NOTHING PERSONAL: TURKEY’S TOP TEN
By Raffi K. Hovannisian
LRAGIR.AM
13:43:51 – 06/04/2009
That an Armenian repatriate, American-born into a legacy of remembrance
inherited from a line of survivors of genocide nearly a century ago,
feels compelled to entitle his thoughts with a focus on Turkey–
and not Armenia– reveals a larger problem, a gaping wound, and
an imperative for closure long overdue on both sides of history’s
tragic divide.
The new Armenia, independent of its longstanding statelessness
since 1991, is my everyday life, as are the yearnings of my fellow
citizens for their daily dignity, true democracy, the rule of law,
and an empowering end to sham elections and the corruption, arrogance
and unaccountability of power. Having suffered so much in the past,
from the Ottoman Empire to the Soviet Union, today the Armenian people
ironically are deprived in their own Republic of the very rights and
freedoms that foreign empires had so often violently denied them.
Armenia deserves good governance and better leadership across the
board, and that time must come to pass.
"Generation next" is neither victim nor subject, nor any longer an
infidel "millet." We seek not, in obsequious supplicancy, to curry the
favor of the world’s strong and self-important, whose interests often
trump their own principles and whose geopolitics engulf the professed
values of liberty and justice for all. Gone are the residual resources
for kissing up or behind.
And so, with a clarity of conscience and a goodness of heart, I expect
Turkey and its administration to address the multiple modern challenges
they face and offer to this end a list of realities, not commandments,
that will help enable a new era of regional understanding and the
globalization of a peaceful order that countenances neither victims
nor victimizers.
1. Measure sevenfold, cut once: This old local adage suggests a
neat lesson for contemporary officials. Before launching, at Davos
or elsewhere, pedantic missiles in condemnation of the excesses
of others, think fully about the substance and implications of
your invectives and your standing to articulate them. This is not
a narrow Armenian assertion; it includes all relevant dimensions,
including Cyprus, the Kurds, the Assyrians, the Alewis, the Jewish
and other minorities. Occupation, for its part, is the last word
Turkish representatives should be showering in different directions
at different international fora, lest someone require a textbook
definition of duplicity. Maintain dignity but tread lightly, for
history is a powerful and lasting precedent.
2. Self-reflection: Democracies achieve domestic success, applicants
accomplish European integration, and countries become regional drivers
only when they have the political courage and moral fortitude to
undergo this process. Face yourself, your own conduct, and the track
record of state on behalf of which you speak.
Not only the success stories and points of pride, but the whole
deal. Be honest and brave about it; you do possess the potential to
graduate from decades of denialism. Recent trends in civil society,
however tentative and preliminary, attest to this.
3. The Armenian genocide: Don’t fidget for the escape hatch, take
responsibility. There is so much evidentiary documentation in the US
National Archives, the British Public Record Office, the Quai d’Orsay,
and even the German military archives to disarm the various instruments
of official denial that have been employed over the years. But this is
only the paperwork. The most damning testimony is not in the killing
of more than a million human souls in a manifest execution of the 20th
century’s first genocide or, in the words of the American ambassador
reporting at the time, "race extermination."
4. Homeland-killing: Worse than genocide, as incredible as that
sounds, is the premeditated deprivation of a people of its ancestral
heartland. And that’s precisely what happened. In what amounted to
the Great Armenian Dispossession, a nation living for more than four
millennia upon its historic patrimony– at times amid its own sovereign
kingdoms and more frequently as a subject of occupying empires– was
in a matter of months brutally, literally, and completely eradicated
from its land. Unprecedented in human history, this expropriation
of homes and lands, churches and monasteries, schools and colleges,
libraries and hospitals, properties and infrastructures constitutes
to this day a murder, not only of a people, but of a civilization,
a culture, a time-earned way of life. This is where the debate about
calling it genocide or not becomes absurd, trivial, and tertiary. A
homeland was exterminated by the Turkish republic’s predecessor and
under the world’s watchful eye, and we’re negotiating a word. Even
that term is not enough to encompass the magnitude of the crime.
5. Coming clean: It is the only way to move forward. This is not a
threat, but a statement of plain, unoriginal fact. Don’t be afraid
of the price tag. What the Armenians lost is priceless. Instead
of constantly and viscerally attempting to flee this catastrophic
legacy through the decoy of counterarguments and commissions of
various kinds, return to the real script. And rather than complain
about or anticipate Armenian demands, undertake your own critical
introspection and say what you plan to do to right the wrong, to
atone for and to educate, to revive and restore, and to celebrate–
yes, you, we and Hrant together– the Armenian heritage of what is
today eastern Turkey. Finally take the initiative that you have not
yet launched, the one that leads to a real reconciliation based on
the terrible truth but bolstered by a fresh call to candor.
6. Never again: The rewards of coming to this reality check far
outweigh its perils. What is unfortunately unique about the Holocaust
is not the evil of the Shoah itself, but the demeanor of postwar
Germany to face history and itself, to assume responsibility for
the crimes of the preceding regime, to mourn and to dignify, to
seek forgiveness and make redemption, and to incorporate this ethic
into the public consciousness and the methodology of state. Germany,
now a leader in the democratic world, has only gained and grown from
its demeanor. Brandt’s kneeling should not remain unique. A veritable
leader of the new Turkey, the European one of the future, might do the
same, not in cession but in full expression of his and his nation’s
pride and honor. My grandmother, who survived the genocide owing to
the human heights of a blessed Turkish neighbor who sheltered little
Khengeni of Ordu from the fate of her family, did not live to see
that day.
7. The politics of power: Turkey’s allies can help it along this
way. Whether it’s from Washington and its transatlantic partners,
the European Union, the Muslim world or even Moscow, to which Ankara
has most interestingly been warming up of late, the message might
be delivered that, in the third millennium AD, the world will be
governed by a different set of rules, that might will respect right,
that no crime against humanity or its denial will be tolerated. The
Obama Administration bears the burden, but has the capacity for this
leadership of light. And it will be tested soon and again.
8. Turkey and Armenia: These sovereign neighbors have never, in all of
history, entered into a bilateral agreement with each other. Whether
diplomatic, economic, political, territorial, or security-specific,
no facet of their relationship, or the actual absence thereof, is
regulated by a contract freely and fairly entered into between the two
republics. It’s about time. Hence, the process of official contacts
and reciprocal visits that unraveled in the wake of a Turkey-Armenia
soccer match in September 2008 should mind this gap and structure the
discourse not to run away from the divides emanating from the past,
but to bridge them through the immediate establishment of diplomatic
relations without the positing or posturing of preconditions, the
lifting of Turkey’s unlawful border blockade, and a comprehensive
discussion and negotiated resolution of all outstanding matters
based on an acceptance of history and the commitment to a future
guaranteed against it recurrence. Nor should the fact of dialogue, as
facially laudable as it is, be pitched in an insincere justification
to deter third-party parliaments, and particularly the US Congress,
from adopting decisions or resolutions that simply seek to reaffirm
the historical record. Such comportment, far from the statesmanship
many expect, would contradict the aim and spirit of any rapprochement.
9. The past as present: The current Armenian state covers a mere
fraction of the vast expanse of the great historical plateau upon
which the Armenians lived from the depths of BC until the surgical
disgorgement of homeland and humanity that was 1915. Having managed
for seventy years as the smallest of the republics of the USSR,
Soviet Armenia was the sole remnant component of the patrimony in
which the Armenians were permitted by the Soviet-Turkish accords of
1921– the Armenian equivalents of Molotov-Ribbentrop– to maintain
a collective existence under the Kremlin’s jurisdiction. Even such
obviously Armenian homesteads as Mountainous Karabagh and Nakhichevan
were severed by Bolshevik-Kemalist complicity and placed, in exercise
of Stalin’s divide-and-conquer facility, under the suzerainty of
Soviet Azerbaijan. Accordingly, as improbable as it seems in view of
its ethnic kinship with Azerbaijan, modern-day Turkey also carries
the charge to discard outdated and pursue corrective policies in
the Caucasus.. This high duty applies not only to a qualitatively
improved and cleansed rapport with the Republic of Armenia, but also
in respect of new realities in the region.
10. Mountainous Karabagh from sea to shining sea: Called Artsakh in
Armenian, this easternmost territory of the Armenian Plateau declared
its independence from Soviet Azerbaijan in 1991 in full compliance with
controlling Soviet legislation, customary international law, and the
Montevideo Convention. Against the odds of a David-and-Goliath struggle
for liberty and identity, its people valiantly defended their hearths
and homes first against provocations and pogroms, and then in the face
of "Grad" rocket launchers, cluster and other indiscriminate aerial
bombings of civilian targets, and finally in response to an all-out
war of aggression that brought together as bedfellows the Azerbaijani
military, Turkish advisers and through them NATO-vintage materiel,
"mujaheddin" mercenaries, and some transitional rogue units from the
devolving Soviet army.
Almost miraculous in view of the tragedy of modern history, the
Armenians of Artsakh were able to successfully defend their homeland,
secure their frontiers from further attack, and ultimately resist the
temptation of an excessive counter-offensive, so signing a ceasefire
with Azerbaijan in May 1994. Unlike Nakhichevan– where no Armenians
remain today and where even the final vestiges of Armenian cultural
heritage have been defaced and destroyed, as recently as December 2005,
by an official policy of the Azerbaijani state– Mountainous Karabagh
held its own and most exceptionally surmounted the Stalinist legacy
of subjugation and colonization.
Turkey, as Azerbaijan’s proxy in the wider world and as an important
political contributor, must come to respect Karabagh’s choice and
include it in any platforms or other initiatives brought to the
regional table.
Of course, the diplomatic agenda continues to comprise such issues
as the return of refugees to their places of origin, the opening
of communications, demilitarization and peacekeeping, territorial
adjustments and security guarantees, but none of these can or will
happen unilaterally or in one direction only.
Mutuality is key in every category, and the final agreement of the
parties, together with the ensuing supervisory regime, must attach
equally to all from the Caspian to the Black Sea. When considering,
for instance, the secured right of voluntary return for refugees
and their progeny, or else a reactivation of normal transportation
avenues, the scope of these provisions and the related security
protocols must embrace Azerbaijan, Mountainous Karabagh, Armenia,
and Turkey. In this sense, a durable and equitable resolution of the
Azerbaijan-Karabagh standoff is substantively derivative from the
Turkish-Armenian relationship and the course of its development.
On the road to inevitable self-discovery, Turkey, its future with
Armenia, and their immediate neighborhood have come to form one of
the planet’s most sensitive and seismic tectonic plates. Neo-imperial
interests and raw power in their pursuit can no longer control the
shift. Integrity, equity, and a bit of humility might help to save
the day. And our world.