Assyrian International News Agency AINA
March 7 2015
The Armenian Genocide: Turkey’s Hundred Shades of Denial
By Grigor Boyakhchyan
Posted 2015-03-07 19:08 GMT
Picture showing Armenians killed during the Armenian Genocide. Image
taken from Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, written by Henry Morgenthau,
Sr. and published in 1918. Original description: “THOSE WHO FELL BY
THE WAYSIDE. Scenes like this were common all over the Armenian
provinces, in the spring and summer months of 1915. Death in its
several forms–massacre, starvation, exhaustion–destroyed the larger
part of the refugees. The Turkish policy was that of extermination
under the guise of deportation” (Public Domain/Wikimedia
Commons).Repentant or emboldened through a hundred long years of
denial, the Turkish statehood stands at a critical juncture of its
historical past, present, and future. The Armenian Genocide and the
Great National Dispossession of the Armenian people from their
homeland will ultimately determine its decent place in the family of
civilized nations. Recognition and repentance, along with elimination
of dire consequences, is the right way forward for the Turkish
government.
Only a month ahead of the April 24 Centennial of the Armenian
Genocide, the Republic of Armenia, together with Diaspora Armenians
from many far-flung corners of the world, brings together the vestiges
of enduring historical memory and remembrance on human suffering,
extermination and resurgence to denounce past inhumanities and prevent
future ones. Unbroken in spirit against this unprecedented crime, the
message they bring to the fore of international agenda stretches far
beyond the tragedy of a single nation to embrace the whole humanity.
Against the backdrop of Turkish official denialism, distortion, and
propaganda stunt — as the commemoration of Gallipoli landings staged
by the Turkish government on April 24 demonstrate — looms the larger
decay of a state rooted in organized forgetting and long-enforced
oblivion. Not only does the strenuous denial of the Armenian Genocide
by the Turkish government constitute a form of renewed aggression that
should be condemned and outlawed in its own right, but it also
forecloses the mere opportunity for many decent men and women in
Turkey to come to grips with their own history.
Despite the vast amount of evidence that points to centrally planned
and systematically orchestrated genocide against the Armenian people
— the testimony of survivors, documentary evidence, official
archives, and the reports of diplomats — the denial of Armenian
genocide by successive regimes in Turkey has proceeded from 1915 to
the present. Among the scores of articles available in the archives of
the New York Times, one featured on February 23, 1916 presents the
reflections of Lord Bryce, the head of British delegation to the
Anglo-French Parliamentary conference, on Turkish atrocities committed
against Armenians. It reads in part: “The cause of Armenians is
especially dear to me. There is no people in the world which has
suffered more. It has been a victim not of religious fanaticism, but
of cold-blooded, premeditated hatred on the part of the brigands who
term themselves the Turkish Government and who do not intend to permit
the existence of any national vitality except in their own element.”
In an attempt to assassinate the entire civilization and culture, the
Ottoman Turkish government unleashed the deportation of Armenian
people to the arid deserts of Syria that would come to be known as
death marches of men, women and children, with many dying along the
way of exhaustion and starvation. The American ambassador Henry
Morgenthau would later write in his memoirs: “When the Turkish
authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely
giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well,
and in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to
conceal the fact.”
Various perspectives on denial can be brought to bear on the form and
content of Turkish attempts to transplant a benign political image
around the world; what unites them together, however, is the
state-sponsored struggle to diminish, disguise and consign to oblivion
the memory of race extermination behind their actions in whatever way
possible — a struggle of forgetting against memory.
Regardless of the state of play on the ground in the Middle East or
elsewhere and the ensuing geopolitical significance allegedly
attributed to Turkey in world affairs, it is crystal clear that the
only enduring strength, authority and leadership that a country seeks
to obtain in international arena proceeds along the principles of
morality and justice. Unwillingness to embrace this route is an
attribute of politicians who think in short timelines.
There are no “smart denials” on the face of justice, irrespective of
the strategies and techniques the Turkish authorities choose to
concoct behind the sealed borders and closed doors. Denials are either
short-or long-lived; but they never mature into reality. Nor does the
known fade into the unknown — no matter how intensely the hundred
shades of distortion and denial envelop the truth — and those who
have attempted it have themselves ended up in the dustbin of history.
To bind the country to the same path of government-backed denial is an
expression of no strategy, no goals, and no vision for its future. It
is a sign of moral decay.