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Where the past is another country: Armenians in Turkey

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  • Where the past is another country: Armenians in Turkey

    The Economist
    October 21, 2006
    U.S. Edition

    Where the past is another country;
    Armenians in Turkey

    This article contains a table. Please see hard copy.

    WHAT has to happen before a nation can look honestly at the darkest
    chapters in its own past? Moments of truth can occur when a country
    isdefeated, occupied and helpless, like Germany and Japan in 1945. At
    the other extreme, such moments are also possible when a nation feels
    so secure that it can discuss past misdeeds without fearing for its
    future existence: think of the British, French and Belgian historians
    now uncovering murky chapters of the colonial era. And there is a
    third answer: after a big revolution (like the Bolshevik one), the
    new rulers are often keen to show up the moral turpitude of their
    predecessors.

    None of these conditions has ever prevailed in modern Turkey,
    although things came close after 1918; and that is why the fate of
    hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Armenians who died horribly in 1915
    is still a bitterly disputed question, for diplomats and judges as
    well as scholars.

    What is contested is whether, in addition to the overt orders given
    to deport the Armenians - on grounds that they were a fifth column for
    the tsarist enemy - secret orders were also given by the Committee of
    Union and Progress (CUP), the shadowy clique which wielded effective
    authority over the Ottoman empire, to make sure that very few
    Armenians survived theexperience.

    This timely and well-researched work by Taner Akçam, a Turkish-born
    scholar who now lives in America (and would risk prosecution if he
    tried to go home) highlights at least two things. First, how many
    foreign observers of the deportations, including Germans and
    Austrians who were allied to the Turks, did conclude that the
    intention was to kill, not just deport. And secondly, the book helps
    to explain why the conditions in which these events might be freely
    discussed in Turkey have never quite fallen into place.

    The Ottoman empire did, of course, accept defeat by the Entente, and
    in the months that followed, Britain had much sway over the Ottoman
    institutions. From March 1920, Britain and its allies formally
    occupied Istanbul. But the occupation, at a time of British-backed
    Greek expansion in Anatolia, backfired: the real moral authority of
    the war victors over Turkey ebbed rapidly, as did the Turks'
    readiness to receive moral lessons from their foes. So too did
    Turkish willingness to accept that crimes had been committed against,
    as well as by, the eastern Christians.

    Things might have been different. During the first world war, all
    decisions on the conduct of the war (and the treatment of the
    Armenians) were taken by the committee. When the war ended, its
    leaders fled, fearing prosecution for their atrocities against the
    Armenians. At that time, the Ottoman government was desperate to
    distance itself from the CUP's actions, and agreed readily to a
    series of trials in which the fate of the Armenians was considered;
    some grisly evidence came to light. But the mood of self-reproach was
    short-lived.

    Mustafa Kemal (later Ataturk), the brilliant general who smashed the
    Greeks in 1922 and created modern Turkey, might in theory have
    renounced all the deeds of the Ottoman era - given that the republic he
    proclaimed was supposed to mark a rupture with the past. But as Mr
    Akçam shows, Ataturk's movement was too close to the committee for a
    clean break to occur. That laid the ground for today's odd
    situation - a modern republic that passionately defends, on pain of
    prosecution, theimperial regime which the republic'sfounders
    overthrew.

    GRAPHIC: A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of
    Turkish Responsibility.
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