TURKEY, GENOCIDE AND THE EU’S DOUBLE STANDARDS
Mideast Mirror
October 25, 2006 Wednesday
While the Turks may not be blameless, French and other EU pressures
regarding the Armenian genocide smack of hypocrisy, says Helia Hamad
al-Mukeimi in Saudi Asharq al-Awsat
The European Commission is supposed to begin a review of Turkey’s
application for EU membership on 24 October, notes Kuwaiti expert
on European affairs Helia Hamad al-Mukeimi in the Saudi daily Asharq
al-Awsat.
INCREASING PRESSURE: In the run up to this review, the Turkish
government has been coming under increasing pressure from the European
side designed to find pretexts to keep Turkey out of the club.
Turkey has been trying to become part of Europe since 1963, but to
no avail. One aspect of these pressures has been the insistence that
Turkey admits responsibility for the massacre of Armenians that took
place under the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1917, which cost 1.5
million Armenians their lives (according to Armenian figures).
The Turks deny that those killings constituted genocide, and maintain
that the Armenians also killed a large number of Turks. Some Turks
believe that the figures cited by the Armenians are exaggerated,
and that no more than 300,000 were killed. Nationalist Turks say that
admitting responsibility for these killings would constitute a grave
affront to Turkish identity. In spite of knowing how sensitive this
issue is to the Turks, the Europeans insist on raising it all the
time – but not on an official government level.
By raising the issue of the Armenian ‘genocide’ through national
parliaments, the Europeans have been keen to let the Turks know that
it is European public opinion that is against Turkey’s Ottoman past.
The latest report by the Foreign Affairs Committee of the European
Parliament contained severe criticism of Turkey for its failure to
carry out the reforms needed to qualify it for EU membership.
Among these reforms are improvements to the rights of women and
minorities, freedom of expression, and religious rights. The report
also called on the Turks to recognize and establish normal relations
with Cyprus. It also made admitting responsibility for the Armenian
genocide a precondition for Turkish accession.
In fact, even the decision by the Swedish Academy to grant Turkish
writer Orhan Pamuk this year’s Nobel Prize for literature was not
devoid of political connotations. For in spite of Pamuk’s undeniable
talent as a novelist, he is also one of Turkey’s most prominent
advocates of recognizing the Armenian genocide. The fact that he was
nominated for the Nobel Prize last year undermined the government’s
efforts to try him for ‘deliberately insulting Turkishness.’ Pamuk
would have spent three years in jail had the accusations against
not been thrown out, thanks to the pressure exerted by the European
Commission on Ankara.
The announcement that Pamuk had won the Nobel prize coincided
with another event that caused uproar in Turkey. On the same day,
the French parliament passed a bill making it a crime to deny the
Armenian genocide. The new bill came on top of a previous piece of
legislation passed by the French parliament in 2001 recognizing the
Armenian massacre as a case of genocide.
The draft was tabled by the opposition socialist bloc, and was passed
by 106 votes to 19 amid loud applause.
Oddly enough, the French bill went beyond a bill passed in 1996
by the Greek parliament, which while recognizing the massacres as
genocide, did not go as far as criminalizing their denial. While it
was understandable that the Greeks should have passed such a law,
given the historical enmity between Greece and Turkey, why the French
passed their recent bill is still a mystery.
The position adopted by European governments is different however.
Officially, European governments seem eager to maintain cordial
relations with Turkey, and to avoid antagonizing the Turks. ‘We are
working hard to accept you in the club,’ they seem to say, ‘but what
can we do if our peoples do not want you in?’
Olli Rehn, the EU commissioner for expansion warned that the new
French law would damage efforts to settle differences between Turkey
and Armenia, while Rehn’s spokesperson Christina Nagy said, ‘When this
bill becomes law, it will undermine reconciliation efforts.’ Nagy went
on to say that, laws cannot write history, only historians can do that.
She stressed that taking responsibility for the Armenian genocide
should not be a precondition for Turkey’s accession to the EU. For its
part, the French government opposed the bill, saying that it restricts
freedom of expression. But President Jacques Chirac seemed to side
with parliament by paying an unprecedented visit to Armenia last month.
After laying a wreath on a monument to the victims, Chirac urged
Turkey to ‘do its duty’ and take responsibility for the genocide,
insinuating that this would have a bearing on Turkey’s accession. The
French president declared, ‘Nations stand tall when they admit their
mistakes.’
‘Germany,’ Chirac said, ‘took responsibility for the Holocaust. That
did not lose it its credibility; on the contrary, it grew in the eyes
of the world. The same can be said of France and other nations.’
Orhan Pamuk’s position is similar. Yet it is different for a Turk
to call for recognizing the genocide. Pamuk’s insistence that Turkey
must take responsibility for the massacres is a call for his country
to reconcile itself with its past. Only then, he believes, could
Turkey be prepared to come to terms with the West in its vain quest
for EU membership.
The West sees it differently. Western insistence that Turkey take
responsibility for the Armenian genocide is designed to widen the
gap between Ankara and the EU thus making accession impossible.
Clearly, Pamuk himself finally understood this difference. Commenting
recently on Turkey’s efforts to gain EU membership, he said: ‘Yes,
I support Turkish membership, and have written extensively to that
effect. But I find myself chasing a mirage. I believed that Turkey
and Europe could live in harmony with each other. Unfortunately,
I discovered that there is no love lost between them. That is why I
decided to return to my novels.’
Taking responsibility for the Armenian genocide means that Turkey
has to compensate the victims financially and morally. This would
mean that economically weak Turkey would have to wait even longer
to fulfill the EU’s stringent economic criteria. Thus, we see that
taking responsibility for the genocide is not so much a condition
for EU entry as it is an obstacle.
Also, comparing Turkey’s assuming responsibility with the experience
of other European nations is neither fair nor valid. Turkey, a Muslim
nation with 70 million inhabitants on the fringes of Europe is not
Germany, the beating heart of Europe and the continent’s economic
engine. Calls for reconciliation with the past do not mean the
same thing.
As far as Turkey is concerned, reconciliation with the past means
admitting mistakes, while for the West it means forgetting the
colonial past.
France for example has never apologized for killing up to one million
Algerians. Although France does give certain privileges to citizens of
its former colonies, it has never apologized to, much less compensated,
its victims.
Belgium is another case in point. Despite its crimes in Africa (in
Congo especially), Belgium still takes pride in its colonial past,
as witnessed by Brussels’ African Museum. Did Belgium reconcile itself
with its past before it was chosen as the EU’s capital?
Criticizing Western double standards does not necessarily mean
accepting the mistakes committed by the Ottomans. In fact, the Ottoman
Empire played a major part in keeping its possessions (including
the Arab world) in a state of backwardness. European colonialism
only exacerbated this backwardness and institutionalized a state
of inequality that still exists today. Thanks to this inequality,
the former Arab Ottoman provinces now provide a fertile soil for the
growth of extremism and terrorism.
Had the Ottoman Empire not become so backward in its latter years,
Western colonialism could not have flourished. This means that the
Ottoman Empire unintentionally did the Western colonial powers a
great service. How then can these powers still demand that Turkey
apologize for their past mistakes?
If secular Muslim Turkey admits responsibility for the Armenian
genocide (a la Germany and the Holocaust), will it then be accepted
as a member of the EU?