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  • The Armenian genocide was just that

    National Post

    The Armenian genocide was just that

    National Post
    Wednesday, April 8, 2009
    Page: A14
    Section: Editorial
    Byline: Christopher Hitchens
    Column: Christopher Hitchens
    Source: Slate.com

    Even before President Barack Obama set off on his visit to Turkey this
    week, there were the usual voices urging him to dilute the principled
    position that he has so far taken on the Armenian genocide. April is the
    month in which the Armenian diaspora commemorates the bloody initiation,
    in 1915, of the Ottoman Empire's campaign to erase its Armenian
    population.

    The marking of the occasion takes two forms: Armenian Remembrance Day,
    on April 24, and the annual attempt to persuade Congress to name that
    day as one that abandons weasel wording and officially calls the episode
    by its right name, which is the word I used above.

    Genocide had not been coined in 1915, but the U. S. ambassador in
    Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau, employed a term that was in some ways
    more graphic. In his urgent reports to the State Department, conveying
    on-the-spot dispatches from his consuls, especially in the provinces of
    Van and Harput, he described the systematic slaughter of the Armenians
    as "race murder."

    A vast archive of evidence exists to support this claim. But every year,
    the deniers and euphemists set to work again, and there are usually
    enough military-industrial votes to tip the scale in favour of our
    Turkish client. (Of late, Turkey's opportunist military alliance with
    Israel has also been good for a few shame-faced Jewish votes as well.)

    President Obama comes to this issue with an unusually clear and
    unambivalent record. In 2006, for example, the U. S. ambassador to
    Armenia, John Evans, was recalled for employing the word genocide.
    Thensenator Obama wrote a letter of complaint to then-secretary of state
    Condoleezza Rice, deploring the State Department's cowardice and roundly
    stating that the occurrence of the Armenian genocide in 1915 "is not an
    allegation, a personal opinion or a point of view, but rather a widely
    documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical
    evidence."

    On the campaign trail last year, he amplified this position, saying that
    "America deserves a leader who speaks truthfully about the Armenian
    genocide and responds forcefully to all genocides. I intend to be that
    president."

    For any who might entertain doubt on this score, I would recommend two
    recent books of exceptional interest and scholarship that both add a
    good deal of depth and texture to this drama. The first is Armenian
    Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, by Grigoris Balakian, and
    the second is Rebel Land: Travels Among Turkey's Forgotten Peoples, a
    contemporary account by Christopher de Bellaigue.

    In addition, we have just learned of shattering corroborative evidence
    from within the archives of the Turkish state. The Ottoman politician
    who began the campaign of deportation and extermination, Talat Pasha,
    left enormous documentation behind him. His family has now given the
    papers to a Turkish author named Murat Bardakci, who has published a
    book with the somewhat dry title The Remaining Documents of Talat Pasha.
    One of these "remaining documents" is a cold estimate that during the
    years 1915 and 1916 alone, a total of 972,000 Armenians simply vanished
    from the officially kept records of population.

    There are those who try to say that the Armenian catastrophe was a
    regrettable by-product of the fog of war and of imperial collapse, and
    this might be partly true of the many more Armenians who were
    slaughtered at the war's end and after the implosion of Ottomanism.

    But this is an archive maintained by the government of the day and its
    chief anti-Armenian politician, and it records in the very early days of
    the First World War indicate a population decline from 1,256,000 to
    284,157. It is very seldom that a regime in its private correspondence
    confirms almost to an exactitude the claims of its victims.

    So what will the deniers say now? The usual routine has been to
    insinuate that if Congress votes to assert the historic truth, then
    Turkey will inconvenience the NATO alliance by making trouble on the
    Iraqi border, denying the use of bases to the U. S. Air Force, or in
    other unspecified ways.

    This same kind of unchecked arrogance was on view at the NATO summit
    last weekend, where the Ankara government had the nerve to try to hold
    up the appointment of a serious Danish politician, Anders Rasmussen, as
    the next secretary-general of the alliance, on the grounds that as
    Denmark's prime minister he had refused to censor Danish newspapers to
    Muslim satisfaction!

    It is now being hinted that if either President Obama or the U.S.
    Congress goes ahead with the endorsement of the genocide resolution,
    Turkey will prove unco-operative on a range of issues, including the
    normalization of the frontier between Turkey and Armenia and the transit
    of oil and gas pipelines across the Caucasus.

    When the question is phrased in this thuggish way, it can be slyly
    suggested that Armenia's own best interests are served by joining in the
    agreement to muddy and distort its own history. Yet how could any state,
    or any people, agree to abolish their pride and dignity in this way?

    And the question is not only for Armenians, who are economically
    hard-pressed by the Turkish closure of the common border. It is for the
    Turks, whose bravest cultural spokesmen and writers take genuine risks
    to break the taboo on discussion of the Armenian question.

    And it is also for Americans, who, having elected a supposedly brave new
    President, are being told that he --and our Congress too--must agree to
    collude in a gigantic historical lie. A lie, furthermore, that
    courageous U. S. diplomacy helped to expose in the first place.

    This falsification has already gone on long enough and has been
    justified for reasons of state. It is, among other things, precisely
    "for reasons of state," in other words, for the clear and vital
    announcement that we can't be bought or intimidated, that April 24,
    2009, should become remembered as the date when we affirmed the truth
    and accepted, as truth-telling does, all the consequences.

    Illustration:
    . Black & White Photo: Erhan Sevenler, AFP, Getty Images / Turkish Prime
    Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan

    Idnumber: 200904080100
    Edition: National
    Story Type: Column; Crime
    Length: 992 words
    Keywords: PRESIDENTS; POLITICAL PARTIES; POLITICIANS; UNITED STATES
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