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October 15, 2007

Turkey's Islamists Deny Armenian Genocide

This article by Adrian Morgan (Giraldus Cambrensis of Western Resistance) appeared today in Family Security Matters and is reproduced with their permission.

Turkey And The Armenian Genocide - Uncomfortable Truths That Must Be Faced

The Current Political Conflict

On Wednesday, October 10, the House of Congress' House Foreign Affairs Committee voted by 27 votes to 21 to pass a non-binding resolution to classify actions which took place in Turkey in 1915 as "genocide". The full text of the resolution includes the statements: "The House of Representatives finds the following: (1) The Armenian Genocide was conceived and carried out by the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1923, resulting in the deportation of nearly 2,000,000 Armenians, of whom 1,500,000 men, women, and children were killed, 500,000 survivors were expelled from their homes, and which succeeded in the elimination of the over 2,500-year presence of Armenians in their historic homeland.

(4) The post-World War I Turkish Government indicted the top leaders involved in the 'organization and execution' of the Armenian Genocide and in the `massacre and destruction of the Armenians'. "

The day before the resolution was put to a vote, President George W. Bush warned against the passing of the resolution, saying: "This resolution is not the right response to these historic mass killings." Turkey, whose current government is led by Islamists of the AKP (Justice & Development Party), reacted angrily to the initial vote, which is expected to be presented before the entire House of Congress.

Abdullah Gül, who recently became the first Islamist President since modern Turkey was officially established in 1923, said the vote was "unacceptable". He claimed that some US politicians had "sought to sacrifice big problems for small domestic political games". Turkey withdrew Nabi Sensoy, its ambassador from Washington, as soon as the vote was passed. The president of Armenia, Robert Kocharyan, supported the committee's vote and said he hoped it would lead to full US recognition of the genocide.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee's decision on the vote had split mostly along party lines, with democrats supporting it and Republicans opposing it. On the floor of Congress, the bill had the sponsorship of 226 representatives, mostly democrats. One of the co-sponsors of the bill, Luis Fortuno of Puerto Rico, changed his committee vote following direct lobbying by the US president. It will now be the decision of Nancy Pelosi to introduce the resolution to the vote of the Full House of Congress (where Fortuno will not be able to vote).

Democrat Tom Lantos, the only US politician to have survived the Holocaust, is chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee. He opened discussions by saying: "We have to weigh the desire to express our solidarity with the Armenian people... against the risk that it could cause young men and women in the uniform of the United States armed services to pay an even heavier price than they are currently paying." Lantos, told AFP news agency that he would introduce a resolution praising US-Turkish friendship this week.

The United States, along with the efficiency of its military operations in Iraq, certainly stands to lose from deteriorating relations with Turkey. The US military employs Incirlik Air Base near Adana in southeastern Turkey to fly most of its supplies to its troops in Iraq.

A senior legislator in Turkey's ruling AKP, Egemen Bagis, visited Capitol Hill on Tuesday to warn that the bill would threaten military cooperation. He told Reuters: "This resolution will put your troops in harm's way. We will not be able to extend the current cooperation we are providing to you. If our allies are insulting us with crimes we have not committed, we will start questioning the merits of that endeavor."

President Abdullah Gül sent a letter to George W. Bush before the vote was taken, to thank him for his personal attempts to urge members to vote down the resolution. The US administration is now trying to limit damage. On Friday, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke to Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and also foreign minister Ali Babacan. She said: "They were dismayed."

Two US officials went to Turkey on Saturday to bolster relations between the two nations and prevent possible restrictions on US military operations in Turkey. Eric Edelman, a former US ambassador to Turkey, and Dan Fried arrived in Ankara, the capital, and met Ertugrul Apakan, a Turkish minister in the foreign ministry.

The Armenian prime minister, Serge Sarkisian will be arriving in Washington on Wednesday October 17, a move guaranteed to add to US/Turkish tensions. His visit had been planned months previously.

While US and Turkish politicians were fretting about the outcome of the resolution, another development was taking place. Turkey was planning to mount its own independent military incursion into Kurdish Northern Iraq, the least unstable region within Iraq. There are fears that such an invasion could destabilize all Iraqi regions. Concerns about this invasion force led crude oil to reach a record high of $84 per barrel on Friday. Most Iraqi oil production is in the south, but a key crude oil pipeline runs from Baku in Azerbaijan through Georgia to the port of Ceyhan in southeastern Turkey, where it is then placed on tankers. The political fallout from an invasion could lead to problems with distribution at the Turkish end.

The US has tried to urge Turkey not to mount its independent incursion into northern Iraq, but the mood in Turkey is not compromising. Already prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan claimed on Saturday that he did not need permission to enter northern Iraq. The reason for the proposed incursion is that members of the Kurdish separatist party, PKK (Workers Party of Kurdistan), have recently mounted a series of attacks in southeastern Turkey. Thirty people have been killed over the past month. The PKK fighters have fled across the border into northern Iraq.

PKK terrorists warned on Friday that they would be returning to Turkey from their enclaves in northern Iraq, to mount terror strikes on police. This is unlikely to stop Turkey's administration from requesting its parliament this week for approval for its venture. On Wednesday last week, prime minister Erdogan claimed that his party wanted a year-long authorization for mounting possible attacks against PKK bases in northern Iraq. He suggested such incursions would not necessarily start immediately.

Kartet, a private company in Turkey, supplies electricity to Iraq. On Thursday, the Turkish daily newspaper Hürriyet announced that a senior official from the Energy Ministry said that Kartet would no longer be supplying power to Iraq, due to Turkey's own power needs. He did not state whether this action was part of a sanctions package against Iraq, connected with logistical support and refuge to PKK terrorists being provided in northern Iraq.

Condoleezza Rice has said that she would want to stop the submission of the resolution on Armenian genocide to the full House of Congress, but admitted that it would be "tough". Such a resolution could hardly come at a worse time for the current US administration, but there is no "right time" to discuss the issue, when it involves a matter of historical truth. The fault ultimately lies with Turkey, for being so intransigent in its denial of documented fact. If Turkey can blackmail and threaten the safety of US troops as a direct result of the recent resolution, then the US should seriously question the worth of maintaining deep trust in such an "ally".

Turkey's Denial of Armenian Genocide

The UN Convention on Genocide took place in December 1948. Article Two of this declaration describes genocide as the implementation of acts designed "to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group."

Turkey admits that large numbers of Armenians died in 1915, but says that they died as a by-product of forced deportation and because some Armenians took up arms against the ailing Ottoman Empire. It refuses to acknowledge that there was a "genocide". Turkey claims that during World War 1, no more than 300,000 Armenians died, though overwhelming evidence suggests that between 1915 and 1917, 1.5 million Armenians died. If Turkey had been more mature about its history, as Germany has been concerning the Nazi genocide of 6.5 million Jews, the issue would have been laid to rest long ago.

As the situation now stands, Turkey has no diplomatic relations with its small neighbor Armenia, as a result of its obstinate denial of the truth. In 1993, the border with Armenia was closed by the Turks. There were tentative moves towards a thawing of the diplomatic frostiness in April 2005, but these came to nothing. The stumbling blocks again concerned issues of the Armenian genocide.

In May 2005, Turkey's justice minister Cemil Cicek blocked a conference of Turkish academics who wanted to critically discuss the historical facts of the deaths of Armenians. In September 2005, just 10 days before Turkey was to begin talks about its possible accession to the European Union, a second attempt to hold this conference was banned by a court order. The legal move had been instigated by a group of nationalist lawyers.

The denials of what took place particularly in 1915 are upheld by the Islamists in Turkey, and also the secularists. The AKP party is the first Islamist party to rule Turkey. Previous attempts to form an Islamist government were suppressed with coups mounted by the pro-secular military. The last elected Islamist government was dissolved by the military in 1996.

Within Turkey, anyone who denies the official version of "history" runs the risk of falling foul of Article 301 of the penal code. This outlaws any "insult against Turkey or Turkishness". The maximum penalty for breaching Article 301 is a three-year jail term. Article 301 had been rewritten in June 2005 in a package of amendments to the existing penal code. The penal code had been altered to make Turkey eligible to join talks on membership of the European Union. No-one in the EU appeared to notice that Article 301, in both its original and revised state, contravened Article 19 of the 1948 International Declaration of Human Rights - the right to freedom of speech.

Orhan Pamuk is Turkey's most famous novelist, whose novel "Snow" has been has been acclaimed as a modern "classic". In 2006, Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. In February 2005, Pamuk had given an interview to a Swiss newspaper. In this interview, he referred to the killings of Armenians, but he did not mention the term "genocide". He said that in the 20th century "a million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed in these lands [Turkey],"but few spoke of this. His statement contradicted the "official version" of the truth, and on December 16, 2006, Pamuk appeared in court, charged with breaching Article 301.

Pamuk's impending trial had drawn international criticism of Turkey, but prime minister Erdogan claimed that foreign critics were putting pressure on Turkey's judiciary. He said: "I find that a little controversial to the principle of respecting the rule of law... I don't think the way they act is very proper in this case."

On the first day of Pamuk's trial at Sisli district criminal court in Istanbul, Judge Metin Aydin adjourned the case to February. He was unsure if the case was to be brought under the original penal code, instituted by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, or under the revised penal code. If the trial was made under the old conditions of the penal code, the justice minister (then Cemil Cicek) would have to issue a ruling. Pamuk's appearance at the court was greeted by angry crowds. Most of these were militant nationalists, sometimes called "Kemalists". As he entered the courtroom, a woman hit him with a folder. As he was driven away, his car was pelted with eggs.

On January 23, 2006, it was announced that Turkey had dropped its case against Pamuk. The novelist was luckier than Turkish Armenian Hrant Dink.

On August 28, 2005, a court in the southeastern city of Sanliurfa initiated proceedings against Hrant Dink, on charges of breaching Article 301. Mr Dink was the owner and editor of a bilingual magazine called Agos. The Sanliurfa trial had concerned comments that Dink had made at a 2002 conference, where he had referred to a verse that must be memorized by all students. This verse starts with the words: "I am a Turk, I am honest and hardworking." Dink had told the conference that he was honest and hardworking, but he was not a Turk. He was an Armenian. That trial was never completed, for reasons I will explain below.

On October 7, 2005, Dink was sentenced by the Sisli Court of Second Instance at Istanbul at the culmination of another trial where he had been accused of breaching Article 301 by "insulting Turkish identity". All Dink had done to "insult Turkish identity" was to publish a series of articles extolling the virtues of "Armenian identity" and to write of the way that the Armenian genocide still impacted on modern Turkish life. Dink was given a suspended six month jail term. He appealed against this conviction in 2006, but the decision against him was upheld.

Dink's trials and subsequent tribulations, as well as the international brouhaha stirred up by US politicians mentioning a genuine historical event, point to an affliction in the heart of Turkey's national identity. Quasi-fascistic Turkish nationalism is the infectious and suppurating byproduct of the unhealed wounds of Turkish history. And in the background, not acknowledged by predominantly Muslim Turkey, and never mentioned in the Western media, is another dimension to the case of the Armenian genocide. The Armenians are Christian.

The deportations of Armenians in 1915 is acknowledged by Turkey. What is not acknowledged is that they were deported precisely because they were Christian, and had their own cultural identity and language. Ethnic cleansing is the handmaiden of genocide, and Turkey in 1915 was openly practicing ethnic cleansing, a practice that had started at the end of the 19th century. In the 21st century, only scoundrels can make political capital from defending the indefensible.

Because of Turkey's obstinate denials, other countries have made official rulings attesting that the Armenian genocide took place. In 1982, Cyprus' House of Representatives passed a resolution. The European Parliament passed a resolution in 1987. This move did stop Turkey attempting to join the European Union, a factor which should hearten US Republicans and administrative officials who fear a House of Congress vote. After all, there are 1.5 million US citizens of Armenian descent, many of whom had ancestors directly affected by the Armenian genocide. Their opinions should count far more than the hurt pride of a temperamental NATO ally that is currently threatening to throw its toys out of the baby carriage because it doesn't like the truth.

Greece made a resolution in 1996 and even established an Armenian Genocide Day. Switzerland's National Council passed a resolution in 2003 and Canada's House of Commons passed a resolution in 2004. Slovakia's National Assembly made a resolution in 2004. Argentina passed a law in 2006, and Chile's Senate passed a resolution in 2007.

In France, where 500,000 Armenians live, a resolution was passed in 2001, but on October 12, 2006 a bill was passed which made denial of the Armenian genocide a crime, potentially punishable by a one-year prison sentence and a $60,000 fine. The move was carried in the French National Assembly by 106 votes to 19. Before the French vote took place, Islamist prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called it a "systematic lie machine" but claimed Turkey would not engage in "tit-for"tat" reprisals.

The day before the French vote, a judicial committee had debated two moves to introduce laws to parliament which would have described France's actions in its war with its former colony of Algeria as "genocide". A third draft bill was discussed by the justice commission, which would have made anyone who claimed that there was an Armenian genocide would be jailed. Article 301 already allows for such punishment. All three draft bills were rejected. However, Ankara warned that French companies would be banned from major economic projects in Turkey should the French bill become law, an obvious "tit-for-tat" reprisal.

Hrant Dink opposed the punitive aspects of the French law. He said to a newspaper: "This is idiocy. It only shows that those who restrict freedom of expression in Turkey and those who try to restrict it in France are of the same mentality." On TV, he said: "I am standing trial in Turkey for saying it was genocide. If this bill is adopted, I will go to France and, in spite of my conviction, I will say it was not genocide. The two countries can then compete to see who throws me in jail first."

Hrant Dink was born on September 15, 1954 in Malatya, the town in central Turkey where three Christians had their throats slit on April 18 this year. He founded the magazine Agos on April 5, 1996. The intention of this publication was to foster understandings between the Turkish and Armenian communities in Turkey. Dink believed that the Armenian community lived in too much isolation. The attention drawn to him by his high-profile trials brought his life under threat.

Agos had its offices in central Istanbul. On January 19, 2007 Hrant Dink was leaving his offices when a teenager wearing a white Muslim skullcap approached him. The youth fired three shots into the 53-year old editor's head and neck. Dink slumped down dead on the spot. His teenaged killer shouted out "I shot the infidel" before running off.

Hrant Dink was aware of death threats which had been made against him for daring to speak of the Armenian genocide. One threat he received by email seemed so serious he turned it over to the Sisli prosecutor's office, but his complaint was ignored. In his last article for Agos, Dink wrote: "How real or unreal are these threats? To be honest, it is of course impossible for me to know for sure. What is truly threatening and unbearable for me is the psychological torture I personally place myself in. "Now what are these people thinking about me?" is the question that really bugs me. It is unfortunate that I am now better known than I once was and I feel much more the people throwing me that glance of "Oh, look, isn't he that Armenian guy?"

And I reflexively start torturing myself. One aspect of this torture is curiosity, the other unease. One aspect is attention, the other apprehension. I am just like a pigeon... Obsessed just as much what goes on my left, right, front, back. My head is just as mobile... and just as fast enough to turn right away."

After his death, his son Arat Dink took over the editing of Agos. When Arat Dink decided to reproduce one of his father's 2006 articles which mentioned the Armenian genocide, he too was hauled before the courts, charged under Article 301 for "insulting Turkish identity". Only last week, while Turkey officially fulminated at the US mention of its genocide, Arat Dink was sentenced. On Thursday October 11, 2007, he and a colleague from the magazine were both given suspended jail terms of one year.

Tomorrow, in Part Two, I will outline the cultural and historical background of the first massacres against the Armenians in Turkey. These would lead inevitably to the genocide which took place in the First World War. Genocides never happen in a vacuum as isolated events. Often, as in the case of Russian pogroms against peasants, there are campaigns of deliberate starvation. In the case of the Armenian genocide starvation was used as a weapon (see picture at top of page).

Without incidents such as the German attacks on Jewish shops that took place on "Crystalnacht", there would not have been a climate that later allowed the Nazis to conduct mass exterminations of Jews. Similarly, in the case of the Armenian genocide, the events of 1915 to 1917 were preceded by deliberate and politically-motivated attacks and killings at least from 1894 onwards.

Adrian Morgan

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Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at October 15, 2007 8:02 PM

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