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The Herald, Scotland
March 20 2010
Is it an insult to challenge Turkey's denial of atrocities?
Published on 20 Mar 2010
Everyone has a story.
If the dates are right, part of my tribe wound up in this country
because of the great hunger, the Irish famine. Those immigrants were a
small part, wounded in their own way, of a bigger history. But I don't
remember feeling moved, particularly, when Tony Blair decided to
apologise for Britain's role in Ireland's catastrophe.
My middle name is Mackay. Another set of dates point me, therefore, to
Sutherland, the ancestral territory, and to the Clearances that shaped
so many Scottish families, here and gone. I have some opinions about
19th century economic theory. I've been known to suggest uses for
dynamite around Dunrobin Castle. But an apology? What would I do with
that?
Some black Americans have tested the idea. They have said that the
long-betrayed promise made to freed slaves of `40 acres and a mule'
should be revived. They have heard all the things said about slavery
days and guilt, and retorted: money speaks louder. A few polemicists
have even arrived at figures, at billions to make Wall Street blush.
It will never happen, but it illustrates how empty language can be.
Those American radicals can summon precedent, after all. Puny as the
gesture may be, Germany has paid money to Holocaust Jews for many
decades. The past cannot be undone, but you cannot say that nothing
should be done. So words, money, lands restored: reparation, in some
form, and restitution. So Israel disputes the Palestinian right of
return ` the ironies will keep ` because of `demographic issues' and
preceding ownership.
The Vatican has expressed its sorrow over anti-Semitism and the
Holocaust. Crimes have come to trial because of apartheid, Pol Pot's
Cambodia, Rwanda, the Balkans: there's a list. People ask, rationally,
about the use of it all, and whether there is not something insulting
in going through the futile motions. The dead are dead. Memories of
grievance are an excuse, as often as not, for this year's demagogue.
But here's something: no one says the Irish Famine didn't happen. Even
racists do not bother to attempt to conceal slavery. In Germany, to
Germany's credit, you can be jailed for lying about the Holocaust. The
world bears its knowledge ` the important word ` of collective guilt
for the betrayal of Rwanda with an uneasy certainty. So who remembers
theArmenians?
Those who know, and have known for 95 years, will wonder that I resort
to the cliche. I'd say it's valid simply because it speaks to a blank
` erased ` portion of human truth. The question was Adolf Hitler's,
after all. He was preparing his stooges for his Final Solution to the
Jewish Question, and he was asking, rhetorically, jovially, who knew
or cared what became of 1.5 million people in the Anatolian quarter of
the Ottoman empire between 1915 and 1923.
One answer: `atrocities on both sides'. Another: `the fog of war',
chaos and disease, the breakdown of command and order, local failures,
and the usual matters beyond investigation. A third: a conspiracy to
insult the national pride of a modern, 21st century Nato partner, key
Middle East player, and prospective EU member.
The last of these is, more or less, Turkey's response. It causes a
nationalist vehemence, left and right, secular and religious, that
will not fade. Journalists and other writers have died just for
doubting phrases in the official story. This week it caused an
extraordinary statement by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Prime Minister. The
foreign relations committee of the US Congress had voted, not for the
first time, to call the fate of the Armenians a genocide. A similar
deliberation, with a similar result, had taken place in Sweden.
France, Germany and Italy ` and other nations amounting to 20 ` had
already reached the same conclusion. In Sweden and the US, as before,
Turkish emissaries had been withdrawn. So a prime minister spoke.
I'll quote him in full, because I know what usually follows. As
reported (and not disputed) in the Times, Mr Erdogan said: `In my
country there are 170,000 Armenians; 70,000 of them are citizens. We
tolerate 100,000 more. So, what am I going to do tomorrow? If
necessary I will tell the 100,000: OK, time to go back to your
country. Why? They are not my citizens. I am not obliged to keep them
in my country'.
So let's begin. Even by Erdogan's accounting, 170,000 into 1.5 million
suggests certain population changes in the space of 95 years. What
happened? It is not, I think, a complicated question.
Nevertheless, recent attempts to repair relations between the rump
statelet of modern Armenia and modern Turkey, efforts intended to
allow historians to tackle the question through the Ottoman archives,
have `stalled'. They always stall when Turkey's pride is scorched. So
who is harmed by truth?
Secondly, unless I misread, this is the leader of a `key' ally
threatening ethnic cleansing. And threatening it, moreover, to a
people who claim that 1.5 million died when last they were
`transported' from Turkish lands. Some are illegal today? Armenia is
dirt poor. The victims of its 1988 earthquake still seek any work they
can, wherever they can. All the Turks who contributed to Germany's
Wirkschaftswunder would probably understand.
The modern Turkish state is not responsible for the massacre of
Armenians. No one with the slightest credibility has said such a
thing. Nor, within any interpretation of the UN's genocide convention,
has anyone tried to place an economic liability on Turkey for what
began in the late 19th century and drew to a close in 1923. There is
no possibility that the descendants of cleared Armenians will return
from Delaware to reclaim an ancestral croft.
There is not even a chance, as it happens, that the modern Turkish
state will lose status or credibility if it recognises a truth.
America appreciates Turkey for its airbases, its military, its
secularism and its proximity to Iran. Europe retains dreams of
Byzantine trade. Russia, little Armenia's modern patron, would like to
resolve one mess on its borders. None of these governments would
embarrass Ankara. But the threat of ethnic cleansing, and the fact of
genocide, will not be glossed.
The Armenian diaspora is obdurate, I'll grant. It is true,
equally, that at the Great War's beginning Armenia's Nationalists saw
opportunities in Turkey's difficulties, and took up Russian arms. But
all the definitions of genocide are explicit: it involves an intent to
destroy a people. Is it an `insult', in the 21st century, to insist
that all we inheritors of decaying empires should deal with historical
truth?
If insults matter, as Mr Erdogan believes, then the future becomes
complicated. Turkey is `turning towards Iran'? I suggest a re-reading
of Ottoman catastrophes. Barack Obama remembered in his campaign what
he has forgotten in government: it happened. That ought to count for
Turkey.
The very word `genocide' exists only because of a Polish Jew, one
Raphael Lemkin, who remembered the Armenians. He decided that
international law required new categories when the Nazis deprived even
Winston Churchill of speech. Truth and history have no such
deficiencies. Journalism, in advance of a promised Commons debate on
the genocide, can also cope.
So I give the Turkish government a challenge I have offered before.Let
me walk in the ruins of the Armenian city of Van, a mile from the
lake, at my own expense, without the risk of arrest, and ask what once
happened. If not, why not?
http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/ian-be ll/is-it-an-insult-to-challenge-turkey-s-denial-of -atrocities-1.1014697
March 20 2010
Is it an insult to challenge Turkey's denial of atrocities?
Published on 20 Mar 2010
Everyone has a story.
If the dates are right, part of my tribe wound up in this country
because of the great hunger, the Irish famine. Those immigrants were a
small part, wounded in their own way, of a bigger history. But I don't
remember feeling moved, particularly, when Tony Blair decided to
apologise for Britain's role in Ireland's catastrophe.
My middle name is Mackay. Another set of dates point me, therefore, to
Sutherland, the ancestral territory, and to the Clearances that shaped
so many Scottish families, here and gone. I have some opinions about
19th century economic theory. I've been known to suggest uses for
dynamite around Dunrobin Castle. But an apology? What would I do with
that?
Some black Americans have tested the idea. They have said that the
long-betrayed promise made to freed slaves of `40 acres and a mule'
should be revived. They have heard all the things said about slavery
days and guilt, and retorted: money speaks louder. A few polemicists
have even arrived at figures, at billions to make Wall Street blush.
It will never happen, but it illustrates how empty language can be.
Those American radicals can summon precedent, after all. Puny as the
gesture may be, Germany has paid money to Holocaust Jews for many
decades. The past cannot be undone, but you cannot say that nothing
should be done. So words, money, lands restored: reparation, in some
form, and restitution. So Israel disputes the Palestinian right of
return ` the ironies will keep ` because of `demographic issues' and
preceding ownership.
The Vatican has expressed its sorrow over anti-Semitism and the
Holocaust. Crimes have come to trial because of apartheid, Pol Pot's
Cambodia, Rwanda, the Balkans: there's a list. People ask, rationally,
about the use of it all, and whether there is not something insulting
in going through the futile motions. The dead are dead. Memories of
grievance are an excuse, as often as not, for this year's demagogue.
But here's something: no one says the Irish Famine didn't happen. Even
racists do not bother to attempt to conceal slavery. In Germany, to
Germany's credit, you can be jailed for lying about the Holocaust. The
world bears its knowledge ` the important word ` of collective guilt
for the betrayal of Rwanda with an uneasy certainty. So who remembers
theArmenians?
Those who know, and have known for 95 years, will wonder that I resort
to the cliche. I'd say it's valid simply because it speaks to a blank
` erased ` portion of human truth. The question was Adolf Hitler's,
after all. He was preparing his stooges for his Final Solution to the
Jewish Question, and he was asking, rhetorically, jovially, who knew
or cared what became of 1.5 million people in the Anatolian quarter of
the Ottoman empire between 1915 and 1923.
One answer: `atrocities on both sides'. Another: `the fog of war',
chaos and disease, the breakdown of command and order, local failures,
and the usual matters beyond investigation. A third: a conspiracy to
insult the national pride of a modern, 21st century Nato partner, key
Middle East player, and prospective EU member.
The last of these is, more or less, Turkey's response. It causes a
nationalist vehemence, left and right, secular and religious, that
will not fade. Journalists and other writers have died just for
doubting phrases in the official story. This week it caused an
extraordinary statement by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Prime Minister. The
foreign relations committee of the US Congress had voted, not for the
first time, to call the fate of the Armenians a genocide. A similar
deliberation, with a similar result, had taken place in Sweden.
France, Germany and Italy ` and other nations amounting to 20 ` had
already reached the same conclusion. In Sweden and the US, as before,
Turkish emissaries had been withdrawn. So a prime minister spoke.
I'll quote him in full, because I know what usually follows. As
reported (and not disputed) in the Times, Mr Erdogan said: `In my
country there are 170,000 Armenians; 70,000 of them are citizens. We
tolerate 100,000 more. So, what am I going to do tomorrow? If
necessary I will tell the 100,000: OK, time to go back to your
country. Why? They are not my citizens. I am not obliged to keep them
in my country'.
So let's begin. Even by Erdogan's accounting, 170,000 into 1.5 million
suggests certain population changes in the space of 95 years. What
happened? It is not, I think, a complicated question.
Nevertheless, recent attempts to repair relations between the rump
statelet of modern Armenia and modern Turkey, efforts intended to
allow historians to tackle the question through the Ottoman archives,
have `stalled'. They always stall when Turkey's pride is scorched. So
who is harmed by truth?
Secondly, unless I misread, this is the leader of a `key' ally
threatening ethnic cleansing. And threatening it, moreover, to a
people who claim that 1.5 million died when last they were
`transported' from Turkish lands. Some are illegal today? Armenia is
dirt poor. The victims of its 1988 earthquake still seek any work they
can, wherever they can. All the Turks who contributed to Germany's
Wirkschaftswunder would probably understand.
The modern Turkish state is not responsible for the massacre of
Armenians. No one with the slightest credibility has said such a
thing. Nor, within any interpretation of the UN's genocide convention,
has anyone tried to place an economic liability on Turkey for what
began in the late 19th century and drew to a close in 1923. There is
no possibility that the descendants of cleared Armenians will return
from Delaware to reclaim an ancestral croft.
There is not even a chance, as it happens, that the modern Turkish
state will lose status or credibility if it recognises a truth.
America appreciates Turkey for its airbases, its military, its
secularism and its proximity to Iran. Europe retains dreams of
Byzantine trade. Russia, little Armenia's modern patron, would like to
resolve one mess on its borders. None of these governments would
embarrass Ankara. But the threat of ethnic cleansing, and the fact of
genocide, will not be glossed.
The Armenian diaspora is obdurate, I'll grant. It is true,
equally, that at the Great War's beginning Armenia's Nationalists saw
opportunities in Turkey's difficulties, and took up Russian arms. But
all the definitions of genocide are explicit: it involves an intent to
destroy a people. Is it an `insult', in the 21st century, to insist
that all we inheritors of decaying empires should deal with historical
truth?
If insults matter, as Mr Erdogan believes, then the future becomes
complicated. Turkey is `turning towards Iran'? I suggest a re-reading
of Ottoman catastrophes. Barack Obama remembered in his campaign what
he has forgotten in government: it happened. That ought to count for
Turkey.
The very word `genocide' exists only because of a Polish Jew, one
Raphael Lemkin, who remembered the Armenians. He decided that
international law required new categories when the Nazis deprived even
Winston Churchill of speech. Truth and history have no such
deficiencies. Journalism, in advance of a promised Commons debate on
the genocide, can also cope.
So I give the Turkish government a challenge I have offered before.Let
me walk in the ruins of the Armenian city of Van, a mile from the
lake, at my own expense, without the risk of arrest, and ask what once
happened. If not, why not?
http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/ian-be ll/is-it-an-insult-to-challenge-turkey-s-denial-of -atrocities-1.1014697