SIMON HEFFER: KIM KARDASHIAN AND POPE FRANCIS LEFT TURKEY IN PR DISASTER OVER ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
14:32, 14 Apr 2015
Siranush Ghazanchyan
By Simon Heffer
International Business Times
Some countries are so upset by Holocaust deniers that they make it a
crime. There have been calls to do the same in Britain but we have,
luckily, avoided such a heavy-handed and grandstanding approach to
the freedom of speech of idiots.
We prefer to see people who deny the Nazi genocide as idiots – or
something stronger – and in a very British way content ourselves that
the obloquy, contempt and derision such people heap upon themselves
by expressing their offensive views is punishment enough, and comes
free of charge.
Sadly there isn’t the newsreel of what happened to the Armenians a
century ago at the hands of the Turks to compare with what we have seen
captured on film of Auschwitz, Belsen and the other Nazi death camps.
Therefore it is disputed to this day by Turkey that its Ottoman
forebears conducted a genocide against the Armenians in 1915.
A hundred years of denial
Armenians see this as their Holocaust and when an entire nation denies
it happened, it is denial on a truly grand and awesome scale. Imagine
how the Jews would feel if the present German republic itself – not
just handfuls of mentally disturbed anti-Semites – said there had been
no German-led genocide against the Jews, and you will understand how
the Armenians and those who sympathise with them feel about Turkey,
a state about to celebrate 100 years of denial.
So three cheers for Pope Francis, who on Sunday (12 April) referred to
the “genocide” of the Turks against the Armenians, knowing the choice
of the G word would infuriate the Turks. Not only do the Turks deny
any such thing happened but they claim they themselves were on the
receiving end of some harsh treatment from the Armenians.
The historical consensus is that 1.5 million Armenians were murdered.
Many countries recognise this as an act of genocide. So too did Pope
John Paul II, who issued a declaration in 2001 saying as much. Francis
chose to quote his predecessor-but-one’s words: but it still upset
the Turks, who immediately recalled their ambassador to the Vatican
and demanded the Vatican’s man in Ankara come and explain himself.
In recalling the mass murder during a commemorative service in St
Peter’s attended by large numbers of Armenians, Francis used rhetoric
familiar from calls over the past 70 years never to forget the Nazi
atrocities. He said: “We recall the centenary of that tragic event,
that immense and senseless slaughter whose cruelty your forebears had
to endure. It is necessary, and indeed a duty, to honour their memory,
for whenever memory fades, it means that evil allows wounds to fester.”
Turkey remains far from admitting the historic culpability. The
country’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu used a tweet to describe
Francis’s statement as “far from the legal and historical reality”
and said the Pope had incited “resentment and hatred with baseless
allegations”.
This seems to be a step back from a statement made in 2014 by
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, when he offered
condolences to the present generation of Armenians whose forebears
were slaughtered. Not only does Turkey claim the deaths of Armenians
were in battles during the Great War in which many Turks were killed
too, but it also says the historical consensus about the numbers of
dead is an exaggeration.
An idiotic position
Turkey still conducts relentless lobbying operations to try and
persuade nations not to recognise what happened in Armenia in 1915-16
as genocide, but it has failed with many of them. America does not
use the term officially, not because it does not believe it to be
accurate but because it does not wish to offend so crucial an ally
as Turkey when the rest of the Middle East is so turbulent and hostile.
The Vatican, which is also keen to see a diminution of the conflict
in that region, wants good relations with the Turks too, but not,
to judge from Francis’s remarks, at the expense of pretending not
to notice Turkey’s responsibility for an outrage that happened just
outside living memory.
Armenia itself is building up to a formal commemoration of the genocide
on 24 April. Last week, Kim Kardashian and her sister Khloe were
in Yerevan to lay flowers at a memorial to the victims: the whole
performance was captured on the sisters’ reality TV show, so anyone
out there who is not aware of this atrocity may soon be alerted to it.
The combination of the Kardashians and the Pope adds up to a PR
disaster for Turkey, at a time when in every other respect it is
trying to show itself to be a responsible and progressive member of
the family of civilised nations.
Those whose curiosity is stimulated whether by the Kardashians or
Pope Francis to search the internet for a few minutes will find
not just endless accounts of Turks crucifying Armenians – who were
Christians in an otherwise Muslim empire – but photographs of some
of the atrocities, including a row of gallows with Armenians hanging
from them, and hardly constituting men killed in the heat of battle.
It is well documented that the Ottoman government released brutal
criminals from prison in late 1914 especially to form squads to go
into Armenian territory and slaughter those who lived there. The
trained killers were told the Armenians had collaborated with the
Russians to defeat Turkey.
Armenian intellectuals were rounded up and tortured before being
executed – the extraction of toenails and fingernails followed by
blinding was commonplace. There were mass deportations, killings
and forced starvation. Thousands of bodies were dumped in ravines
and live infants were thrown on to rocks. It was as if Hitler found
this template.
If Turkey won’t see how foolish it makes their nation seem today by
continuing to deny these atrocities, then one despairs of the country
ever joining the civilised world. Many Turks, well aware of what
happened, are embarrassed by the idiotic position of the country’s
political leaders. The centenary would seem to provide the ideal moment
to offer a historic admission of guilt and an apology. And this time,
Germany can provide the template.
Dr Simon Heffer is a British commentator and author who has written
columns for The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator and The
New Statesman. He is the biographer of Enoch Powell, Thomas Carlyle
and Ralph Vaughan Williams and recently published High Minds: The
Victorians And The Birth Of Modern Britain.