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  • Denial Of An Ugly Past Is Holding Turkey Back

    DENIAL OF AN UGLY PAST IS HOLDING TURKEY BACK
    by Colin Tatz

    Sydney Morning Herald
    http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/denial-of-an-ugly-past-is-holding-turkey-back-20101108-17k8f.html
    Nov 9 2010
    Australia

    Turkey must acknowledge the Armenian genocide if it wishes to move
    forward as a modern. democratic country. Photo: Reuters

    The idea that Australia was born as a nation on Gallipoli's shores
    is now deeply cemented in our history books and national psyche. We
    are about to see the annual holding of hands by the former combatants
    on Armistice Day, when thousands will visit the "sacred site". Turks
    and Australians will join in understandable commemoration but less
    comprehensible celebration; and friendship societies will become
    tearful and lyrical during this anniversary of the shedding of
    brotherly blood.

    But intruding on this mourning ritual is the growing world recognition
    of the Ottoman (and, later, Kemalist) Turkish genocide committed
    between 1915 and 1922. Some 26 nation states and more than 50 regional
    governments, including NSW and South Australia, formally recognise
    the Turkish attempts to annihilate 3 million Armenians and possibly 1
    million Pontian Greeks and Christian Assyrians. At least 1.5 million
    Armenians were killed by bayoneting, beheading, bullets, butchering,
    crucifixion, drowning, elementary gas chambers, forced death marches,
    hanging, hot horseshoes, medical experiments, and other unprintable
    atrocities.

    Turkey is totally dedicated, at home and abroad, to having every
    hint or mention of an Armenian genocide contradicted, countered,
    explained, justified, mitigated, rationalised, relativised, removed
    or trivialised. The entire apparatus of the Turkish state is tuned to
    denial, with officers appointed abroad for that purpose. Their actions
    are spectacular, often bizarre, and without distinction between the
    serious and the silly, including: pressures to dilute or even remove
    any mention of the genocide in the Armenian entry in the Encyclopaedia
    Britannica; threats to sever diplomatic relations with France over the
    latter's parliamentary declaration that there was such a genocide;
    replacing the Turkish Prime Minister's Renault with an inferior
    Russian limo; Sydney Turks demanding that the broadcaster SBS pulp
    its 25th anniversary history for twice making passing reference to
    an event they claim "never happened"; and, more recently, frenetic
    Turkish efforts to stop a memorial to the dead Assyrians in the
    western Sydney district of Fairfield.

    Advertisement: Story continues below Explanations abound. One is
    that Turkey is the victim of the single greatest conspiracy in world
    history, with states such as Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, France,
    Germany, Holland, Italy, Northern Ireland, Poland, Russia, Scotland,
    Sweden, Switzerland, the Vatican and Wales conniving to falsely brand
    Turkey as a genocidaire. Another is that somehow 11 million Armenians
    around the globe have subverted the truth, history and dozens of
    nations to "frame" innocent Turkey. Yet another is that witnesses
    - such as British historians Arnold Toynbee and Viscount Bryce,
    German missionary Dr Johannes Lepsius and German medico Armin Wegner,
    the American ambassador to Turkey Henry Morgenthau and his Swedish
    diplomatic colleagues - invented their sometimes daily conversations
    with the major perpetrators, Talaat Pasha and Enver Pasha, and lied to
    besmirch Turkish honour. Another is that the dozens of Australian PoWs,
    isolated and often grossly maltreated in remote villages rather than
    in camps, deliberately faked the photographs and invented the atrocity
    stories they brought back home. They assert that the special Turkish
    military courts-martial held in Istanbul in 1919 only sentenced several
    perpetrators to death in absentia and imprisoned some 30 others for
    war crimes only because of duress from the Allies.

    The best explanation is that the Turks did precisely what they
    were recorded and filmed as doing, for which their own tribunals
    convicted them.

    We are approaching a serious junction: the path to Gallipoli grows
    in scale and traffic each year, but so does the avenue to official
    recognition that what occurred was genocide, one in so many ways the
    prologue to, and template for, the Holocaust less than 20 years later.

    Sooner rather than later the US Congress will find the numbers
    for the two-thirds majority needed for recognition. The British
    government won't be far behind. More Australian states will follow
    and, inevitably, an unwilling (and very unhappy) federal government
    will have to do so. Our dilemma will be profound.

    There is, of course, a way forward: an admission of truth about the
    events; a genuine opening of all the Ottoman archives to obviate the
    old Turkish chestnuts about "awaiting the verdict of historians" and
    "Armenian revolutionaries engaged in civil war"; an offer of regret,
    or apology, even one leavened by a limitation on reparations. That
    way Turkey can more readily enter the European Union and the comity
    of nations. But the hysterical and obsessive denialism of the Batak
    massacres in Bulgaria in 1876, the 200,000 Armenians dead at the hands
    of Sultan Abdul Hamid II between 1894 and 1896, the 1.5 million dead at
    the hands of the Young Turks from 1915, will always get in the way of
    "normal" relationships.

    Even if today's Turkey decided to become more rather than less secular,
    more West-oriented, less cosy with Syria, Iran and Hezbollah in a
    jihadist worldview, more willing to address its past in relation to
    Christians generally, the juggernaut of the denialism industry is
    such that it simply cannot stop.

    The machine has developed its own mind, its own convulsive and
    reflexive responses. Turks see genocide as a blot on their escutcheon
    and honour; they see themselves as decent people, and decent people
    don't commit genocide. Wrong. "Decent people" - like Americans,
    Canadians, Belgians, Italians, Germans, Austrians, Spaniards and
    Australians - have all done just that.

    Colin Tatz is a visiting fellow in the College of Arts & Social
    Sciences, Australian National University. He is the author of With
    Intent to Destroy: Reflecting on Genocide.




    From: A. Papazian
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