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Turkey Keeps Genocide Controversy Alive

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  • Turkey Keeps Genocide Controversy Alive

    TURKEY KEEPS GENOCIDE CONTROVERSY ALIVE

    AOL News -
    April 6 2010

    (April 6) -- Earlier this year, the House Foreign Affairs
    Committee narrowly passed a resolution to officially label Turkey's
    state-orchestrated murder of 1.5 million Armenians, which began
    95 years ago this month, a genocide -- a move that in turn led the
    Turkish government to recall its ambassador from Washington.

    Then, in March, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened
    to expel 100,000 Armenians living in Turkey illegally if foreign
    governments continued to agitate for the genocide designation for the
    mass killing (earning a filleting from Christopher Hitchens in Slate).

    It wasn't Erdogan's first such fulmination, but it also is in keeping
    with long-standing Turkish policy when it comes to discussing the
    deliberate Ottoman destruction of Armenians during and immediately
    following World War I.

    So why can't Turkey own up to its bloody past?

    "Fear of rewriting history is the main fear of modern Turkey," says
    Hayk Demoyan, director of the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute in
    Armenia's capital of Yerevan.

    Indeed, the founding of modern Turkey and the state's campaign against
    Armenia go hand in hand. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey's revered
    "founding father," who secularized the country, is implicated in
    the killings of Armenians, Demoyan says. "It is a fear of facing
    historical reality and causing a total collapse of the ideological
    axis that modern republican Turkey was formed around. Turks get
    panicked when you compare Ataturk's legacy to Lenin."

    Instead, Turkey and various pro-Turkey groups have consistently
    maintained that the Armenian death toll has been exaggerated, and
    that while hundreds of thousands may have died, it was because of
    starvation and disease -- not at the hands of Turkish troops.

    Increasingly, this account has been challenged by both foreign
    governments and dissenters within Turkey itself.

    "The country's best-known novelist, Orhan Pamuk, was dragged before
    a court in 2005 for acknowledging Turkey's role in the destruction
    of Armenia," Hitchens writes. "Had he not been the winner of a Nobel
    Prize, it might have gone very hard for him, as it has for prominent
    and brave intellectuals like Murat Belge. Turkish-Armenian editor
    Hrant Dink, also prosecuted under a state law forbidding discussion
    of the past, was shot down in the street by an assassin who was later
    photographed in the company of beaming, compliant policemen."

    Turkey's continued denials come at a high cost, most notably
    endangering its entrance into the European Union. But even if Turkey's
    ideological foundations are as fragile as Demoyan contends, many
    nations have had to confront their unsavory pasts, to own up to them
    and make amends (even if only symbolically) in order to move forward.

    Germany's done so for its Nazi past. Australia apologized to its
    Aborigine population. Congress has apologized for slavery and the
    mistreatment of Native Americans. Such measures may do little,
    but they are at the very least an acknowledgment of wrongdoing,
    and part of a growing process that Turkey, to its own detriment,
    refuses to engage in.

    http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/turkey-k eeps-armenian-genocide-controversy-alive/19428230
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