Fresno Bee
Sept 15 2005
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Turkey in denial
Bid to join European Union entangled in genocide dispute.
(Updated Thursday, September 15, 2005, 5:55 AM)
For nearly a century debate has roiled over what the Turkish
government and most Turks call a human tragedy brought on by the
chaos of World War I and what most of the world – including The Bee –
call the Armenian genocide.
Now the issue has become enmeshed in Turkey’s faltering effort to
join the European Union. How the conflict turns out is important –
for Turkish-Armenian relations and for the future of Turkey, a
country that straddles Europe and the Middle East.
Turkish officialdom has always denied that forces of the collapsing
Ottoman Empire sought to exterminate Turkish Armenians starting in
1915, when ethnic Armenians say the Turks killed as many as 1.5
million Armenians over eight years. Turkish officials agree that
hundreds of thousands of Armenians died, but say that disease, famine
and exposure, as well as fighting caused by Armenian guerrilla raids
against retreating Turkish troops, were the primary causes.
There matters stood until last spring, when Turkish Prime Minister
Recep Tayyip Erdogan invited foreign scholars to study Ottoman
archives to determine what really happened.
That encouraging gesture has had little hopeful result. Scholars have
run afoul of Turkish officials and military leaders, who forced
cancellation of a conference. An ethnic Armenian publisher has been
accused of defaming Turkey by calling himself “an Armenian of
Turkey,” and a prominent Turkish novelist faces a similar charge for
saying in an interview that Turks killed 1million Armenians and, more
recently, 30,000 Turkish Kurds in a guerrilla war, and that “no one
but me dares to talk about it.”
The timing of these charges – just weeks before negotiations are to
begin on Turkey’s application to join the EU – has raised suspicion,
and charges that some nationalist elements, already angered by
growing European opposition to Turkish EU membership, are trying to
sabotage the process. The criminal charges fly in the face of
extensive changes in Turkish law, including abolition of the death
penalty and ending a ban on speaking Kurdish, to satisfy EU
requirements for membership. France opposes Turkey joining, and if
the Christian Democrats win Germany’s election, another prominent
negative voice would be added.
What’s at stake goes well beyond the Armenian issue, coming as
millions of Europeans – even in such liberal bastions as the
Netherlands – are rethinking their traditional welcome to immigrants.
And Muslims rank highest in this reassessment.
Turkey, with an overwhelmingly Muslim population but a staunchly
secular political system, is seen by many as a bridge between the
Christian West and the Muslim East. But as Europe’s welcome mat is
pulled away, many Turks resent what they regard as rising religious
and cultural bigotry among Europeans.
Although it’s hard to envision Turkey’s secular leaders rejecting the
West and embracing Islamic tradition, the roadblocks in the path of
Armenian-Turkish reconciliation raise again the question of whether
Turkey and Europe can ever share a common home.
There’s a simple solution, though it would by no means be easy:
Turkey should simply recognize and acknowledge the past. That would
both smooth Turkey’s path toward EU membership, and begin to right a
historic wrong.