Barbara Slavin
Once again, the Obama administration has shied-away from using the word genocide to describe what befell Armenians in Turkey 100 years ago.
Despite Obama’s pledges as a presidential candidate to
use this term, his White House — like those before it — appears
reluctant to offend a NATO ally on the front lines of so many conflicts
in the Middle East.
Instead the Obama administration speaks obliquely of the “1915
atrocities” that “extinguished” 1.5 million lives — without saying who
was responsible for the killing. But academics and think-tankers in
Washington say there is growing recognition that the deaths of Armenians
in Turkey during World War I was the result of a genocidal campaign by
Ottoman Turkish authorities that began with mass deportation of
Armenians from Istanbul on April 24, 1915.
Kemal Kirisci, director of the Center on the United States and
Europe's Turkey Project at the Brookings Institution, agreed with
Grigoryan. “I use the term,” he told Al-Monitor. “There is growing
recognition that something nasty befell the Armenian community in the
Ottoman period and Turks are painfully revisiting this history.”
Recognition is one thing, however; statecraft another.
“There’s the history and there’s the politics,” said Thomas de Waal, a
senior associate in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace and author of a new book, “Great
Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide.”
“There is not a dispute anymore about the history,” de Waal told
Al-Monitor (*), but about how Turks and Armenians should come to terms with
it and what the impact might be on efforts to normalize relations
between their two modern states.
One side of the debate, de Waal told Al-Monitor, are advocates for
“holding Turkey’s feet to the fire, another group asks why let a
century-old tragedy get in the way of real stuff happening today and a
bunch of liberals in the middle says, ‘yes it was genocide but this
isn’t going to be solved by preaching to the Turks but by Turks talking
among themselves.’”
The Justice and Development Party under the leadership of former
prime minister, now President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has helped advance
the debate by apologizing for crimes committed against Armenians and
other minorities. (**) But the Erdogan government rejects evidence that the
Ottomans carried out a systematic effort to eliminate the Armenian
population and has called for an international commission to study the
issue.
Erdogan also infuriated Armenians
and their supporters this year by timing a ceremony marking the
Gallipoli campaign of World War I to coincide with a major commemoration
in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, April 24 of the 100th anniversary of
the start of the genocide.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, on his first official
visit to Washington, defended Turkish policies toward Armenia and
Armenians. At a press conference April 20 at the Carnegie Endowment, he
said that there are 40,000 Armenian citizens in Turkey and two Armenian
candidates in upcoming parliamentary elections. He added that the
government was renovating Armenian churches (***) and supporting the Armenian
patriarchy in Istanbul as well as “taking courageous steps toward
reconciliation” with the government in Yerevan.
However, the border between the two neighbors remains closed and an
agreement negotiated by the Swiss with an assist from then-Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton in 2009 has foundered over continued differences
regarding the breakaway Azeri republic of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Meanwhile, parliaments in European countries
including Austria and Germany have endorsed resolutions using the word
genocide to describe Ottoman actions against Armenians. Pope Francis on
April 12 called the slaughter of Armenians “the first genocide of the 20th century,” prompting Turkey to recall its ambassador from the Vatican.
Experts in Washington say the word used to describe the events is
important, but should not stand in the way of the process to promote
healing. A conference is scheduled in Washington in mid-May, sponsored
by the Carnegie Endowment and MIT’s Center for International Studies, to
discuss how to advance the issue beyond name calling. The conference is
in honor of Hrant Dink, a Turkish Armenian journalist and advocate of reconciliation who was assassinated in Istanbul in 2007.
Dink believed that outside criticism would not be productive and that
it was more important to educate Turks about the events so they could
come to terms with what occurred a century ago.
“I tend to agree that Turkey should be left alone to deal with this
issue rather than trying to ram this down Turkey’s throat,” Kirisci
said.
Kirisci and Grigoryan agreed that Erdogan had contributed in significant ways to Turkish recognition of a bloody past.
“In the beginning he did make some gestures that were quite hopeful”
including inviting Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian to Turkey in 2009
to attend a soccer game between
the Turkish and Armenian national teams, Grigoryan said.(***) “There is also
a significant constituency in Turkey for normalizing relations with
Armenia.”
But concerns about alienating Turkish nationalists in advance of this
summer’s parliamentary elections have led Erdogan lately to take a less
conciliatory line.
“Erdogan is a very strange politician,” Grigoryan said. “It’s hard to
pin down his position. Sometimes he’s conciliatory, sometimes the
opposite.”
The grandson of genocide survivors who lost their original spouses in
the flight from Turkey, Grigoryan told Al-Monitor that the events of
1915 are as much “a part of Armenian culture and outlook” as the
Holocaust is for Jews.
“It’s becoming not just morally questionable to deny it but it’s
starting to look ridiculous,” he said, predicting that eventually even a
US president would say the word.
"Al-Monitor," April 23, 2015
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Notes by "Armeniaca"
(*) This questionable view is debunked by the statement of Turkish European Union Minister Volkan Bozkir to Euronews (April 23, 2015): "I served thirty-eight-and-a-half years in the foreign
ministry with the Ottoman archives, our archives in Paris, London and
Berlin, all the archives of the Foreign Ministry. I am a person who
knows closely how carefully these documents have been analysed and the
conclusions drawn. Nowhere did we see any order on intention to commit
genocide. That’s why we are against this terminology. The Turkish nation is comfortable because there is no point in Turkish history or in Ottoman history which would embarrass us. We say historical incidents should not be used as political tools. Politicians cannot make decisions about historical events" (emphasis added).
(**) There has been no apology to Armenians. There have only been "condolences."
(***) The Turkish government has only renovated the church of Aghtamar (2007) since 2002.
(****) The invitation was from former President Abdullah Gul.
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