TURKEY COVERS UP ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
Assyrian International News Agency AINA
Oct 16 2013
In 1915, under the cover of World War I, Ottoman Turks wiped out
about a third of its Armenian population. To this day, Turkey denies
any blame for the atrocity, and behind it, U.S. stands firm among a
dwindling band of nations that fail to acknowledge the killings were
Genocide, writes Syuzanna Petrosyan, Executive Producer at Annenberg
Digital News (neontommy.com).
“In the recent years, as recognition from governments around the
world has increased, Turkey has also multiplied its efforts to combat
remembrance and commemoration inside and outside of Turkey. From the
vivid photographs of Armin T. Wegner, a German soldiers and medic
stationed in the Ottoman Empire during the genocide, to the reports
of U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Henry Morganthau, and the
front page headlines in the New York Times, it is remarkable how
forcefully Turkey has been able to curtail the memory of this tragedy
from its own people and those around the world. It becomes perhaps
less surprising when taking into account the billions of dollars
the Turkish government spends on world-wide denial efforts. And one
doesn’t have to look too far. For the past five years, The Pacifica
Institute, a Turkish-American organization based in Orange County,
Calif. has hosted the Anatolian Cultures & Foods Festival. Anatolia
refers to the region of Turkey were majority of Armenians lived during
the Ottoman Empire. The festival portrays the rich multiculturalism
of the region, including displays of old Armenian churches, artifacts
and music, with no mention of the annihilation of an entire people
but also the complete destruction of its culture in their homeland
of thousands of years,” Petrosyan says.
“By presenting the Ottoman era of the Turkey in a positive light,
they appeal to the mass media and the public, which helps them spread
their message in solidifying denial and shaping the discourse of the
Armenian Genocide. They focus on perceptions and images to appeal
rather than historical and scholarly accuracy. Nonetheless, it is by
no means an easy task to re-write history. In 1998, UCLA’s history
department voted to reject a $1m offer to endow a program in Turkish
and Ottoman studies because it was conditional on their denying the
Armenian Genocide.”
Petrosyan goes on to say: “In August of 2011, the Turkish government
tried to suppress a Microsoft online encyclopedia entry. The Chronicle
of Higher Education reports that the Turkish government threatened
Microsoft with serious reprisals unless all mention of the Armenian
genocide was removed. Authors Ronald Grigor Suny and Helen Fein
refused to give in.
“Professor Colin Tatz, director for the Centre for Comparative Genocide
Studies at Macquarie University, in Sydney, Australia, claims that
Turkey has used “a mix of academic sophistication and diplomatic
thuggery . . . to put both memory and history into reverse gear”.
Despite the massive efforts by the Turkish government, however,
in the recent years, intellectuals in Turkey have began rising the
discussion of the genocide, risking persecution and arrest. In 2005,
Nobel prize-winning novelist Orhan Pampuk was put on trial in Turkey
after he made a statement regarding the Armenian Genocide. The
controversy ensued with burning of Pamuk’s books at rallies and
assassination attempts.”
She reminds that in 2007, Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was
assassinated in Istanbul in front of his newspaper office. “Dink had
long endured threats by Turkish nationalists for his statements on the
Armenian Genocide. He had also been under prosecution for violating
Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code which makes it illegal to
“insult Turkishness.” In a 2012 decision, the European Court of
Human Rights ruled that Turkey had failed to protect Dink’s freedom
of speech. His murder sparked international outrage.”
“In more recent years, academics in Turkey have risked fierce backlash
by issuing a public apology campaign for genocide. The apology
comes in an open letter inviting Turks to sign an online petition
supporting its sentiments. In an interview with Cengiz Aktar, one of
the founders of the apology campaign and a professor of EU studies at
Istanbul’s University of Bahcesehir, he said that the purpose of the
petition is to bring back the memory of the genocide which has been
forcefully erased by the government. By the end of 2000, the European
Parliament, France, Sweden, the Vatican and Italy finally acknowledged
the Armenian Genocide. Of the major powers, only the U.S., Canada and
Britain still hold back. There are too many conflicting interests at
stake. Turkey, for instance, threatened to deny the U.S. use of its
air bases if President Clinton agreed formally to accept the massacres
as a genocide,” she says.
“For the Turks, the problem is enormous. An acknowledgement of the
Armenian genocide might result in land claims and reparations. They
have only to look at recent German and Swiss history to take fright.
It is no surprise, then, that they try to control every aspect of
discourse on this topic.”
Petrosyan concludes the article with the words of Thomas Burgenthal, an
Auschwitz survivor, lawyer and member of the UN Human Rights Committee,
who said, “I don’t know why the Turks can’t admit it, express sorrow
and go on. That is the worst. You do all these things to the victim
and then you say it never happened. That is killing them twice.”