Eric Bogosian
It would be a mistake to think of the Ottoman leaders who engineered
the mass destruction of the Armenians during World War I as nothing more
than bloodthirsty barbarians. To be sure, many of their proxies were
intensely violent characters common to the frontier lands of Eastern
Asia Minor. But the leaders of the Ottoman Empire, the key figures in
the Committee for Union and Progress, specifically Talat Pasha, Enver
Pasha, Doctor Behaeddin Shakir and associates such as Ziya Gokalp, were
urbane Europeans. They saw the world through European eyes and
understood very well European law. To be sure, the eradication of the
Armenian people from their homelands was a massive and terrible
bloodletting, but it was not the product of a breakdown of civilization.
Instead it was, like the Holocaust that would follow only 25 years
later, a centrally organized, criminal act planned and prosecuted by
wily and callous political leaders.
This
genocide, as it would later be labeled by jurist Rafael Lemkin, was a
brazen attempt to completely restructure and “Turkify” what remained of
the Ottoman Empire. It was carefully planned with a clear-eyed
understanding of the consequences of such a massive crime. In fact, in
May of 1915, the Allied powers made it clear that whenever the war did
end there would be severe punishments meted out to those responsible for
“crimes against humanity” (the first time this term was used). For this
reason, the genocide was structured to include its coverup and its
denial. Talat Pasha, a central figure in the leadership and in the
planning and orchestration of the genocide, was very active in this
regard. He sent directives to local governors instructing them to bury
the countless bodies so they would not be reported. He avoided outright
massacres in major cities, so that Westerners in those places would only
learn of the killings by hearsay. He routinely sent his orders as two
simultaneous cables, so that one set of instructions would appear to
preserve, rather than destroy Armenians, thus laying the groundwork for
later denial. The fog of war camouflaged a major crime. At the end of
the war, records were destroyed and in fact, significant archives remain
closed to this day.
The full coverup and denial began once the
Republic of Turkey was institutionalized under Kemal Ataturk beginning
in 1923. The first step was to erase history by making any records that
existed of the late Ottoman leaders’ actions unintelligible. The
Turkish language was reconfigured, the alphabet converted from an
Arabic-based script to a European style alphabet, towns and cities were
renamed obscuring their origins, indeed a new history was authored. This
new, cleaned-up version of the Turkish narrative was taught in schools
and institutions with the same thoroughness as any Communist doctrine.
Eventually, even more radical histories, particularly of the Turkish
people and the events surrounding World War I were published. Here
absurd allegations were made denying that the Armenians, an ancient
indigenous people who had lived in the region for thousands of years,
ever existed in the first place!
For the last two decades of the
20th century, this reformulation of history and the direct denial of the
genocide has been the entrenched position of the Turkish government.
Millions of dollars have been spent to promulgate an alternative to what
is now established history among most scholars in the world. Lobbyists
have been recruited and scholars subsidized in order to support the
Turkish position. The Turkish government went so far at one point in the
1930s as to lobby successfully against the production of the MGM movie
“The Forty Days of Musa Dagh,” eventually getting the State Department
to intercede and quash the film.
Of course, Turkey has been an
important ally to the United States for a long time now. With its
strategic location bordering Russia, Iran and Iraq as well as its close
proximity to Israel and the Arabian oil fields, Turkey is irreplaceable.
Turkey is a member of NATO. Turkey is the recipient of millions in aid.
For this reason, that is, to appease a foreign power, the United States
has avoided any official recognition of the Armenian Genocide. Why does
Turkey persist in this denial of established history? Simply because it
can.
In the last 15 years, the program of denial has been stepped
up. New techniques have come into play, as recently explained by
National Association for Armenian Studies and Research director Marc
Mamigonian in his meticulous piece in the most recent issue of the
academic journal Genocide Studies International. Here Mamigonian
explains that significant scholarly institutions have now been enlisted
in this rewriting of history, citing specifically the establishment of a
“Turkish Studies Project” at the University of Utah. Utah in turn has
for a decade now been publishing work by scholars whose representation
of “the events of 1915” aligns with the Turkish state’s position, thus
giving a sort of academic legitimacy to the denialist narrative
promulgated by Turkey.
What is going on here exactly? Imagine a
major university supporting “Creationism” or sponsoring a panel that
supports the notion that global warming is fiction. Such sponsorship
makes the spurious legitimate. Once the denialist position is
underwritten by an institution, the Turkish lobby can then go to court
to argue absurdly that “both sides” need to be represented when the
Armenian Genocide is described (for example, in history books). This is
exactly what happened in Massachusetts, (Griswold et al vs. Board of
Education, 2005). Though the proponents of what is termed, with
Orwellian overtones, the “contra-genocide thesis” led by the Assembly of
Turkish American Associations (ATAA) lost this time, it is not hard to
imagine an ongoing war of attrition against educational institutions all
over the U.S..
Key here is the notion that there must appear to
be some sort of debate over “the facts.” This is a tactic borrowed from
tobacco industry lobbyists and those who argue that global warming is a
fiction. For decades, despite clear evidence, tobacco lobbyists insisted
that we didn’t know all the facts with regard to cigarettes and health,
when the truth was clear and indisputable. By doing so, they delayed
any sort of direct response to the destructive habit. Making the
argument that a “debate” is ongoing, allows doubt to seep into the
picture, muddying the waters and distorting the public’s understanding.
This is exactly what Turkish denialists are intent on doing. And they
are succeeding.
Today, genocide seems almost commonplace. It has
manifested itself in Africa repeatedly as well as in Eastern Europe. The
Americas were built on genocide. Most recently, the actions of ISIS in
the Middle East are virtually identical to the modus operandi of the
Ottoman “Special Organization” as incidents of beheading, immolation and
the razing of villages are reported daily. Though the leaders of the
Ottoman Empire were not the first to employ death marches or to attack
innocent civilians, techniques were perfected under the Young Turks. The
centrally organized and technologically efficient actions of the
Committee of Union and Progress were a precursor to the stunning
destruction of populations a mere 25 years later as the Nazis rolled
across Europe.
“Who remembers the Armenians?” asked Adolf Hitler
as he launched his armies against his perceived enemies. Is there a
reason to remember? Is there a reason to acknowledge what happened? As
the decades roll by, don’t we have other things to focus on? Hasn’t war
always been terrible? Didn’t the Ukrainians, the Poles, the Chinese, the
Native Americans, the Filipinos (and on and on) all suffer as greatly
if not greater than the Armenians? Why is it necessary to acknowledge
this great tragedy at all?
For me, the answer lies eight blocks
away from my home in New York City at the site of the World Trade Center
where thousands died 15 years ago. What made this tragedy even more
difficult for the survivors was that there was little left of the
victims. Indeed, the tragedy of violent death is amplified exponentially
by anonymity. My great-grandfathers died in this way. Somewhere their
bones lie in an unmarked grave. Denial is the final chapter in a
genocide. To deny how these men and hundreds of thousands of others died
is nothing less than a continuation of the genocide itself.
"Salon," April 29, 2015 (www.salon.com)
No comments:
Post a Comment