French Vote on Armenian Genocide Adds To Turkey’s Growing Anti-EU Sentiment

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 2006, pages 30-31
Talking Turkey
By Jon Gorvett

Turkish protesters demonstrating in front of the French consulate in Istanbul Oct. 14 carry signs calling for a boycott of French goods (AFP photo/Bulent Kilic).

WITH THE FRENCH parliament passing in early October a resolution to make denial of the Armenian genocide a crime, the issue of 1915 once again was buried beneath a mass of knee-jerk responses in Turkey.

Protests were held, tricoleur flags were burned. Calls for a boycott of French goods were wheeled out of the nationalist garage, where they had been gathering dust since 2001—the last time the French parliament had intervened in this dispute—and plenty of brave speeches were made.

Yet while the motion in Paris may have been a storm in an electoral teacup likely to be quashed by more sober heads in the Senate and the Presidency—just as it was back in 2001—this time it may not be a case of plus ça change, plus ça la meme chose.

This is because, nowadays, support in Turkey for the European Union—of which France is such an important symbol—has never been more dismal. Illustrative of this was the fact that the resolution was passed just as Turkey was about to be on the receiving end of another annual European Commission report on its progress in EU membership talks. Widespread leaks, and a condemnatory version of the report from the European Parliament, had left little doubt in Turkey that this year’s end-of-term grade would have a definite “could do better” ring to it.

Thus the French vote added to a growing feeling on the Turkish street that the EU spends all of its time attacking Turkey rather than helping it.

Some in Istanbul and Ankara also pointed to the bill as illustrative of a perceived double standard in European attitudes toward free speech.

Only a few weeks before the French vote, Europe had condemned Turkey for putting on trial one of its most respected authors, Elif Safak. She had been accused of “insulting Turkishness” under the controversial Article 30 of the revised Turkish criminal code—the same article used unsuccessfully last December to try to prosecute recent Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk.

At a hearing attended by many European Union representatives anxious to establish their free expression credentials, the Safak case also was dismissed. But, some columnists asked, how come the Europeans condemned Turkey for gagging free speech under Article 30 while at the same time they were busy gagging free speech over the Armenian genocide?

The effect of the French parliament’s decision, therefore, was to create another sense of grievance in Turkey against the Europeans. This also plays to a central part of the Turkish national narrative—that of the persecuted Turks, forced back into Anatolia via massive bouts of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, the Middle East and the Caucasus, as the Ottoman Empire collapsed in the later 19th and early 20th centuries.

Indeed, in this narrative, which continues to be spread at school and beyond in Turkey, the Armenians themselves come as essentially the last straw. Even in Anatolia, the nationalists say, they wanted to push us out—“they,” in this case, being the Armenians, erstwhile citizens of the same Ottoman Empire, who lived in Anatolia and are then portrayed as fifth columnists of the Europeans and the Russians. This allows the nationalists to then claim that it was the Turks, not the Armenians, who were the victims in 1915.

Challenging this view not only has long been highly dangerous for Turks, but has only recently been open to debate at all. Whether the French parliament’s effective closing of the issue to discussion is at all useful in encouraging openness elsewhere remains to be seen, but the French vote was largely seen as a setback by those in Turkey trying to bring the events of 1915 out into the open.

At the same time, it also clearly is a setback for the pro-EU camp in Ankara, which recently has been under fairly constant shellfire over foreign policy in particular, and over the perennial Kurdish issue as well. Joining the barrage with its heavy artillery was the Turkish military, which launched a series of attacks on perceived concessions to the European Union over the nation’s fundamental interests.

The first salvo came at the end of September from the head of the navy, Admiral Yener Karahanoglu, who said that Turkey would never make the concessions being demanded of it on the path to membership. These were widely seen as being over Cyprus—where Turkey is being asked to open its ports and airports to the vessels of EU-member Cyprus, as represented by the Greek Cypriot government.

Indeed, the Cyprus issue duly arose again, like Banquo’s ghost, to rattle its chains over the annual membership accession talks between Turkey and the EU in October. EU Enlargement Commissioner Oli Rehn warned that unless Turkey made a move on opening its ports, a “last window of opportunity on the Cyprus issue in the coming weeks or months for a very long time, perhaps for years” might close.

The other foreign policy issue over which the EU is pushing Turkey is Armenia, with which Turkey is expected to normalize relations. Since the Azerbaijan-Armenian conflict in the early 1990s over Nagorno Karabakh, Turkey has closed its land frontier with Armenia and will not reopen it until there is a settlement between Baku and Yerevan.

Admiral Karahanoglu’s words were then backed up by the head of the army, Gen. Ilker Basbug, who warned of “intentional, patient and systematic attempts” to undermine the achievements of the secular Turkish Republic. This was interpreted as a widening of the attack to target the Turkish government, which with its Islamist past has long been held in deep suspicion by the generals.

Finally, the bunker buster itself was dropped by Gen. Yasar Buyukanit, the new chief of the General Staff and thereby Turkey’s topmost military official, when he spoke out to accuse the EU of having “a hidden agenda” for Turkey.

Given that the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) comes from an Islamist tradition that also has long been hostile to the EU—indeed, it was one of the great achievements of liberals within the AKP to have turned this around after the “soft coup” back in 1997—support for “concessions” has never been high among Turkey’s politicians either.

So, with such a basis of mistrust at the highest levels of both military and government—and a bureaucracy that has a long history of opposition to the kind of reforms EU membership would entail—it is no surprise to find that support in society as a whole for EU membership has plummeted. Recent opinion polls suggest around half the population support membership. Even five years ago, the figure was nearer 80 percent.

Nor is Turkey immune to broader global polarizations that have been underway in recent years. The U.S. also is massively more unpopular in Turkey now than it was before the “War on Terror.” As a Muslim country, Turkey feels the pull of the widespread condemnation of Western actions found elsewhere in the Islamic world.

Given such circumstances, the path toward EU membership has been growing thornier, even as it has seemed to be getting clearer. This contradiction is evidence of the complexity of Turkish attitudes toward Europe—and vice versa—while also perhaps serving as cautionary tale to those who see the world in simpler terms.

Jon Gorvett is a free-lance journalist based in Istanbul.

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.