National Post
The Armenian genocide was just that
National Post
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Page: A14
Section: Editorial
Byline: Christopher Hitchens
Column: Christopher Hitchens
Source: Slate.com
Even before President Barack Obama set off on his visit to Turkey this
week, there were the usual voices urging him to dilute the principled
position that he has so far taken on the Armenian genocide. April is the
month in which the Armenian diaspora commemorates the bloody initiation,
in 1915, of the Ottoman Empire’s campaign to erase its Armenian
population.
The marking of the occasion takes two forms: Armenian Remembrance Day,
on April 24, and the annual attempt to persuade Congress to name that
day as one that abandons weasel wording and officially calls the episode
by its right name, which is the word I used above.
Genocide had not been coined in 1915, but the U. S. ambassador in
Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau, employed a term that was in some ways
more graphic. In his urgent reports to the State Department, conveying
on-the-spot dispatches from his consuls, especially in the provinces of
Van and Harput, he described the systematic slaughter of the Armenians
as "race murder."
A vast archive of evidence exists to support this claim. But every year,
the deniers and euphemists set to work again, and there are usually
enough military-industrial votes to tip the scale in favour of our
Turkish client. (Of late, Turkey’s opportunist military alliance with
Israel has also been good for a few shame-faced Jewish votes as well.)
President Obama comes to this issue with an unusually clear and
unambivalent record. In 2006, for example, the U. S. ambassador to
Armenia, John Evans, was recalled for employing the word genocide.
Thensenator Obama wrote a letter of complaint to then-secretary of state
Condoleezza Rice, deploring the State Department’s cowardice and roundly
stating that the occurrence of the Armenian genocide in 1915 "is not an
allegation, a personal opinion or a point of view, but rather a widely
documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical
evidence."
On the campaign trail last year, he amplified this position, saying that
"America deserves a leader who speaks truthfully about the Armenian
genocide and responds forcefully to all genocides. I intend to be that
president."
For any who might entertain doubt on this score, I would recommend two
recent books of exceptional interest and scholarship that both add a
good deal of depth and texture to this drama. The first is Armenian
Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, by Grigoris Balakian, and
the second is Rebel Land: Travels Among Turkey’s Forgotten Peoples, a
contemporary account by Christopher de Bellaigue.
In addition, we have just learned of shattering corroborative evidence
from within the archives of the Turkish state. The Ottoman politician
who began the campaign of deportation and extermination, Talat Pasha,
left enormous documentation behind him. His family has now given the
papers to a Turkish author named Murat Bardakci, who has published a
book with the somewhat dry title The Remaining Documents of Talat Pasha.
One of these "remaining documents" is a cold estimate that during the
years 1915 and 1916 alone, a total of 972,000 Armenians simply vanished
from the officially kept records of population.
There are those who try to say that the Armenian catastrophe was a
regrettable by-product of the fog of war and of imperial collapse, and
this might be partly true of the many more Armenians who were
slaughtered at the war’s end and after the implosion of Ottomanism.
But this is an archive maintained by the government of the day and its
chief anti-Armenian politician, and it records in the very early days of
the First World War indicate a population decline from 1,256,000 to
284,157. It is very seldom that a regime in its private correspondence
confirms almost to an exactitude the claims of its victims.
So what will the deniers say now? The usual routine has been to
insinuate that if Congress votes to assert the historic truth, then
Turkey will inconvenience the NATO alliance by making trouble on the
Iraqi border, denying the use of bases to the U. S. Air Force, or in
other unspecified ways.
This same kind of unchecked arrogance was on view at the NATO summit
last weekend, where the Ankara government had the nerve to try to hold
up the appointment of a serious Danish politician, Anders Rasmussen, as
the next secretary-general of the alliance, on the grounds that as
Denmark’s prime minister he had refused to censor Danish newspapers to
Muslim satisfaction!
It is now being hinted that if either President Obama or the U.S.
Congress goes ahead with the endorsement of the genocide resolution,
Turkey will prove unco-operative on a range of issues, including the
normalization of the frontier between Turkey and Armenia and the transit
of oil and gas pipelines across the Caucasus.
When the question is phrased in this thuggish way, it can be slyly
suggested that Armenia’s own best interests are served by joining in the
agreement to muddy and distort its own history. Yet how could any state,
or any people, agree to abolish their pride and dignity in this way?
And the question is not only for Armenians, who are economically
hard-pressed by the Turkish closure of the common border. It is for the
Turks, whose bravest cultural spokesmen and writers take genuine risks
to break the taboo on discussion of the Armenian question.
And it is also for Americans, who, having elected a supposedly brave new
President, are being told that he –and our Congress too–must agree to
collude in a gigantic historical lie. A lie, furthermore, that
courageous U. S. diplomacy helped to expose in the first place.
This falsification has already gone on long enough and has been
justified for reasons of state. It is, among other things, precisely
"for reasons of state," in other words, for the clear and vital
announcement that we can’t be bought or intimidated, that April 24,
2009, should become remembered as the date when we affirmed the truth
and accepted, as truth-telling does, all the consequences.
Illustration:
. Black & White Photo: Erhan Sevenler, AFP, Getty Images / Turkish Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
Idnumber: 200904080100
Edition: National
Story Type: Column; Crime
Length: 992 words
Keywords: PRESIDENTS; POLITICAL PARTIES; POLITICIANS; UNITED STATES