Many
had seen their parents murdered and their sisters raped. Levon, who
came from Malgara, was driven from his home with his sisters aged
12 and 14. The girls were taken by Kurds - allied to the Turks - as
"concubines" and the boy was tortured and starved, Trowbridge records.
He was eventually forced by his captors into the Antoura orphanage.
Ten-year-old Takhouhi - her name means "queen" in Armenian and she was
from a rich background - from Rodosto on the Sea of Marmara was put
with her family on a freight train to Konia. Two of her two brothers
died in the truck, both parents caught typhus - they died in the arms
of Takhouhi and her oldest brother in Aleppo - and she was eventually
taken from him by a Turkish officer, given the Muslim name of Muzeyyan
and ended up in Antoura. When Trowbridge suggested that he would try
to find someone in Rodosto and return her family's property to her,
he said she replied: "I don't want any of those things if I cannot
find my brother again." Her brother was later reported to have died
in Damascus.
Trowbridge records many other tragedies from the children he found
at Antoura, commenting acidly that Halide "and Djemal [sic] Pasha
delighted in having their photographs taken on the steps of the
orphanage ... posing as the leaders of Ottoman modernism. Did they
realise what the outside world would think of those photographs?"
According to Trowbridge's account, only 669 of the children finally
survived, 456 of them Armenian, 184 of them Kurds, along with 29
Syrians. Talaat Pasha did indeed die for his sins. He was assassinated
by an Armenian in Berlin in 1922 - his body was later returned to
Turkey on the express orders of Adolf Hitler. Jemal Pasha was murdered
in the Turkish town of Tiflis. Halide Edip Adivar lived in England
until 1939 when she returned to Turkey, became a professor of English
literature, was elected to the Turkish parliament and died in 1964
at the age of 80.
It was only in 1993 that the bones of the children were discovered,
when the Lazarite Fathers dug the foundations for new classrooms. What
was left of the remains were moved respectfully to the little cemetery
where the college's priests lie buried and put in a single, deep
grave. Kelechian helped me over a 5ft wall to look at this place of
sadness, shaded by tall trees. Neither name-plate nor headstone marks
their mass grave.
Independent
Tuesday, 9 March 2010
UK
The US wants to deny that Turkey's slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians
in 1915 was genocide. But the evidence is there, in a hilltop orphanage
near Beirut
It's only a small grave, a rectangle of cheap concrete marking it
out, blessed by a flourish of wild yellow lilies. Inside are the
powdered bones and skulls and bits of femur of up to 300 children,
Armenian orphans of the great 1915 genocide who died of cholera and
starvation as the Turkish authorities tried to "Turkify" them in a
converted Catholic college high above Beirut. But for once, it is
the almost unknown story of the surviving 1,200 children - between
three and 15 years old - who lived in the crowded dormitory of this
ironically beautiful cut-stone school that proves that the Turks did
indeed commit genocide against the Armenians in 1915.
Barack Obama and his pliant Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton -
who are now campaigning so pitifully to prevent the US Congress
acknowledging that the Ottoman Turkish massacre of 1.5 million
Armenians was a genocide - should come here to this Lebanese hilltop
village and hang their heads in shame. For this is a tragic, appalling
tale of brutality against small and defenceless children whose families
had already been murdered by Turkish forces at the height of the First
World War, some of whom were to recall how they were forced to grind
up and eat the skeletons of their dead fellow child orphans in order
to survive starvation.
Jemal Pasha, one of the architects of the 1915 genocide, and - alas
- Turkey's first feminist, Halide Edip Adivar, helped to run this
orphanage of terror in which Armenian children were systematically
deprived of their Armenian identity and given new Turkish names,
forced to become Muslims and beaten savagely if they were heard to
speak Armenian. The Antoura Lazarist college priests have recorded
how its original Lazarist teachers were expelled by the Turks and
how Jemal Pasha presented himself at the front door with his German
bodyguard after a muezzin began calling for Muslim prayers once the
statue of the Virgin Mary had been taken from the belfry.
Hitherto, the argument that Armenians suffered a genocide has rested
on the deliberate nature of the slaughter. But Article II of the
1951 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime
of Genocide specifically states that the definition of genocide -
"to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or
religious group" - includes "forcibly transferring children of the
group to another group". This is exactly what the Turks did in Lebanon.
Photographs still exist of hundreds of near-naked Armenian children
performing physical exercises in the college grounds. One even shows
Jemal Pasha standing on the steps in 1916, next to the young and
beautiful Halide Adivar who - after some reluctance - agreed to run
the orphanage.
Before he died in 1989, Karnig Panian - who was six years old when
he arrived at Antoura in 1916 - recorded in Armenian how his own name
was changed and how he was given a number, 551, as his identity. "At
every sunset in the presence of over 1,000 orphans, when the Turkish
flag was lowered, 'Long Live General Pasha!' was recited. That was
the first part of the ceremony. Then it was time for punishment for
the wrongdoers of the day. They beat us with the falakha [a rod used
to beat the soles of the feet], and the top-rank punishment was for
speaking Armenian."
Panian described how, after cruel treatment or through physical
weakness, many children died. They were buried behind the old college
chapel. "At night, the jackals and wild dogs would dig them up and
throw their bones here and there ... at night, kids would run out to
the nearby forest to get apples or any fruits they could find - and
their feet would hit bones. They would take these bones back to their
rooms and secretly grind them to make soup, or mix them with grain
so they could eat them as there was not enough food at the orphanage.
They were eating the bones of their dead friends."
Using college records, Emile Joppin, the head priest at the Lazarite
Antoura college, wrote in the school's magazine in 1947 that "the
Armenian orphans were Islamicised, circumcised and given new Arab
or Turkish names. Their new names always kept the initials of the
names in which they were baptised. Thus Haroutioun Nadjarian was
given the name Hamed Nazih, Boghos Merdanian became Bekir Mohamed,
to Sarkis Safarian was given the name Safouad Sulieman."
Lebanese-born Armenian-American electrical engineer Missak Kelechian
researches Armenian history as a hobby and hunted down a privately
printed and very rare 1918 report by an American Red Cross officer,
Major Stephen Trowbridge, who arrived at the Antoura college after
its liberation by British and French troops and who spoke to the
surviving orphans. His much earlier account entirely supports that
of Father Joppin's 1949 research.
"Every vestige, and as far as possible every memory, of the children's
Armenian or Kurdish origin was to be done away with. Turkish names
were assigned and the children were compelled to undergo the rites
prescribed by Islamic law and tradition ... Not a word of Armenian
or Kurdish was allowed. The teachers and overseers were carefully
trained to impress Turkish ideas and customs upon the lives of the
children and to catechize [sic] them regularly on ... the prestige
of the Turkish race."
Halide Adivar, later to be lauded by The New York Times as "the Turkish
Joan of Arc" - a description that Armenians obviously questioned -
was born in Constantinople in 1884 and attended an American college
in the Ottoman capital. She was twice married and wrote nine novels
- even Trowbridge was to admit that she was "a lady of remarkable
literary ability" - and served as a woman officer in Mustafa Ataturk's
Turkish army of liberation after the First World War. She later lived
in both Britain and France.
And it was Kelechian yet again who found Adivar's long-forgotten
and self-serving memoirs, published in New York in 1926, in which
she recalls how Jemal Pasha, commander of the Turkish 4th Army in
Damascus, toured Antoura orphanage with her. "I said: 'You have
been as good to Armenians as it is possible to be in these hard
days. Why do you allow Armenian children to be called by Moslim [sic]
names? It looks like turning the Armenians into Moslims, and history
some day will revenge it on the coming generation of Turks.' 'You
are an idealist,' he answered gravely and like all idealists lack
a sense of reality ... This is a Moslem orphanage and only Moslem
orphans are allowed.'" According to Adivar, Jemal Pasha said that he
"cannot bear to see them die in the streets" and promised they would go
"back to their people" after the war.
Adivar says she told the general that: "I will never have anything
to do with such an orphanage" but claims that Jemal Pasha replied:
"You will if you see them in misery and suffering, you will go to them
and not think for a moment about their names and religion." Which is
exactly what she did.
Later in the war, however, Adivar spoke to Talaat Pasha, the architect
of the 20th century's first holocaust, and recalled how he almost lost
his temper when discussing the Armenian "deportations" (as she put
it), saying: "Look here, Halide ... I have a heart as good as yours,
and it keeps me awake at night to think of the human suffering. But
that is a personal thing, and I am here on this earth to think of my
people and not of my sensibilities ... There was an equal number of
Turks and Moslems massacred during the [1912] Balkan war, yet the
world kept a criminal silence. I have the conviction that as long
as a nation does the best for its own interests, and succeeds, the
world admires it and thinks it moral. I am ready to die for what I
have done, and I know that I shall die for it."
The suffering of which Talaat Pasha spoke so chillingly was all too
evident to Trowbridge when he himself met the orphans of Antoura. Many
had seen their parents murdered and their sisters raped. Levon, who
came from Malgara, was driven from his home with his sisters aged
12 and 14. The girls were taken by Kurds - allied to the Turks - as
"concubines" and the boy was tortured and starved, Trowbridge records.
He was eventually forced by his captors into the Antoura orphanage.
Ten-year-old Takhouhi - her name means "queen" in Armenian and she was
from a rich background - from Rodosto on the Sea of Marmara was put
with her family on a freight train to Konia. Two of her two brothers
died in the truck, both parents caught typhus - they died in the arms
of Takhouhi and her oldest brother in Aleppo - and she was eventually
taken from him by a Turkish officer, given the Muslim name of Muzeyyan
and ended up in Antoura. When Trowbridge suggested that he would try
to find someone in Rodosto and return her family's property to her,
he said she replied: "I don't want any of those things if I cannot
find my brother again." Her brother was later reported to have died
in Damascus.
Trowbridge records many other tragedies from the children he found
at Antoura, commenting acidly that Halide "and Djemal [sic] Pasha
delighted in having their photographs taken on the steps of the
orphanage ... posing as the leaders of Ottoman modernism. Did they
realise what the outside world would think of those photographs?"
According to Trowbridge's account, only 669 of the children finally
survived, 456 of them Armenian, 184 of them Kurds, along with 29
Syrians. Talaat Pasha did indeed die for his sins. He was assassinated
by an Armenian in Berlin in 1922 - his body was later returned to
Turkey on the express orders of Adolf Hitler. Jemal Pasha was murdered
in the Turkish town of Tiflis. Halide Edip Adivar lived in England
until 1939 when she returned to Turkey, became a professor of English
literature, was elected to the Turkish parliament and died in 1964
at the age of 80.
It was only in 1993 that the bones of the children were discovered,
when the Lazarite Fathers dug the foundations for new classrooms. What
was left of the remains were moved respectfully to the little cemetery
where the college's priests lie buried and put in a single, deep
grave. Kelechian helped me over a 5ft wall to look at this place of
sadness, shaded by tall trees. Neither name-plate nor headstone marks
their mass grave.
LA TIMES EDITORIAL
Making Sense of Genocide
Making Sense of Genocide
Mar 8th, 2010
Turkey needs to come to grips with its bloody past so it can move
forward in its relations with Armenia and the U.S.
An estimated 1.5 million ethnic Armenians were massacred in the
final throes of the Ottoman Empire. That blood bath, carried out
by the Turks between 1915 and 1918, was genocide, and should be
called by that name. In approving a nonbinding resolution to make
this the official U.S. position, Chairman Howard L. Berman (D-Valley
Village) and other members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee were
responding to constituent demands that the United States take a moral
stand. Now, Congress and the Obama administration must decide whether
such a symbolic act also serves the strategic interests of the United
States. For the moment, just like presidents George W. Bush and Bill
Clinton before him, Barack Obama appears to be saying no.
It is important for the United States to stand for historical truth on
the Armenian slaughter. Even more important is that Turks themselves
come to terms with their brutal history. From Germany to South Africa
to Argentina, there are many examples of countries that have confronted
their violent pasts honestly.
Instead, Turkey recalled its ambassador for consultations after the
23-22 House committee vote, saying the resolution offends the country's
honor and warning of negative consequences for U.S.-Turkish relations,
as well as for the ratification of agreements to normalize ties with
the Republic of Armenia. A more productive approach would be for the
Turks and Armenians to adopt the protocols hammered out last year to
establish diplomatic relations and reopen their shared border.
The U.S. vote must not become a pretext for further stalling.
During the 2008 campaign, Obama was unequivocal in his support for
labeling the killings a genocide. As president, however, he has the
unenviable task of weighing that position against the need for Turkey's
support in Afghanistan, in stabilizing Iraq and for United Nations
sanctions against Iran. Turkey is the only Muslim country in NATO,
and it currently sits on the U.N. Security Council.
We understand that any U.S. administration must nurture the vital
strategic alliance with Turkey. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham
Clinton, who coaxed Turkey and Armenia into signing the protocols last
year, noted that the agreement established a commission to examine
their bloody history and argued that "it is not for any other country
to determine how two countries resolve matters between them." That's
true, but we also understand Armenian fears that such a commission
could whitewash history.
The goal is Turkish and Armenian reconciliation, putting to rest the
ghosts of the past. That is in the U.S. interest as well as that of
both peoples. For it to happen, the onus is on Turkey to acknowledge
the Armenian genocide.
THE BETRAYAL OF SOULS AND THE DENIAL OF THE ARMENIAN
Turkey needs to come to grips with its bloody past so it can move
forward in its relations with Armenia and the U.S.
An estimated 1.5 million ethnic Armenians were massacred in the
final throes of the Ottoman Empire. That blood bath, carried out
by the Turks between 1915 and 1918, was genocide, and should be
called by that name. In approving a nonbinding resolution to make
this the official U.S. position, Chairman Howard L. Berman (D-Valley
Village) and other members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee were
responding to constituent demands that the United States take a moral
stand. Now, Congress and the Obama administration must decide whether
such a symbolic act also serves the strategic interests of the United
States. For the moment, just like presidents George W. Bush and Bill
Clinton before him, Barack Obama appears to be saying no.
It is important for the United States to stand for historical truth on
the Armenian slaughter. Even more important is that Turks themselves
come to terms with their brutal history. From Germany to South Africa
to Argentina, there are many examples of countries that have confronted
their violent pasts honestly.
Instead, Turkey recalled its ambassador for consultations after the
23-22 House committee vote, saying the resolution offends the country's
honor and warning of negative consequences for U.S.-Turkish relations,
as well as for the ratification of agreements to normalize ties with
the Republic of Armenia. A more productive approach would be for the
Turks and Armenians to adopt the protocols hammered out last year to
establish diplomatic relations and reopen their shared border.
The U.S. vote must not become a pretext for further stalling.
During the 2008 campaign, Obama was unequivocal in his support for
labeling the killings a genocide. As president, however, he has the
unenviable task of weighing that position against the need for Turkey's
support in Afghanistan, in stabilizing Iraq and for United Nations
sanctions against Iran. Turkey is the only Muslim country in NATO,
and it currently sits on the U.N. Security Council.
We understand that any U.S. administration must nurture the vital
strategic alliance with Turkey. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham
Clinton, who coaxed Turkey and Armenia into signing the protocols last
year, noted that the agreement established a commission to examine
their bloody history and argued that "it is not for any other country
to determine how two countries resolve matters between them." That's
true, but we also understand Armenian fears that such a commission
could whitewash history.
The goal is Turkish and Armenian reconciliation, putting to rest the
ghosts of the past. That is in the U.S. interest as well as that of
both peoples. For it to happen, the onus is on Turkey to acknowledge
the Armenian genocide.
THE BETRAYAL OF SOULS AND THE DENIAL OF THE ARMENIAN
GENOCIDE
http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=12016
March 8th 2010
In the book The Guilt of Nations, Elazar Barkan wrote, "For a 'new'
history to become more than a partisan 'extremist' story, the narrative
often has to persuade not only the members of the group that will
'benefit' from the new interpretation but also their 'others,' those
whose own history will presumably be 'diminished,' or tainted by
the new stories." Clearly Turkey's reaction to the vote by the House
Foreign Affairs Committee on the Armenian Genocide resolution shows
that Turkey remains unpersuaded by its own guilt. This is painful to
continue to witness.
Nearly a hundred years after the slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians
by Turkish forces during World War One, Turkey, an otherwise moderate
country, continues to deny what eyewitness accounts prove to be an
undeniable fact. Turkey's reaction in recalling its Ambassador to
the United States is both heavy-handed and a touch of "thou protesth
too much."
In recent efforts to defeat similar resolutions, Turkey has enlisted
the help of high-paid Washington lobbyists to cajole, persuade, and
arm twist individual Members of Congress to make it impossible to pass
the resolution recognizing this genocide. Threats of dire consequences
to US-Turkish relations ensued, with cynical accusations of damaging
the relationship over a resolution recognizing what the world already
knew to be true. March 4th's Turkish reaction is no different.
During the Senate Banking Committee's three-year investigation into
the actions of the Swiss banks withholding of the assets of Holocaust
victims, Swiss banks tried the same trick of buying their way out
of trouble. Perhaps in the end, their settlement with the survivors
and claimants of $1.25 billion was tantamount to the same, but it was
nevertheless accompanied with a quasi-admission of guilt. For Turkey,
there is plenty of money being spent to fight the campaign against
them, but certainly no admission of responsibility or wrongdoing is
forthcoming, only simple, stubborn, unremitting denial.
Turkey's denial of its forefathers' actions would be laughable were it
not so deadly serious for its historical precedent. As it has often
been said, Turkey's genocide of the Armenians opened the door to
further genocides in the twentieth century: the Holocaust, Cambodia,
Biafra, Bosnia, Rwanda, Sudan, and the long list goes on. Official
Turkey is overwhelmed with denial.
During meetings with Turkish diplomats years ago in Ankara to discuss
Turkey's role on the ill-fated United Nations Oil-for-Food program,
instead of addressing the topic I was serenaded by complaints about
the "propaganda" spewed from Armenian summer camps in California about
the "supposed genocide." Even Turks who promote the idea within their
own country, including Nobel Laureates, are prosecuted. This is sad.
While this denial is awful in its construction, it is harmful
no less to Turks than it is to Armenians. For Turkey to continue
this irresponsible attitude is to tar their country with an almost
snickering response to its protestations. Far better for Turkey
would be to confess its wrongdoings in a responsible, humble way and
to move forward. Germany, the obvious poster child for historical
guilt and genocidal successor to the Turks-as Hans Frank, the former
Governor-General of Poland was to have stated, "A thousand years will
pass and the guilt of Germany will not be erased."-has long dealt
with the responsibility for its crimes.
Some will say that now is not the right time. They will say Turkey
and Armenia are in delicate negotiations. They say it will damage
Israel's relations with this important Muslim country. While not
discounting the threats Turkey will bring out, surely, the souls of
those marched out into the Anatolian desert and slaughtered cry out
for more. They cry out for recognition.
About the Holocaust, Alan Dershowitz argues, all Jews are victims. For
the Armenians, the same is true. Jews are so clearly pained when idiots
who deny the Holocaust do so with a straight face, defiant in their
ignorance. When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says the Holocaust is a lie, Jews
cringe. How must Armenians feel when Turkey denies its responsibility
for the same type of crime? As long as Turkey refuses responsibility
for its sins, then all Armenians are in fact victims: the souls of the
Armenian dead wander and their descendants are betrayed. The time for
denial is over and the time for recognition is overdue. When this crime
is finally recognized, memory, history, and truth will be restored.
Cutting Edge contribuitor Gregg J. Rickman served as the first U.S.
Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism from 2006-2009. He
is a Senior Fellow for the Study and Combat of Anti-Semitism at the
Institute on Religion and Policy in Washington, DC; a Visiting Fellow
at The Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism
at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut; and a Research Scholar
at the Initiative on Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israelism of the Institute
for Jewish & Community Research in San Francisco.
http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=12016
March 8th 2010
In the book The Guilt of Nations, Elazar Barkan wrote, "For a 'new'
history to become more than a partisan 'extremist' story, the narrative
often has to persuade not only the members of the group that will
'benefit' from the new interpretation but also their 'others,' those
whose own history will presumably be 'diminished,' or tainted by
the new stories." Clearly Turkey's reaction to the vote by the House
Foreign Affairs Committee on the Armenian Genocide resolution shows
that Turkey remains unpersuaded by its own guilt. This is painful to
continue to witness.
Nearly a hundred years after the slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians
by Turkish forces during World War One, Turkey, an otherwise moderate
country, continues to deny what eyewitness accounts prove to be an
undeniable fact. Turkey's reaction in recalling its Ambassador to
the United States is both heavy-handed and a touch of "thou protesth
too much."
In recent efforts to defeat similar resolutions, Turkey has enlisted
the help of high-paid Washington lobbyists to cajole, persuade, and
arm twist individual Members of Congress to make it impossible to pass
the resolution recognizing this genocide. Threats of dire consequences
to US-Turkish relations ensued, with cynical accusations of damaging
the relationship over a resolution recognizing what the world already
knew to be true. March 4th's Turkish reaction is no different.
During the Senate Banking Committee's three-year investigation into
the actions of the Swiss banks withholding of the assets of Holocaust
victims, Swiss banks tried the same trick of buying their way out
of trouble. Perhaps in the end, their settlement with the survivors
and claimants of $1.25 billion was tantamount to the same, but it was
nevertheless accompanied with a quasi-admission of guilt. For Turkey,
there is plenty of money being spent to fight the campaign against
them, but certainly no admission of responsibility or wrongdoing is
forthcoming, only simple, stubborn, unremitting denial.
Turkey's denial of its forefathers' actions would be laughable were it
not so deadly serious for its historical precedent. As it has often
been said, Turkey's genocide of the Armenians opened the door to
further genocides in the twentieth century: the Holocaust, Cambodia,
Biafra, Bosnia, Rwanda, Sudan, and the long list goes on. Official
Turkey is overwhelmed with denial.
During meetings with Turkish diplomats years ago in Ankara to discuss
Turkey's role on the ill-fated United Nations Oil-for-Food program,
instead of addressing the topic I was serenaded by complaints about
the "propaganda" spewed from Armenian summer camps in California about
the "supposed genocide." Even Turks who promote the idea within their
own country, including Nobel Laureates, are prosecuted. This is sad.
While this denial is awful in its construction, it is harmful
no less to Turks than it is to Armenians. For Turkey to continue
this irresponsible attitude is to tar their country with an almost
snickering response to its protestations. Far better for Turkey
would be to confess its wrongdoings in a responsible, humble way and
to move forward. Germany, the obvious poster child for historical
guilt and genocidal successor to the Turks-as Hans Frank, the former
Governor-General of Poland was to have stated, "A thousand years will
pass and the guilt of Germany will not be erased."-has long dealt
with the responsibility for its crimes.
Some will say that now is not the right time. They will say Turkey
and Armenia are in delicate negotiations. They say it will damage
Israel's relations with this important Muslim country. While not
discounting the threats Turkey will bring out, surely, the souls of
those marched out into the Anatolian desert and slaughtered cry out
for more. They cry out for recognition.
About the Holocaust, Alan Dershowitz argues, all Jews are victims. For
the Armenians, the same is true. Jews are so clearly pained when idiots
who deny the Holocaust do so with a straight face, defiant in their
ignorance. When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says the Holocaust is a lie, Jews
cringe. How must Armenians feel when Turkey denies its responsibility
for the same type of crime? As long as Turkey refuses responsibility
for its sins, then all Armenians are in fact victims: the souls of the
Armenian dead wander and their descendants are betrayed. The time for
denial is over and the time for recognition is overdue. When this crime
is finally recognized, memory, history, and truth will be restored.
Cutting Edge contribuitor Gregg J. Rickman served as the first U.S.
Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism from 2006-2009. He
is a Senior Fellow for the Study and Combat of Anti-Semitism at the
Institute on Religion and Policy in Washington, DC; a Visiting Fellow
at The Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism
at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut; and a Research Scholar
at the Initiative on Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israelism of the Institute
for Jewish & Community Research in San Francisco.
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