Taner Akcam: Modern Turkey’s National Struggles Rooted In Genocide D

TANER AKCAM: MODERN TURKEY’S NATIONAL STRUGGLES ROOTED IN GENOCIDE DENIAL

10:17, 21 Nov 2014

/PRNewswire-USNewswire/ – “Modern Turkey is constructed on top of
the denial” of the 1914-1918 Ottoman Genocide, the renowned Turkish
Scholar Taner Akcam argued at a recent CSI co-sponsored lecture at
Boston College.

Christian Solidarity International (CSI) today released a video
of Akcam’s October 22 lecture, entitled, “The Anatomy of Religious
Cleansing: Non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire.” Akcam claimed that
the genocide’s buried legacy helps explain “why Turkey has such so
much difficulty today in its Middle East policy towards Christians,
Alawites and Kurds.”

Working from a broad range of Ottoman and other contemporary sources,
Akcam argued against the usual analysis of the Armenian Genocide, the
Assyrian Genocide, and the expulsion of Greeks as “separate events,”
when they should be seen as parts of a “comprehensive policy of ethnic
homogenization, implemented by one government, carried out as part
of a general plan.”

Akcam spoke instead of an “Ottoman Genocide against Christians”
during World War I, which was part of a broader “genocide process”
in Turkey lasting from 1878 to 1924. “By end of this period, at least
one-third of the population of Anatolia had either been resettled,
deported or annihilated,” Akcam said.

Responding to a question about the connection between the genocide in
Turkey 100 years ago and similar acts today committed by contemporary
Islamist terrorists in Syria and Iraq, Akcam noted that while the
leaders of the Ottoman Empire were then progressive nationalists
and not religious zealots, they nevertheless “declared a jihad” and
“used religion extensively” to mobilize local support for the genocide.

Akcam also observed that many Armenian girls and women were “forcibly
converted and married to Muslims.”Akcam added that he is in the
process of going through League of Nations records of 2,000 Armenian
children recovered from “Arab, Kurdish and Turkish households” after
the war. “There is a story of each child with a picture – horrendous
stories. You can take the stories, change the date to 2014, and it
looks like ISIS enslaving Christian women and children.”

Ultimately, Akcam concluded, the genocide was driven by the
unwillingness of Turkey’s rulers “to share power with the Christians,”
who then constituted as much as 25% of the population. Turkey today
faces “exactly the same problem” in its struggles with the Kurds and
its broader Middle East policy, Akcam said.

Boston College’s School of Theology and Ministry, Departments of
Slavic and Eastern Languages and Literatures and Political Science, and
Islamic Civilization and Society Program, and the National Association
for Armenian Studies and Research joined CSI as co-sponsors of Akcam’s
lecture as a part of a series on The Future of Religious Minorities
in the Middle East.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress