Genocide denial causes Dutch election upset

27-09-2006
Radio Netherlands
by Andy Clark

It might seem a little strange but the Armenian genocide of 1915 has become an issue in the run up to the Dutch elections. The two leading parties in the opinion polls have kicked out prospective MPs because they deny that the genocide took place. The candidates, one from the opposition Labour Party and two from the biggest coalition party - the Christian Democrat CDA - are Dutch/Turkish politicians.

It made the headlines after questions were raised by the Armenian community in the Netherlands when the names of the candidates were made public on the party lists for the November elections, and a heated discussion soon followed.

Official policy
The candidates in question had clearly stated in the past that, in their view, the genocide of Armenians in Turkey in 1915 had not taken place. This view is contrary to the official policy of the Dutch government and of the parties themselves.

Tineke Huizinga is from the Christian Union - a small party in the parliament which introduced an initiative in 2004 saying that the government has to push for recognition of the genocide in Turkey as part of the negotiations for Turkey's desired accession to the EU. That initiative was unanimously accepted. Ms Huzinga explains the official Dutch position:

"More than one and a half million people were murdered during the time of World War I by Turkey and this was a genocide and you can absolutely compare this with the Holocaust."

Never took place
It was a clash with this position that brought the CDA candidates Ayhan Tonca, Osman Elamci and Labour Party candidate Erdinc Sacan into problems with their parties. Ayhan Tonca has constantly denied the genocide occurred:

"The genocide that people talk about never took place."

Although he doesn't deny that hundreds of thousands of people died, he argues that there needs to be further investigation to see if the killings were consciously carried out by the Turkish government at that time. Deliberate and conscious persecution would constitute genocide.

Newspaper interview
His explanation was not in line with the recognition of genocide called for by his party, and events that followed the initial uproar made things even harder for the CDA to accept. Under pressure following the discussion in the Dutch media, the two CDA candidates signed a declaration saying they had changed their minds and would now recognise the genocide. But then followed an interview with a Turkish newspaper in which they repeated their original denials - and this left the CDA with little choice but to remove them from the list of candidates.

The Labour Party decided to scrap its candidate from the list after he refused to stand by the official party policy recognising the genocide.

Naive
Experts accuse the parties of being somewhat naive in not carrying out more thorough checks before putting the candidates up for election. Professor of Turkish studies at Leiden University Erik Jan Zurcher says the parties were so anxious to have ethnic minority candidates on their lists that they didn't carry out the checks.

In Turkey itself it is official policy to deny the genocide and those saying it did take place are liable to prosecution. Just this week Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink made it known that he is being prosecuted for the second time for saying that the genocide took place.

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.