GLOBE EDITORIAL
The Boston Globe
Turkey’s historical amnesia
September 1, 2007
NINETY-TWO years ago, the legal term "genocide" had yet to be adopted,
but foreign missionaries and diplomats knew that a campaign of
unprecedented savagery was destroying the Armenians of eastern
Anatolia, in what was then the Ottoman empire. "The ultimate objective
of the actions against the Armenians is complete annihilation," said
Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, a German vice consul. "They’re mowing
them all down," a police officer told Thora Wedel-Jarlsberg, a nurse
from Norway. "This barbaric policy will be a source of shame for
Turkey," said Huseyin Kazim Kadri, an Ottoman official who tried to
help the Armenians.
These eyewitnesses were describing the forced removal and murder of
Armenians from provinces where they might threaten the homogeneity of
the Turkish state that was being born from the remnants of the empire.
The 1915-1917 campaign against the Armenians was amply documented at
the time, and more evidence became available from trials held briefly
in allied-occupied Istanbul in 1919. No one knows exactly how many
Armenians were killed, but the figure cited at the trials was 800,000.
Why and how the Ottoman government undertook this genocide has been
comprehensively examined by the Turkish historian Taner Akcam, who
teaches at the University of Minnesota. The three quotations are taken
from his book "A Shameful Act; The Armenian Genocide and the Question
of Turkish Responsibility." And yet the Turkish government keeps
insisting that the historical record is in doubt. The Foreign Ministry
said last month it objected to the use of the word genocide because it
is "historically and legally baseless" and "there is no consensus
among the historians on how to qualify the events."
The word didn’t enter the lexicon of international law until 1948, but
by the legal definition of the term – "Deliberately inflicting on the
group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical
destruction in whole or in part" – this was a genocide. So why did the
Ottoman government commit this atrocity, and why does the present
government deny it?
Before 1915, The Ottoman Empire had been under intense pressure from
nationalities within its borders to grant them independence. It allied
itself with Germany in World War I to remake itself as a predominantly
Turkish state, but large Armenian and Greek populations interfered
with that transformation. The Armenians could expect help from the
Russian empire, which had a large Armenian population in its lands
just north of the border.
After the Russians defeated an Ottoman army on the frontier in January
1915, the government put the genocide in motion. While it would have
been understandable if Armenians who supported the Russian cause were
imprisoned, there can be no justification for the mass murders that
resulted.
With the allied victory in 1918 came trials for war crimes. And the
allies enraged the Turks with the Treaty of Sevres in 1920, which gave
a substantial section of western Turkey to the Greeks and created an
Armenian state from Ottoman and Russian lands. Under the leadership of
General Mustafa Kemal, the Turks repudiated the treaty, defeated the
Greek Army, and formed the Turkish state the world knows today.
Kemal took no part in the genocide, and in 1920 called it a series of
"shameful acts." But he had been a member of the ruling Ottoman party,
whose leaders masterminded the killings. When Kemal formed a
government, he put many of the perpetrators in important positions.
And there were no reparations or resettlement of any Armenians that
might have survived the killing but were displaced to other countries.
"A new class of ‘notables’ had been created . . . as a result of the
genocide and attendant looting," Akcam writes. "To return the looted
property was unthinkable for them."
Kemal ruled until his death until 1938, and under the surname Ataturk
is considered the father of his country. Turkey, operating under the
political framework he established, has never apologized for the
genocide, and the Armenian survivors and their descendants, including
many who have resettled in the United States, have felt aggrieved as a
result.
The Jewish Anti-Defamation League got caught up in the controversy
last month when its leadership at first seemed to adopt the Turkish
position. The national ADL subsequently agreed to recognize the
genocide as such. "Using the word ‘genocide’ is a moral issue," said
Abe Foxman, director of the ADL last week. "I looked for a way to
lower the rhetoric and unite us."
It’s unfortunate that the Turkish government won’t show the same
flexibility. In a telephone interview last week, Nabi Sensoy, Turkey’s
ambassador to the United States, affirmed the government’s denial. "It
was wartime," he said. "It’s a known fact that the Armenian population
living in the east sided with the Russians." The ambassador did
endorse the notion of a committee of historians to sift through the
facts, but given the overwhelming eyewitness evidence of mass
killings, this is unnecessary.
Many Armenian-Americans want Congress to approve a resolution
acknowledging the genocide. Sensoy warned that this might complicate
relations between Turkey and the Republic of Armenia, which was
created out of the old Russian territories. Congress has to be careful
before complicating relations in this volatile section of the world,
but the resolution acknowledging a historical reality shouldn’t cause
controversy today.
Vice Consul Scheubner-Richter wrote in 1915 that "a broad section of
the Turkish people, those blessed with common sense and reason . . .
do not support the annihilation policy." In their spirit, and to honor
the hundreds of thousands of victims of the Ottoman government, modern
Turkey should acknowledge this crime and move on.
(c) Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
Source: /editorials/articles/2007/09/01/turkeys_historical _amnesia
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