Armenian discussions again...
Saturday, October 21, 2006
print this page mail to a friend
Six days ago the French lower house of parliament approved a bill making it a crime to deny that Armenians suffered genocide at the hands of Ottoman Turks after World War I. It is unlikely that the upper house, the Senate, will approve of the bill, but if they do, the new motion establishes a one-year prison term and a 45,000 euro fine for anyone denying the massacres. The approval of the bill has sparked justifiably widespread anger in Turkey because Turkey claims that the accusations of the Armenian massacres have no historical basis but are political and aim to cause difficulties, and thus Ankara adamantly rejects accusations that around 1.5 million Armenians died in a genocide in 1915. What it argues is that some Christian Armenians and Muslim Turks died in a partisan conflict that was raging at that time.
ALİ GÜNEŞ*
Six days ago the French lower house of parliament approved a bill making it a crime to deny that Armenians suffered genocide at the hands of Ottoman Turks after World War I. It is unlikely that the upper house, the Senate, will approve of the bill, but if they do, the new motion establishes a one-year prison term and a 45,000 euro fine for anyone denying the massacres. The approval of the bill has sparked justifiably widespread anger in Turkey because Turkey claims that the accusations of the Armenian massacres have no historical basis but are political and aim to cause difficulties, and thus Ankara adamantly rejects accusations that around 1.5 million Armenians died in a genocide in 1915. What it argues is that some Christian Armenians and Muslim Turks died in a partisan conflict that was raging at that time. Moreover, Turkey also maintains that France's attempt to pass this bill is an attempt to impede the prospect of its membership in the EU. For France, however, the crucial point is the presidential elections in seven months, and I think there are two reasons behind its attempt. First, the French public is against Turkey's EU membership, so that the top politicians, Jacques Chirac, Segolene Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy, due to their election worries, object to Turkey's EU membership. The second reason, which is also closely linked to the issue of the coming elections, is the presence of a large Armenian immigrant community of up to 500,000 in France. The community is a powerful political lobby that French politicians feel they have to take into account.
My argument about Armenians is a little bit different. Although the reactions of both the president and the prime minister as well as that of other civil rights groups are unmistakably right and necessary, I have observed for years that the ways Turkey has tried to have its rightful voice heard all over the world is not sufficient or effective. This insufficiency and ineffectiveness may be seen in two ways. First, there is no continuity in Turkey's attempt to have its voice heard. In spite of the fact that the Armenian issue has been a persistent obstacle before Turkey in international relations, we remember it whenever an Armenian discussion starts. We need effective lobbying activities and the means to inform the world of what happened in 1915. Secondly, most of our historians do not have a good enough command of English to get their articles about the so-called massacre discussions published in international journals. Due to the language problem, moreover, they are not courageous and able to organize or join international conferences, seminars and meetings in which they could present the historical facts they have. The world, particularly the Western world, thus remains ignorant or has prejudices about Turkey, since public opinion is shaped solely by politicians or by the dominant lobbying groups as in France
At a conference in Spain a month ago, I witnessed how the people and even intellectuals are badly informed about the Armenian issue. For example, Bill Gray from Lulea Technical University in Sweden analyzed Joseph O'Neil's “Blood-Dark Track,” a work of non-fiction published in 2001. As a historical investigation, it sheds light on the interaction between cultural memories, communal and national amnesia and the evasion of the past. O'Neil puts the massacre of the Protestants by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) into his narrative in County Cork in 1922. Gray suggested that O'Neil “argues that Protestants suffered a demographic cataclysm that has gone totally unmentioned in the literature of the period and claims this is because the pogrom represents the very antithesis of the type of nationalist vision that has appropriated and monopolized the restricted space of literary, political and cultural memory in Ireland.” But what surprised me about Gray's paper was that he established a parallelism between what England did in Ireland and the relationship between Ottoman Turks and Armenians. I objected to his views and said to him that this parallelism was thoroughly wrong in the sense that Britain had been the colonizer of Ireland since 1169. The Irish writer, James Joyce, writes fictionally in "Ulysses" of how Britain exploited Ireland in terms of language, culture and religion, and historians will account for the facts in detail. I continued to explain that the Ottomans were not a colonizer of Armenia, yet there was the relationship of majority and minority groups in the country of the Ottomans. Ottoman Turks and Christian Armenians lived in peace side by side until World War I, and Ottoman Turks called Armenians the “faithful nation” (Millet-i Sadık). Having given my explanation, the intellectuals and critics in the conference hall agreed with me.
As this example indicates, the majority of people, even intellectuals, in the Western world are totally unaware of what happened in 1915. If Turkey wishes to overcome massacre discussions in international relations, it should start effective and continuous international campaigns and lobbying activities to state its case of acceptance of the fact that “some Christian Armenians and Muslim Turks died in a partisan conflict that was raging at that time.” In addition, we should open departments of Armenian language and literature as well as departments of Armenian studies at Turkish universities where students can learn the Armenian language and literature and see how Turkey and Turks are represented in Armenia manuscripts, while Turkish intellectuals and historians examine Armenian historical texts about the so-called genocide issue.
*Ali Güneş is an assistant professor at Kafkas University's English language and literature department's science and letters faculty in Kars. He can be contacted at gunesali1@gmail.com
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.
print this page mail to a friend
Six days ago the French lower house of parliament approved a bill making it a crime to deny that Armenians suffered genocide at the hands of Ottoman Turks after World War I. It is unlikely that the upper house, the Senate, will approve of the bill, but if they do, the new motion establishes a one-year prison term and a 45,000 euro fine for anyone denying the massacres. The approval of the bill has sparked justifiably widespread anger in Turkey because Turkey claims that the accusations of the Armenian massacres have no historical basis but are political and aim to cause difficulties, and thus Ankara adamantly rejects accusations that around 1.5 million Armenians died in a genocide in 1915. What it argues is that some Christian Armenians and Muslim Turks died in a partisan conflict that was raging at that time.
ALİ GÜNEŞ*
Six days ago the French lower house of parliament approved a bill making it a crime to deny that Armenians suffered genocide at the hands of Ottoman Turks after World War I. It is unlikely that the upper house, the Senate, will approve of the bill, but if they do, the new motion establishes a one-year prison term and a 45,000 euro fine for anyone denying the massacres. The approval of the bill has sparked justifiably widespread anger in Turkey because Turkey claims that the accusations of the Armenian massacres have no historical basis but are political and aim to cause difficulties, and thus Ankara adamantly rejects accusations that around 1.5 million Armenians died in a genocide in 1915. What it argues is that some Christian Armenians and Muslim Turks died in a partisan conflict that was raging at that time. Moreover, Turkey also maintains that France's attempt to pass this bill is an attempt to impede the prospect of its membership in the EU. For France, however, the crucial point is the presidential elections in seven months, and I think there are two reasons behind its attempt. First, the French public is against Turkey's EU membership, so that the top politicians, Jacques Chirac, Segolene Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy, due to their election worries, object to Turkey's EU membership. The second reason, which is also closely linked to the issue of the coming elections, is the presence of a large Armenian immigrant community of up to 500,000 in France. The community is a powerful political lobby that French politicians feel they have to take into account.
My argument about Armenians is a little bit different. Although the reactions of both the president and the prime minister as well as that of other civil rights groups are unmistakably right and necessary, I have observed for years that the ways Turkey has tried to have its rightful voice heard all over the world is not sufficient or effective. This insufficiency and ineffectiveness may be seen in two ways. First, there is no continuity in Turkey's attempt to have its voice heard. In spite of the fact that the Armenian issue has been a persistent obstacle before Turkey in international relations, we remember it whenever an Armenian discussion starts. We need effective lobbying activities and the means to inform the world of what happened in 1915. Secondly, most of our historians do not have a good enough command of English to get their articles about the so-called massacre discussions published in international journals. Due to the language problem, moreover, they are not courageous and able to organize or join international conferences, seminars and meetings in which they could present the historical facts they have. The world, particularly the Western world, thus remains ignorant or has prejudices about Turkey, since public opinion is shaped solely by politicians or by the dominant lobbying groups as in France
At a conference in Spain a month ago, I witnessed how the people and even intellectuals are badly informed about the Armenian issue. For example, Bill Gray from Lulea Technical University in Sweden analyzed Joseph O'Neil's “Blood-Dark Track,” a work of non-fiction published in 2001. As a historical investigation, it sheds light on the interaction between cultural memories, communal and national amnesia and the evasion of the past. O'Neil puts the massacre of the Protestants by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) into his narrative in County Cork in 1922. Gray suggested that O'Neil “argues that Protestants suffered a demographic cataclysm that has gone totally unmentioned in the literature of the period and claims this is because the pogrom represents the very antithesis of the type of nationalist vision that has appropriated and monopolized the restricted space of literary, political and cultural memory in Ireland.” But what surprised me about Gray's paper was that he established a parallelism between what England did in Ireland and the relationship between Ottoman Turks and Armenians. I objected to his views and said to him that this parallelism was thoroughly wrong in the sense that Britain had been the colonizer of Ireland since 1169. The Irish writer, James Joyce, writes fictionally in "Ulysses" of how Britain exploited Ireland in terms of language, culture and religion, and historians will account for the facts in detail. I continued to explain that the Ottomans were not a colonizer of Armenia, yet there was the relationship of majority and minority groups in the country of the Ottomans. Ottoman Turks and Christian Armenians lived in peace side by side until World War I, and Ottoman Turks called Armenians the “faithful nation” (Millet-i Sadık). Having given my explanation, the intellectuals and critics in the conference hall agreed with me.
As this example indicates, the majority of people, even intellectuals, in the Western world are totally unaware of what happened in 1915. If Turkey wishes to overcome massacre discussions in international relations, it should start effective and continuous international campaigns and lobbying activities to state its case of acceptance of the fact that “some Christian Armenians and Muslim Turks died in a partisan conflict that was raging at that time.” In addition, we should open departments of Armenian language and literature as well as departments of Armenian studies at Turkish universities where students can learn the Armenian language and literature and see how Turkey and Turks are represented in Armenia manuscripts, while Turkish intellectuals and historians examine Armenian historical texts about the so-called genocide issue.
*Ali Güneş is an assistant professor at Kafkas University's English language and literature department's science and letters faculty in Kars. He can be contacted at gunesali1@gmail.com
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.
Labels: Genocide Recognition
posted by Vahe Balabanian at 8:55 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home