ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
By HAROUT HARRY SEMERDJIAN
The Jerusalem Post
April 23, 2012
While the modern-day Republic of Turkey was founded in 1923, eight
years after its Ottoman predecessors embarked on a massive and
systematic undertaking to rid the empire of its Armenian population,
the country today often finds itself in diplomatic spats with various
Western nations over its history. Outside the periphery of geopolitics,
it would be perplexing to most as to why an event that occurred nearly
100 years ago would impact relations between Turkey and the United
States and various European countries. The answer lies in the annals
of history.
During the First World War, while the Islamic Ottoman Empire was
fighting the Allied Powers on the side of Germany, its native Christian
Armenian population became a target of organized deportations and
massacres. Long having suffered from discrimination and second-class
citizenship, WWI provided the Young Turk government a cover to reach a
`final solution’ to the prevailing Armenian question.
Starting April 24, 1915, with the arrest and killing of the
Armenian intelligentsia, an entire civilization was uprooted from
its many-millennia-old homeland and outright massacred or driven to
a slow death in the deserts of Syria. The material and cultural loss
of the Armenians has also been enormous, with some 3,000 churches
destroyed alone. It is estimated that out of a population of two
million Armenians, one-and-a-half million were killed while another
half a million survived and dispersed to nearly every continent, thus
resulting in the creation of a large and dynamic Armenian diaspora.
This is where global power-politics unfolds. As offspring of survivors
of the genocide, Armenians throughout the world developed an ingrown
sense of patriotism and strong national identity over the years. With
the Cold War over and with a tiny, but nevertheless independent,
Republic of Armenia in existence, the past two decades have seen a
renewal of the international drive for recognition of the genocide
in light of persistent Turkish denial.
The Armenian refugees of 1915 who eventually found themselves
integrated and well-established into their host societies, and
frustrated with a lack of justice for the genocide, often succeeded
in bringing their families’ plight to the attention of world leaders
and onto the agendas of global parliaments and the US Congress. It
is this very Armenian diaspora that is so feared and vilified by the
Turkish government, which regrettably fails to comprehend and accept
the realities, needs and anguish of these communities spread all across
the world. An eerie reminder of the policy of exile still in effect,
visiting diaspora scholars who have written on the genocide have also
been deported from the country.
To date, over 20 countries and 43 US states have officially recognized
the Armenian genocide, often with high costs and difficult political
battles.
In 2001, when the French parliament officially passed a resolution
formally recognizing the Armenian genocide, Turkey recalled
its ambassador and threatened to cut off economic and military
ties with France. The two countries narrowly escaped yet another
political fallout earlier this year over a proposed bill that would
have criminalized the denial of the Armenian genocide in France. The
French Constitutional Court, however, found the bill unconstitutional
and the measure eventually fell through.
Arguably the most influential Armenian diaspora is that of the United
States, where powerful Armenian lobby groups often influence members
of Congress to pass pro-Armenian legislation and secure large amounts
of foreign aid to Armenia every year. While successful on a number of
issues, the Armenian Genocide Resolution is yet to be passed by both
the House and the Senate ` a measure that consistently fails due to
Turkey’s heavy pressure on the White House and threats to close down
a US military base on its territory.
President Barack Obama, while a firm supporter of Armenian genocide
legislation as senator and later as presidential candidate, has also
not come through on his campaign promise to recognize the 1915 events
as genocide despite a strongly-worded statement in acknowledgement of
`Armenian Remembrance Day.’
With the one-hundredth anniversary of the Armenian genocide fast
approaching, Turkey increasingly finds itself isolated on this issue
and under international pressure to finally recognize the wrongs of its
predecessors. Its official policy of denial has been a total failure
over the decades. Turkey has long relied on its military strength and
geopolitical location to get its way on this and other issues including
Cyprus and the Kurdish question; if its leadership wants to seriously
advance the country’s democratization and `Europeanization’ processes,
as well as to set the stage for its rise as a regional power, it
ought to think along the lines of peace and reconciliation with its
neighbors, starting with an honest acknowledgment of its own history.
The writer is a PhD candidate at the University of Oxford. He holds
advanced graduate degrees from The Fletcher School of Diplomacy at
Tufts University and the University of California, Los Angeles.