Talk by Dr. Tessa Hofmann (Berlin) – “Europe, Turkey, and the Armenian
Genocide”
Thursday 20 January 2005, 7:30 PM, Lecture Room 336, Senate House,
School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), 3rd Floor North
Block, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU, University College London (UCL)
Dr. Tessa Hofmann
EUROPE, TURKEY, AND THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
(London, January 20, 2005)
Europe and Turkey look back to a long relationship: Their common
history covers at least 150 years of European pressure for Turkish
reforms, of European half-heartedness and Turkish delays and
evasiveness. As early as 1904 the French author A. Schopell compiled a
documentation under the title “The reforms and the protection of
Christians in Turkey during 1673 until 1904”; it contained 645 decrees
of the Sultan, treaties, agreements, notes and circulars, whichhad
been signed for the protection of the Chris-tian minorities. But all
of them remained unrealised. And not only that. The very fact that
Europe had interfered into Turkey’s domestic affairs on behalf of
minority rights and on behalf of the protection of Christians made the
latter the more hated and suspicious for the ruling Turks as well as
for the dissident, oppositional ones.
1913 was the year, when the Turkish government, after 30 years of
delay, finally agreed to a European project of the realisation of
article 61 of the Berlin Treaty, signed by de-feated Turkey in
1878. This article contained the promise of reforms, including
regional administrative autonomy and securityfor the Ottoman
Armenians. But instead of im-provements, legal inferiority and
occasional local persecution were soon followed by nation-wide
deportation and extermination. Under the guise of WW1 more than the
half of estimated two and a half million Ottoman Armenians perished,
most men during mas-sacres, and most women, children and aged people
from starvation and exhaustion dur-ing death marches and the
subsequent liquidation of concentration camps.
After the Turkish capitulation, the Ottoman parliament, followed by
the government, started inquiries on the crimes of the nationalist war
regime; special military courts sen-tenced the politically main
responsible and the most notorious henchmen, although many of the
first in absentia. The opposition nationalist regime of Mustafa Kemal
in Ankara, however, not only stopped the legal prosecution of the
perpetrators in the Armenian genocide, but integrated many of the
escaped accused into the political apparatus of the new establishment.
After an initial period of plain justification of the annihilation of
– what was then called – enemies of the fatherland, the following
Turkish governments kept silence over the genocide of Armenians and
other Christian ethnic groups in the Otto-man Empire. Confronted with
the Armenian claim for the recognitionof historic facts, Turkey
reacted eventually with denial, although in an contradictory way:
There was no genocide at all, but if there were victims,they were on
both sides, as a result of allegedly mutual killing and civic war, due
to Armenian attempt of rebellion. “Until 1980, Turkish school
textbooks quite simply didn’t mention the Armenian massacres”,
explained Fabio Salomoni, author of a book on the Turkish education
system. “With the first acknowl-edgements of ‘genocide’ by Western
governments and the increasing number of attacks by ASALA (an Armenian
activist organisation), a paragraph was then added excluding all
Turkish responsibility for the death of Armenians, explaining the
context of a war…” This official Turkish version of denial or
minimisation is comparable to a wound, artifi-cially kept gaping.
While Armenia, governed by the Soviets, was compelled to keep her
mouth shut over the genocide, the Armenian Diaspora started to
confront international institutions and national governments of their
corresponding countries of residence with the claim for
recognition. The European Parliament reacted in 1987 with its
“Resolution on a Political solution of the Armenian Question”, despite
years of Turkish interventions to prevent such a decision. With Turkey
as a candidate for the admission into the EU, Armenian Diaspora NGOs
in Europe started to lobby in order to make the recognition of the
Ar-menian genocidea pre-condition for Turkey’s admission. They
achieved further resolu-tions bythe European parliament in 2000, 2002
and 2004, but failed in making the rec-ognition of the Armenian
genocide an integral part of the Copenhagen Criteria of 1998.
At no point of Turkey’s progress towards the EU did the European
Commission demand Turkey’s recognition of the Armenian genocide. This
attitude is, however, not at all ex-ceptional. In difference to the
European parliament, genocide awareness or a critical approach towards
history is not on the Commission’s agenda. Croatia, for example, will
become a member state despite the genocide, committed by Croatia
during 1941 until 1945. This genocide resulted in the death of nearly
one million Serbs, Jews and Roma. If the numeric relation between
population and the figure of victims is considered, the genocide by
the Croatian Ustasha regime is even the most intense during WW2, for
nearly every sixth inhabitant perished.
The possible reason for the abandonment of genocide awareness by the
European Commission and other EU institutions lays, to my
understanding, in the circumstance, that the European Union is a union
of national states, most of whom were, to a higher or lesser degree,
involved in crimes against humanity or even in genocide, in particular
in combination with their colonial or imperialist past. Belgium and
Congo, Germany and Namibia, France and Britain in the Near East and
South Asia – there are dark aspects in most of the European member
states’ history. And the representatives of these states are not too
keen to demand genocide awareness from candidate countries in order to
avoid any questioning of their own past.
This, of course, has nothing to do with the question, whether Turkey
is a part of Europe or whether it should or could become a part of
it. As we have seen, there is no really convincing definition of
Europe, neither geographical, nor historical, cultural or
religious. If we apply historical definitions, we have to admit that
Europe was and is an ever changing entity, including at Roman times
recent Syria, Lebanon and Israel, whereas Ireland was not part of the
Imperium Romanum, and Britain only in its South. Both coun-tries
remained during that age very much at the fringe of Europe. Similarly,
the entire North and most parts of central Europe stayed outside the
civilised European, that is Roman world. In other words, Syria and
Israel were more European – or Roman – than the west of recent insular
Europe. Culturally, Europe was split by different factors, as the
dichotomy of Byzantine and Rome, Protest or Catholic Europe. Religion?
Europe was never, as the favourite Turkish reproach has it, a mere
“Christian club”. This point of view ignores centuries of Muslim
presence in Spain, the Balkans or at the Eastern fringes of Europe.
What else then is Europe? My favourite definition until recently was
the suggestion, that Europe is a community of shared ethical values,
among themthe ability of a critical ap-proach towards history. But as
we have seen, when it comes to state crimes in the past, the attitude
of most EU members does not meet these high ethical standards. Modern,
ethically mature Europe, it seems, is rather a certain entity still to
come into being, and the question whether Turkey should or could be
part of it, is not to be answered with a simple yes or no, but with a
clear definition and setting of pre-conditions.
The public debate in Germany on Turkey’s candidacy or even its
membership was combined with many fears, some of them social, some of
them cultural and some politi-cal. The debate intensified before the
background of a set of so called social and eco-nomic reforms,
recently imposed on Germany’s population with the result, that many in
my country are now poorer and socially more insecure than they were
before. At the same time, we realised, that we failed in properly
integrating our migrant minority, most of its members being
ethnicTurks or people of different ethnic background from Turkey. For
decades, decision-makers in Germany had mentally refused to
acknowledge the fact that Germany had become a country of immigration,
and that the immigrants were not here justfor a season, but for
life. Our liberal middle-class liked the simplistic idea of
“multi-kulti”, of a colourful multi-ethnic diversity, but failed to
realise the imposition on working class areas, dominated by migrants
from pre-industrial, pre-modern societies. Most of our intellectual
opinion-leaders turned a blind eye to problems resulting from the
pre-industrial ethics of Turkish or Kurdish migrants, in particular,
if women were con-cerned. Compulsive marriages of young girls, rape
and violence of girls and women in Muslim families were perceived as
integral part of an alien culture, whose members were allegedly
entitled to other rights and laws then the majority population. Misled
by wrong liberalism, judges failed to punish perpetrators for the
murder of women, if the perpetrators claimed to have killed for the
family honour. With a past of racist motivated state crimes, Germans
were probably more than other nations prone for the trap of
mis-understood political correctness. And once we understood that we
lived with our Turkish neighbours in one country, but not in one
society, many began to fear that the admission of Turkey to the EU
would increase and multiply the problems, we already had with a
Turkish population of approximately two millions.
What most of us did not realise was the fears, many Turks feel in
expectation of Europe. The average expectation seems to be, that
Europe will change nearly everything. As a young couple of students
from Istanbul recently told a friend: “Europe will make regula-tions
on everything. Even the mullahs willno longer have the right to cry as
loud as they used to do. They will have to reduce their voice. And the
bells of Christians churches will get the right to ring louder.”
The original and main motive of official Turkey for its application
for membership is fi-nancial and economical. In summer 2002, Turkey’s
bankruptcy seemed to be a question of few months. With the massive
help of the EU, Turkey recovered. But the fear is wide-spread, that
the political prize for this economical salvation is too high. On the
evening of December 16, 2004, justone night before the European
leadership’s decision on Tur-key’s candidacy, a law expert of the
Turkish Bilkend university explained in a TV inter-view at length all
reasons against a membership in the EU. The EU, he explained not
without a point, is economically declining, since it integrated eight
new member states. The Turkish professor warned his audience: Although
Europe has financially less and less to offer, it will politically
demand more and more and interfere at every occasion possible into
domestic affairs of Turkey. In this context the expert mentioned, as
it is offi-cially called in Turkey, the Armenian and the Cyprus
question. The expert continued in saying, that a model of privileged
partnership is much more favourable to Turkey than a full membership
in theEU.
Interestingly, this coincides with the proposals of the conser-vatives
in Germany. Their idea is to keep Turkey out of Europe by compensating
it witha so called privileged partnership.
This leads us to the beneficiaries of Turkey’s admission. These are
mainly three groups in Turkey, and one interested side outside: In
Turkey, the probable beneficiaries are the democrats, the Kurds and
the ethnic or religious minorities. In difference to the Arme-nian
Diaspora in Europe, in particular in France, the Armenian community of
Turkey welcome Turkey’s membership in the EU, hoping of course for an
improvement of their situation as a despised and discriminated
minority of only 60,000 people. In all, there are less than 142,000
Non-Muslim citizens in Turkey left, among them 22,000 Jews. In
addition to them, there live further 200,000 Christians in Turkey,
most of them Russian and Georgian Orthodox. They came as migrant
workers, but the Georgian Orthodox Church claims that since 1985 the
resident Georgian minority of Turkey is re-conversing to their native
church, after they had been forcibly islamized some centuries
ago. Out-side Turkey, it is Armenia as Turkey’s vulnerable neighbour
who would benefit from a direct neighbourhood with the EU, both
economically and politically.
Whereas Turkish economical and financial expectations towards the EU
can be met with both models – an EU-membership or a privileged
partnership – the needs and hopes of these three groups are only
fulfilled, if Turkey gets the full attention and support of Europe in
its democratisation process. However, a full membership in the EU is
not on top of the political agenda of Turkey’s nationalists, be they
leftist, rightist or Kemalist mainstream nationalists. In particular
Kemalists fear the intervention of European institu-tions on behalf of
Christian minorities.
The EU institutions do control the annual progress of applicants for
membership. Since 1998, an annual report on Turkey’s progress had been
issued by the European com-mission, which is regularly discussed in
the European Parliament’s Commission for Foreign Affairs, Human rights
and other matters, before it passes first the parliamentary commission
and then, after further debates in the plenum, the European
parliament. The debates and voting of 2004 brought the decision on the
beginning of negotiations on Turkey’s membership, which will start on
October 3, this year. About ten-thousand Ar-menians, most of them
citizens of France, demonstrated in Brussels on December 17, 2004, in
protest against the EU’s readiness to start negotiations without
Turkey’s recog-nition of the Armenian genocide. Could a country, whose
opinion-leaders and decision-makers ignore until today the state
crimes, committed during the transition from the mul-tiethnic Ottoman
Empire to a mono-ethnic republic genuinely improveits human rights
situation without revising its history?
Armenian Diaspora organisations normally focus only on the recognition
issue.
They want Turkey to admit the crime, committed 90 years ago, and to
apologise. This is an entirely legitimate and logical demand, as far
as Armenian communities are concerned. But the political consequences
of Turkish denialconcern not only the descendants of genocide
survivors. First of all, the Turkish society itself has become victim
of the all too close link between the war regime of genocide
perpetrators and the founders of the Turkish republic. The integration
of first and second-rate perpetrators into the Kemalist establishment
has caused a continuity of crime, which Kemalist ideologists and
opinion-leaders try to justify, persist and cover up until this
day. The few Turkish human rights defenders and scholars of genocide,
who dared despite the threat of legal prosecution to study this
continuity, point out to the fact that the stubbornly denied genocide
created an increasing black hole in Turkish historiography, and
established state violence as an unquestioned and alleged patriotic
tool to deal with political opponents and dissenters.
It is frightening, to which degree official Turkey, despite its
approach towards Europe, continues the Kemalist policy of denying. It
is more frightening, if genocide denial, com-bined with the
discrimination of ethnic and religious minorities, is initiated and
fostered by one of the country’s most important and responsible
opinion-leading institutions, the Ministry for National Education. In
its circular letter No. 23, as well as in a decree of April 21, 2003
the Ministry’s Commission for Teaching and Education ordered the
im-plementation of a set of “counter actions” to the claim for
recognition of the Armenian genocide. Circular letter 2003/23 relates
to earlier decisions of June 6, 2002, which provided propaganda also
against the “alleged genocide claims” by Armenians, Pon-tian Greeks
and Syriac Orthodox Christians into instructionsof school classes 5
and 7 and in secondary schools during lessons on the history of the
Turkish Republic and Ke-malism, starting with the beginning of school
year 2002/2003.
Part and parcel of this campaign in 2003 was a competition of school
essay writing on the subject “Uprising and activities of Armenians
during World War I” and an award for the “nation-wide best” of these
essays. Furthermore, local and regional school authori-ties were
requested to organise instructions for teachers of history and social
studies, and also for inspectors of secondary schools. Schools of
religious minorities such as those of the Armenian and Greek minority
of the Republic of Turkey were compelled to participate.
Despite the fact, that six teachers had been prosecuted because they
dared to ask questions during instructions, Turkish citizens
articulated protest against the decrees of Education Minister
Dr. Hüseyin Celik which the Turkish Teachers’ Union criticised as
“racist and chauvinist”. On October 4, 2003 an initiative called Baris
icin Tarih (“History for Peace”) published a statement of protest
which had been signed by more than 400 prominent citizens of Turkey.
This NGO pointed out at the fact that in new editions of Turkish
textbooks Armenians, Pontian Greeks and Syrian Orthodox Christians had
been repeatedly called “spies”, “traitors”, “barbarians”, whereas
synagogues, churches and also schools of minorities had been branded
as “noxious communities”. In the same de-humanising language the
perpetrators of the genocide of Ottoman Armenians and Greeks had
denounced their future victims. It took the Turkish lawmaker nearly a
year to react to this incredible scandal. According to the European
Commission’s report on Turkey’s progress towards the EU, issued in
October 2004, Turkey’s Grand Assembly issued a law in March 2004,
which prohibits any future minority discrimination in Turkish
textbooks. According to the report, the law relates to ethnic,
religious, racial, sexual and social minorities. However, for the time
being we have no information whether this new regulation is already
realised and whether there are safeguards that editions of text-books,
which contain already discriminatory language and contents are no
longer used in lessons.
In particular worrying is the confusion caused by the reasoning of
article 306 (305) in the draft of Turkey’s amended Penal Code. In the
context of this penal law, the mentioning of the Armenian genocide or
criticism of Turkey’s military occupation of North Cyprus were cited
as examples for the application of article 306; this article became
article 305 in the final version of the Penal Code, issued in late
summer 2004 by the Grand Assembly of Turkey, but not yet signed by the
president. The background of this law and its reasoning are
telling. Such a law came into existence first in autumn 2000, when the
Turkish legis-lature started to consider a draft bill, crafted under
the pressure of the Turkish General Staff. This legislative initiative
coincided with the debate of a resolution on the Armenian genocide by
the United States House of Representatives. The Turkish General Staff
intended, under the term of article 359 of the then Turkish Penal
Code, to treat the very use of the word “genocide” (soykirim in
Turkish) in connection with the World War I fate of Ottoman Armenians
hence forth as a criminal offence. Although the bill did not receive
the ultimate approval, it survived in the reasoning of article 306
(305) of the re-cent amendments of the Turkish Penal Code, despite the
fact, that it contradicts the Human Rights Treaty Convention of the
Council of Europe. The reasoning of article 305 provoked the protest
of numerous NGOs inside and outside the European Union and caused a
warning by the EU. The fact, that the possibility of such a reasoning
existed despite Turkey’s candidacy for membership in the EU is in
itself indicative for the obsti-nacy with which the Turkish military
authorities, together with radical nationalists and the tacit
agreement of Turkey’s recent rulers are pursuing the goal of
suppressing any seri-ous debate on the topic of the Armenian genocide
or the ongoing military occupation of North Cyprus. Such obstinacy,
however, causes serious doubts about Turkey’s decision for willingness
to introduce reforms.
Although the EU issued a warning to Turkey on behalf of the reasoning
of article 305, in legal practice this and similar restrictive
articles of Turkish Penal Code are still applied. There is a
court-case pending on the internationally prominent Turkish publisher
Ragip Zarakolu of Istanbul, forhis intention to publish the Turkish
translation of a book by George Jerjian on Armenian and Turkish
reconciliation; Jerjian’s book was first pub-lished in London in April
2002 under the title “The Truth will set us Free”. Important, as the
message of this politically balanced and moderate book may be, three
pages the Armenian author’s preface had been named as a reason for the
legal prosecution of the Turkish publisher, who is pursued under
Article 159 of the Turkish Penal Code and the Law for Protecting
Atatürk’s Memory. The Prosecutor considers an insult to the Turkish
Republic and her founder Mustafa Kemal (“Atatürk”) to claim that there
were some peo-ple around M. Kemal, who had responsibility for the 1915
Armenian Genocide. For fear of being arrested, Mr Zarakolu did not
dare to leave his homeland and travel to Frankfurt in order to meet an
U.S. producer of documentaries on the Armenian Genocide for an
interview.
For the year of the 90th commemoration of the Armenian genocide, 2005,
the president of the Turkish Historical Society, Prof. Halacoglu,
announced a new offensive against, was he calls it, the alleged
Armenian genocide; he appealed to Prime Minister Erdogan to establish
a commission which should run this new offensive. Despite the contrary
of what is true, Halacoglu declares that Turkey has nothing to fear of
the Armenian geno-cide claim, for researches in foreign archives
allegedly proved that the claim is un-founded. He also declares since
2001, that Turkey should try to achieve a new hearing of the known
court case against Soghomon Tehleryan, the Armenian murderer of
Meh-met Talat Pasa, previously the minister of the interior of the
Ottoman Empire and one of the politically responsible for the Armenian
genocide. A Berlin jury ruled on the 3rd of June, 1921 that Tehleryan
was not guilty. The German authorities of the time immedi-ately
released Tehleryan and expelled him, thus getting rid of any revision
of the case, which was politically so inconvenient for Germany.
In face of the historic truth, one may consider such activities as
ridiculous or cynic. They add to the wide spread perception of Turkey
by Armenians, who see this country as never changing in its decision
to offend the remainder of the Armenian nation. But as all things
change, Turkey does, too. There is a slow progress even in regards to
Turkey’s largest taboo, the Armenian genocide, since the
1990ies. There are a few scholars of genocide and history in the
Turkish Diaspora community and even in Turkey itself, who acknowledge
the historic truth. There are some human rights defenders and
publishers with tremendous courage, who despite all threats contribute
to the support of genocide understanding in Turkey and the Turkish
community. There are translations and publica-tions in the Turkish
language, which add to the understanding of the historic truth as well
as to an increased knowledge about the Armenians and other nations,
which are Tur-key’s neighbours and which also represent minorisized
communities in Turkey itself. The proceedings of the Talat Pasa Court
Case,for example have been published from German into Turkish and are
available in Turkey as a book since 2003; in 2004, a sec-ond volume of
comments and articles on the Talat Pasa Court Case appeared,
includ-ing my own publications. In the light of a defamation campaign,
started by Turkish media against me in the end of the year 2000, this
is progress. Until a few years ago, scholars of genocide and human
rights defenders, who were involved into the recognition of the
Armenian genocide, were grossly insulted and defamed by Turkish media;
in my case, I was declared to be head of the German intelligence and a
representative of the “Super NATO”, in order to undermine my respect
among Turkish intellectuals, many of them with suspicion towards
intelligence services.
All this has not stopped over night or disappeared entirely. There are
still pro-Turkish websites, which serve the only purpose to offend and
insult those scholars confirming the fact of the Armenian
genocide. But at the same time there are encouraging devel-opments.
We can support these developments in the framework of European
institu-tions and the admission process. Naturally, a pre-condition
for success is, that the European institutions, in particularthe
European Commission, realise their tremendous historic responsibility
towards the peoples of Turkey and the neighbour states of Turkey, in
particular Armenia, Greece and Cyprus. I return to my remarks in the
beginning of my talk. The relationship between Europe and Turkey over
the last 150 years reads as story of deception and betrayal, as far as
Europe and the Christian minorities of Turkey were concerned, or like
a story of sporadic and half-hearted reform appeals and interventions
from the European side. In order to secure efficiency and consistency
in the reform process, independent human and minority rights NGOs
should not only observe, docu-ment and comment developments in Turkey,
but also pressure in the corresponding EU institutions. For this
purpose, an independent network of experts and representatives of the
minorities concerned has been established, called Monitoring Minority
Rights (MMR), which is affiliated with the Armenian Assembly of
Europe, the Swiss-Armenian Society and the Working Group Recognition,
an international non-profit NGO, which I have the honour to chair.
As a conclusion, I answer some questions, which you may like to
discuss more exten-sively in the following debate.
First question: Does Europe need Turkey? My answer as a European: Not
really. Europe is pre-occupied with the integration of new
member-states in East and Southeast Europe, and the integration of
Turkey is a finan-cial, social and political challenge.
Second question: Does Turkey need Europe? My answer: Undoubtedly
yes. If the admission and integration process work, as de-scribed
before, Turkey wins in all areas. Most of all, a full membership in
the EU is Tur-key’s biggest chance for sustainable democratisation. As
a European, I may decline from being enthusiastic about Turkey as a
new member state. As a human right de-fender, I have no right to
decline from a chanceto improve a very bad human rights situation of
my fellow-beings.
Third question: Is the admission of Turkey to the EU good or bad for
the recognition of the Armenian genocide? My answer: We all failed to
make the recognition a pre-condition of Turkey’s entry. At least we
failed to do this in time and in a convincing way. Now we should not
insist on further linking the admission issue with the recognition of
the Armenian genocide, which is a task on its own rights. Provided
that the democratisation process in Turkey is sup-ported and
encouraged by Europe, both on the informal and on the official level,
there are better chances for a recognition with Turkey on its way to
Europe than outside. Speaking as a citizen of Germany, I consider it a
special challenge for Germany to give an example to Turkey by
addressing to the bleak and unpleasant pages of our national
history. Having said this, I do not mean the Shoah in the first place,
which is studied and officially recognised in Germany since the
victorious allies ofWW2 compelled Germany to do so. I rather mean
Germany’s recognition and complete apology for the first geno-cide of
the 20th century, the genocide of ten-thousand of Herero and Nama
during the years 1904 until 1908. I also think about the German
involvement into the Genocide of the Armenians, in particular as an
knowing ally, who turned a blind eye for the sake of a military and
strategic partnership. As a scholar of genocide, I consider
comparative studies a necessity, for I know, as other scholars do,
that the first genocide of the20th century is linked with the genocide
in the Ottoman Empire during WW1 and with the Shoah during WW2.
And the final question: Does this all mean, that campaigns for the
acknowledgements of the Armenian genocide are in general pointless?
My answer: No, not at all. This important human right defence work is
to be continued, and the 90th year of commemoration offers ample
opportunities to draw attention to the necessity of genocide
acknowledgement. But as mentioned earlier, this is a task own its own
rights and should not be linked to intensely with limited European or
other Real-politik. Otherwise genocide acknowledgement turns into a
political tool of those who simply want to keep Turkey clear of the
European Union under every circumstance.