CONTROVERSY OVER ARMENIAN GENOCIDE PUTS U.S. ON SHAKY MORAL GROUND
Tasbeeh Herwees |
1328772649
February 8, 2012 | 11:30 p.m. PST
February 9, 2012 | 7:30 a.m. PST
Senior Staff Reporter
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Obama and Turkish President Abdullah Gul, 2010. (Official White House
photo) Obama and Turkish President Abdullah Gul, 2010. (Official
White House photo)
In a few weeks, the French Constitutional Council will be expected to
vote on a law that will officially criminalize denial of the Armenian
Genocide, the 1915 killings of over 1.5 million Armenians perpetrated
by the Young Turks of the Ottoman Empire.
Introduced to the French Senate late January, the genocide bill, if
signed into law by the Council, would penalise the denial of
genocidal events with up to one year in prison and a fine of 45,000
Euros. France officially recognized the 1915 massacres as genocide in
1998, eliciting much ire from the Turkish government.
This new bill makes no mention of the Armenian Genocide in specific,
but France recognizes only one other genocide–the
Holocaust–making deniers of the Armenian genocide primary targets
of the new law.
Turkish authorities are already up in arms about the new
“genocide bill,” denouncing the law and threatening France with
economic sanctions. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan railed
against the bill, calling it “racist” and a threat to free
speech.
“This is clearly a massacre of freedom of expression,”
Erdogan said in a speech to reporters in the Turkish capital of
Ankara.
Egemen BagıÅ~_, the Turkish Minister of European Affairs, told Al
Jazeera English the law was “null and void” in Turkey and
Turkey’s ambassador to France hinted at his possible
“permanent departure” from Paris after the bill was approved
in the French Senate.
In the midst of the democratic uprisings raging across the Middle
East, Turkey proudly trumpeted the praises of international experts
and diplomats who promote it as an example of a democratic Islamic
state to future Arab leaderships.
The U.S. in particular has strengthened relations with the Turkish
government in recent years. Just last week, President Obama named
Turkey among his top five international “friends.” Like most
U.S. presidents, Obama made plenty of promises to officially
recognize the genocide once in office to Armenian-American voters.
But he has since pandered to Turkish interests by avoiding the
genocide label at all, enabling a horrific tradition of genocide
denial.
Perpetuating genocide
In 1996, the founder and president of Genocide Watch, an
international advocacy organization based in the U.S., Gregory
Stanton famously outlined the genocidal process in eight stages.
The last stage, contended Stanton in what became a seminal resource
of genocide studies and research, was denial.
“The black hole of forgetting is the negative force that results
in future genocides,” he wrote in a briefing paper he presented
to the U.S. Department of State, “…Impunity–literally
getting away with murder–is the weakest link in the chains that
restrain genocide.”
This is a large part of the rhetoric that motivates efforts for
international recognition of the Armenian Genocide. Richard Hrair
Dekmejian, a USC professor and expert of genocide studies, says that
genocide denial is a mitigation of the perpetrators’ guilt.
“The standing position is that when you don’t recognize genocide,
by continuing to deny it, you’re still legally and morally a
killer,” said Dekmejian.
Turkey’s denial
While Turkey has begrudgingly acknowledged the deaths of 500,000
Armenians in 1915, it stubbornly refuses to call them a genocide.
With thousands of eyewitness accounts, photographic documentation,
and the testimony of the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey himself as proof,
there are few historians who would deny that the events of 1915 were
a systematic attempt to exterminate the Armenian population.
And most scholars number the deaths at 1.5 million–not, as the
Turkish government would have you believe, half a million.
The Turkish government has not refused to acknowledge these deaths,
it has banned all others from doing so. An article in the Turkish
penal code criminalizes any insult or public denigration of
“Turkishness” or the government of Turkey.
Any acknowledgment of the Armenian genocide–even mention of the
word itself–may be penalized with imprisonment. This article has
been used to prosecute journalists like the late Hrant Dink and even
Turkish scholars like Orhan Pamuk, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning
author.
“They don’t want to pay restitution, especially in terms of
land,” said Dekmejian, “Part of eastern Turkey today used to
be populated by Armenians and that was supposed to be part of the
Armenian republic.”
American complity
“The facts are undeniable,” wrote Obama to Armenian voters
during the 2008 presidential elections. “An official policy that
calls on diplomats to distort the historical facts is an untenable
policy. As a senator, I strongly support passage of the Armenian
Genocide Resolution, and as President I will recognize the Armenian
Genocide.”
Since election, however, Obama has fallen back on what is a long-held
tradition of U.S. presidents. Instead of recognizing the genocide, he
has abandoned the term altogether.
“American presidents use the terms ‘atrocities’, ‘tragedy’.” said
Dekmejian, “Sometimes they mention Turkey, sometimes they don’t.”
Turkey engages in a form of international bullying, threatening to
cut diplomatic ties or install economic sanctions, to dissuade nations
of recognizing the genocide. France has been at the recieving end of
these threats and the U.S. has heeded the warnings.
“We have been told by very very expensive lobbying groups that the
United States needs Turkey much more than Turkey needs the United
States,” said Dekmejian.
Trade statistics reveal that Turkey’s threats are mostly benign.
In fact, in the past few years, Turkey has expanded trade with
governments that have recognized the genocide — Belgium, Lebanon,
and Canada among them. In 2011, Turkey’s fifth largest market for
exports–at a volume of $6.9 billion–was France.
Recognition: Why it’s important
The histories of most modern nations are stained with the blood of the
subjugated — but no longer is it acceptable for most modern nations to
deny the crimes of their pasts. Denial robs the victimized of justice;
and sanitizing history does not make it go away, but perpetuates
cycles of oppression.
The U.S. government understands this in a very negligible fashion,
having paid reparations to former slaves, the Japanese-Americans
who suffered the indignity of internment camps, and even the Native
Americans from whom American soil was stolen.
The Armenian Genocide was a man-made crime–and it wasn’t an evil
peculiar to its time. In January, Genocide Watch named 18 countries
at risk of genocide, politicide or mass atrocities; seven of those
countries are currently experiencing massacres on a horrific scale.
Money, land, and memorials do very little to ease the heartache history
has left behind, but recognition does much in the way of honoring
the memory of those who have passed, and preventing the recurrence of
such atrocities. And when recognition is the very least we could do,
how do we, as U.S. citizens, seek any claim to moral righteousness
when we refuse to do so?