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The Spectre That Haunts Turkey
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"Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" said Adolf Hitler, before ordering storm troopers to kill men, women and children in Poland so Germany could have Lebensraum, or living space.
Hitler was wrong about the killings of Armenians as about so many things.
The death of hundreds of thousands of Armenians between 1915 and 1917 after the collapse of the Ottoman empire and the emergence of modern Turkey in 1923 has not been forgotten and now bedevils US-Turkey relations.
Turkey has condemned a vote by the House of Representatives foreign affairs committee yesterday that recognises the massacres as genocide - the deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic, religious or national group.
Turkish governments have consistently denied the accusation; they say the killings occurred at a time of civil unrest as the Ottoman empire fell apart and that the numbers are inflated.
To say that claims of Armenian genocide touch a raw nerve in Turkey is an understatement.
When the French parliament decreed last year that criminal charges be filed against anyone who denied genocide was committed against the Armenians, Turkey cut off military contacts with France and cancelled some contracts.
In January, Hrant Dink, a Turkish-Armenian journalist, was shot dead outside his newspaper, Agos, after he called the killing of Armenians genocide. More than 100,000 people marched at his funeral procession, chanting: "We are all Armenians."
Yet, although an outspoken critic of Turkey's denial that the events of 1915 amounted to genocide, Dink was equally opposed to international attempts to politicise the issue.
When the French parliament made denying the Armenian genocide a crime, he vowed to travel there to deny it.
Orhan Pamuk, the winner of last year's Nobel prize for literature, was hauled before an Istanbul court in 2005 for "belittling Turkishness" - a criminal offence - by raising the issue of genocide.
Pamuk was taken to court after telling a Swiss newspaper that the massacres of more than one million Armenians and of more than 30,000 Kurds in Turkey [in the 1990s] were taboo topics in his country.
The trial in Istanbul turned ugly, with a mob of baying nationalists scuffling with the writer's supporters as riot police looked on.
Pamuk was acquitted on a technicality, but the case damaged Turkey's efforts to project itself as an increasingly liberal country seeking to join the EU.
The notorious article of the penal code remains.
Turkey's harsh reaction to those who dare to break political taboos by wanting to discuss the Armenian genocide comes despite the fact that 22 countries and organisations, such as the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, recognise it as such.
The mass killings of Armenians, one of the largest minorities in the Ottoman empire, followed Turkey's disastrous military campaign against the Russians in the Caucasus in 1914 after Ankara sided with Germany.
The Turks blamed the defeat on the Armenians living in the region siding with the Russians.
In 1915 Armenian intellectuals were rounded up and laws were passed authorising the deportation of Armenians and the confiscation of their homes and property.
Over the next two years the Armenian population of Ottoman Turkey was uprooted and expelled to the desert regions of Mesopotamia.
In the process between 500,000 and a million Armenians were killed or died of exposure or disease.
President Theodore Roosevelt would later call the episode "the greatest crime of the war".
Turkey's official position is that deaths occurred during the "relocation" or "deportation" and cannot be called "genocide".
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/turkey/st...2188737,00.html
Imperial Delusions Die Hard
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Imperial delusions die hard - and once again the US Congress is trying to legislate for the world. As most Turks see it, this week's committee vote in the House of Representatives accusing Turkey of genocide against the Armenians in 1915-17 is an insulting, gratuitous interference in their sovereign affairs. As the 27 Democrats and Republicans who backed the bill see it, it is a matter of putting the world to rights, according to America's lights.
Congress has a long history of extraterritorial meddling. It regularly slaps unilateral sanctions on "rogue" governments, and orders foreign businesses and individuals to obey its strictures, regardless of nationality. Its attempts to direct US foreign policy are resisted by the executive branch to varying degrees. On Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and Israel, White House and legislature mostly agree. On Turkey, like Iraq, they are at noisy loggerheads.
"We oppose the bill. We think it is a bad idea that will do nothing to improve Turkish-Armenian relations. It will not do anything to advance American interests," Daniel Fried, assistant secretary for Eurasian affairs, told Turkish television this week. President Bush, the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, and defence secretary, Robert Gates, all chimed in. They even mobilised all former living US secretaries of state in joint opposition, but to no avail. It was a measure of the lame-duck president's chronic weakness.
Sentimentality and righteousness are never far from the surface of American politics. "Despite President Bush twisting arms and making deals, justice prevailed," said Democrat Brad Sherman of California, playing to a gallery of elderly ethnic Armenians who attended the vote and the wider Armenian diaspora. "If we hope to stop future genocides, we need to admit to those horrific acts of the past."
One problem for Mr Sherman and his fellow Californian Democrat, the House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is that for the most part Turks admit nothing of the kind - and deeply resent such vicarious apologising. "Twenty-seven foolish Americans" said a headline in the Vatan newspaper. "It is blatantly obvious that [Congress] does not have a task or function to rewrite history," snarled the Ankara government.
Another problem is that the Democrats' motives are up for scrutiny. Turkish media suggest the struggle is less about justice and more about votes and campaign contributions from the powerful Armenian-American lobby, concentrated in the key 2008 election battlefields of California, New Jersey and Michigan.
More pertinently perhaps, Turkish officials ask why, when the US officially believes genocide is occurring right now in Sudan, it is digging up disputed events nearly a century ago. This week saw escalating killings in Darfur and warnings that a beefed-up UN force will not deploy for many months yet. Campaigners say that is partly because Congress has failed to honour US funding pledges.
Having lost the committee vote, and conscious that the full House is expected to approve the bill before Thanksgiving, the Bush administration is now pursuing damage-limitation. Turkey is being reassured the Senate will not pass the bill into law and that in any case, nothing is really changed by such posturing. The hope is that Ankara will not "overreact".
Hope is the correct word, for Mr Bush is now reduced to a fingers-crossed policy. In the next few days, an alienated Turkish parliament will almost certainly vote to authorise punitive military incursions into northern Iraq in pursuit of Kurdish separatists who find sanctuary there. Such action, going directly against US wishes, has great potential to destabilise the region further.
And that may be just a beginning. As Mr Gates noted this week, Turkey could cut off US military supply lines to Iraq and disrupt air force operations. It could strengthen its de facto anti-Kurdish alliance with Iran and withdraw support for Washington's attempts to isolate Tehran. In the worst case, congressional grandstanding could cost the US its most powerful Muslim ally in the Middle East.
Such catastrophic rupture is unlikely - the two sides need each other too much. But as the Turkish Daily News columnist Mehmet Ali Birand noted today: "In spite of the non-binding nature [of the bill], Turkey will still lose considerable prestige. Armenian allegations will gain credibility. It will make it easier for Armenians to pressurise European parliaments. Turkey will be hurt."
The hurt is deep, born of a sense of a friend's betrayal. And given that a poll earlier this year found that 81% of Turks already disapproved of US policies, the multiplying, ramifying cost to American prestige and leverage is set to rise. Even after Iraq and uncounted "war on terror" disasters, imperial Washington still seems blind to the difference between power and wisdom.
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http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/simon_tisdall/2007/10/righteousness_before_realism.html
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"The favorite American pastime is not baseball, it's moral crusades."
Last edited by HardTranceProd on Oct-11-2007 at 15:17
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