VIEW: Turkey has to confront its demons

March 24, 2006
Daily Times - Pakistan
By Jonathan Power

[...]
[...]. Despite phenomenal progress in improving the parameters of free speech [...], Turkey still has not faced up to its two big outstanding historical questions: What has it done with all its Jews and Christians?

[...] when will it have an honest discussion about the disappearance of the Christian Armenians, which some say was an act of genocide?

Jonathan Power is reminded of the International Affirmation of the Armenian Genocide and that the overwhelming majority of historians, estimate that 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey were killed in 1915 as part of a genocide campaign.

The facts of this history have been affirmed by the International Association of Genocide Scholars (unanimously) HERE, the People’s Permanent Tribunal in 1984, and in the legal analysis prepared for the International Center for Transitional Justice issued to the public by the Turkish Armenian Reconciliation Commission (TARC), on February 10, 2003. See HERE.

Such also was the opinion of Raphael Lemkin; Polish Jewish Lawyer, who lost his family in the Jewish Holocaust of WWII and was very affected with the horrors of the Armenian Genocide. He had that in mind in addition to the Jewish Genocide, when he coined the term "Genocide" for the first time, and afterwards when he helped in making of the "U.N. Genocide Prevention Law 1948".

Moreover, in a newly found CBS TV interview, Lemkin on the record had discussed the U.N. resolution and the Armenian Genocide.

If we’re all going to be forced to make the clash of civilisations the principle item on the geo-political agenda, [...]those who oppose such polarisation need to face up to why this modern, liberal Muslim state par excellence has not come to terms with its terrible past. Ironically, this law-abiding state, [...] has a worse record on these matters than its predecessor, the Ottoman Empire. [...] the Ottomans, had a much better historical record than Christianity in its tolerance of the other religions of “The People of the Book”.
[...]
Historically, there has never been a sustained, continuous, clash between these great civilisations. [...] the Muslims invariably showed greater magnanimity and tolerance than the Christian powers when they triumphed. So why is it that the dying Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey have such a poor record?

Some Turks would say in [...] the break up of the Ottoman Empire [...], the West has inflicted one grievous blow after another on the Muslim world. This has pushed Turkey — and much of the Muslim world in this region — into an uncharacteristic degree of defensiveness and intolerance.

Caroline Finkel, the author of the big new study on the Ottomans much praised by Turkey’s most famous novelist, Orhan Pamuk, [...], “terrible massacres did take place on both sides. That’s not in doubt. But the devil is in the detail. No ‘smoking gun’ has been found in the Ottoman archives”, although she adds that some documents could have been lost “perfectly innocently or removed”.

Finkel, while unsparing of the savagery of Ottoman forces in killing off so many Armenians, reminds her audience that more Muslim Turks than Armenians were killed in the war and that the fifth column activities of the Armenians made inevitable their relocation to Syria and Iraq, well away from the Ottoman-Russian frontline.

Jonathan Power is using Caroline Finkel's book as an authoritative document. The truth is the reviewer in The Economist (Feb. 25, 2006, p. 96) qualifies it as follows:
"The limitations of Ms Finkel's approach are most apparent in her perfunctory treatment of the empire's final, tumultuous years. She deals no more than cursorily with the Armenian massacres during the first world war, preferring to observe that scholarship has suffered from the highly-charged contemporary dispute over whether the killings constitute genocide. This point would have made a worthwhile footnote. As a substitute for an account of what happened, it is a cop-out." See HERE.

An open reckoning of the evidence by an independent panel of distinguished historians should now be commissioned by the EU and paid for by the Turkish government. The longer the Armenian issue is left to stew, manipulated by the ignorant, the more damage to the EU digestive tract, as the EU entry negotiations proceed, it is going to cause. Likewise, a separate inquiry into what happened to the Jewish and Christian minorities needs to be undertaken and why even today the continued existence of a major Orthodox seminary near Istanbul remains under threat.

The past weighs too heavily upon modern Turkey, even though its media and intellectuals can be very forthright about these issues. The Turkish government still needs to open up. Denial is no substitute for the whole truth. And if Turkey truly wants to enter the EU it must get on with it, sooner rather than later.

The writer is a leading columnist on international affairs, human rights and peace issues. He syndicates his columns with some 50 papers around the world.

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.