WE’RE ALL CAPABLE OF COMMITTING GENOCIDE
The Times, UK
April 15 2015
David Aaronovitch
Turkey’s row with the Pope over the Armenian massacre highlights how
no country can hide from its history
Editorial
A row between the Pope and the Turks has a pleasingly antique ring
to it, invoking 16th century tapestries of the Battle of Lepanto
or the Siege of Malta. And the summoning of the ambassador of the
Vatican to the foreign ministry in Ankara (not, alas, to the Sublime
Porte in Istanbul) for a dressing down was indeed over a historical
matter. But one that resonates even a hundred years after the event.
Last Sunday, Pope Francis referred to the “first genocide of the
20th century” as being that of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire. A
century ago next week, it began with the arrest and murder of more than
200 Armenian intellectuals and politicians. In the succeeding months,
between a million and a million and a half members of this Christian
minority died in a series of forced marches and deportations into the
desert areas of Ottoman Syria and Iraq. Those who were not murdered
died from starvation, thirst and disease.
Why did it happen? The Armenians were seen by the government as fifth
columnists aiding their Russian Christian brethren to the north,
with whom Turkey was at war. Much of the brutality was abetted by
neighbours of the Armenians who both feared them and stood to gain
from their disappearance. By the end of 1916 the Armenian population
of Turkey had almost completely disappeared, creating a bitter diaspora
outside the country and leaving mass graves inside.
Turkey and Turkish patriots have refused to accept what happened as
a genocide. Even in the 21st century to speak or write openly about
the events of 1915-16 can be fatal. In 2007 the Turkish-Armenian
journalist Hrant Dink, who had appeared in a documentary about the
genocide, was shot dead in Istanbul by a teenage nationalist.
In one of those ironies defined by the inability of the perpetrator
to appreciate irony, Dink was murdered by a man insulted by the idea
that he was the kind of man who might murder people.
On the day Dink was killed his newspaper, Agos, carried a story about
the restoration after 90 years of an Armenian church on an island in a
lake in Turkey. It was a place I knew. Twenty years before I had stood
outside that church – the Church of the Holy Cross on Akdamar island –
and marvelled at its romantic location and the unique friezes on its
outside walls.
When I was there it was ruined, having been abandoned at the time of
the genocide. But then the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in its
expansive, seemingly ideologically generous phase, first restored the
building and then, four years later, permitted a Christian liturgy to
be said there, followed in 2013 by the baptism of some Armenian boys.
I am something of a Turkophile. I love the country and its people and
so I was pleased. If Erdogan could somehow drain the swamp of extreme
Turkish nationalism then Turkey could make a great contribution to
the modern world. But I knew too that at the reopening of the Akdamar
church there had been a demonstration against the ceremony. A banner
read: “The Turkish people are noble. They would never commit genocide.”
The elastic band snapped back.
Almost as soon as Erdogan found himself under real political pressure
he reverted to nationalism.
Critics of the government were not just wrong, they became
unpatriotic. Opposition to Erdogan was not legitimate because it was
somehow foreign – associated with conspiracies by outside powers to
diminish Turkey.
Volkan Bozkir, Turkey’s minister for European affairs, criticised the
Pope by reference to his native Argentina this week. In that country,
said Mr Bozkir, “the Armenian diaspora controls the media and business”
and that was why the Pope said what he did. You would have thought
it was a too-obvious echo of Holocaustdeniers’ accusations about the
Jewish lobby.
But Mr Bozkir was not finished with Argentina. Who, in any case, were
the Argentinians to talk? Was not Argentina “a country that welcomed
the leading executors of the Jewish Holocaust, Nazi torturers,
with open arms”? If Mr Bozkir’s “Armenian lobby” point was absurd
and demeaning, his “Argentinians are not innocent” point was almost
the opposite. Because, of course, he was right. And, indeed, he could
have taken it further. Where, after all, were the original inhabitants
of that long, grassy country? Dead, scattered and deprived of land
and liberty by the ancestors of those now calling Mr Bozkir’s great
grandparents genocidaires. He might have added (and Turks often do)
the “whatabout” objection to any discussion of culpability. What
about the Turks “ethnically cleansed” from the Balkans in the long
decline of the Ottoman Empire after 1878? Or those displaced from
Greece following the war of 1919 to 1922? Where are the minarets of
Thessalonica now? And much of that would have been true too. Because
the awful reality of massacres and despoliations is not that any
of us could become the victim of them, but that any of us – in the
wrong circumstances – could become the perpetrators. For example,
the tribal ancestors of the Kurds, a people whose aspirations to
nationhood and democracy I support – played a horrible part in the
genocide of the Armenians. By the 1980s they were themselves the
victims of a genocidal campaign by Saddam Hussein of Iraq.
Our ancestors first profited massively from and then repented the
slave trade, selectively massacred rebels in the colonies and presided
neglectfully over terrible famines. It was not all they did, but they
did it all the same. It is a necessary condition to not repeating such
crimes, I think, that you must recognise that they were indeed crimes.
Nor does it end there. There is, of course, a moral difference between
committing genocide and other gross violations of human rights, and
looking on while others commit them. But the latter – the stance of
the Bad Samaritan – is still morally hard to defend. I am thinking of
Rwanda in 1994. And also I reflect that many thousands of Armenians
ended up as corpses in the region of Syria and Iraq now held by
Islamic State or after being barrel bombed by President Assad. To
judge by our leaders, we’re happy to walk by on the other side.
I am something of a Turkophile. I love the country and its people
The stance of the Bad Samaritan is still morally hard to defend.