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Turkey Must End Its 100 Years Of Genocide Denial

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  • Turkey Must End Its 100 Years Of Genocide Denial

    TURKEY MUST END ITS 100 YEARS OF GENOCIDE DENIAL

    Peter Balakian
    Reconciliation with Armenia can only begin when Turkey roots out
    institutional denial and owns up to this gruesome chapter of its past
    A placard shows the images of the Ottomans believed to be responsible
    for the Armenian genocide. Photograph: Mark Kerrison/Demotix/Corbis

    Tuesday 21 April 2015 15.53 BSTLast modified on Wednesday 22 April
    201500.09 BST

    Exactly 100 years ago, on 24 April 1915, the Turkish government
    arrested 250 Armenian intellectuals and cultural leaders in
    Constantinople, so beginning the Armenian genocide.

    >From late spring of 1915, massacres were carried out throughout
    Turkey. The government organised the genocide by creating death squads,
    passing laws to sanction deportation and confiscation, using the then
    cutting-edge railway and telegraph technology, and wrapping the whole
    thing up in the nationalist ideology of pan-Turkism.

    The US consul in Aleppo, Jesse B Jackson, called it "a gigantic
    plundering scheme, as well as the final blow to extinguish the
    [Armenian] race". By 1918, between a half and two-thirds of the 2
    million Armenians living in their historic homeland in the Ottoman
    empire had been annihilated. Raphael Lemkin, the legal scholar who
    created the concept of genocide as an international crime, and was
    in the 1940s the first to use the term "Armenian genocide", put the
    death toll at 1.2 million.

    The roots of this slaughter began in the late 19th century, when
    Armenian reformers began petitioning for equal rights for Christians
    and Jews in the Ottoman empire, in which non-Muslim minorities were
    legally relegated to infidel status. Largely peaceful activism for
    change resulted in horrendous massacres of more than 100,000 unarmed
    Armenian civilians under Sultan Abdul Hamid II in the 1890s. As Turkey
    lost more of its territory in eastern Europe during the Balkan wars
    of 1912-13, it became increasingly anxious.

    'Even at the time of the mass killings, Turkey's interior minister,
    Talaat Pasha, adamantly denied them'

    When the first world war broke out, the Ottoman government (the
    Unionist party) claimed that Armenians were a danger to national
    security and would side with the Russians (some did defect to join
    the Russian army). It put into motion a final solution.

    In every city, town and village across Turkey, from Constantinople
    to Ankara to the Armenian vilayets in the east, where they had lived
    for 2,500 years, Armenians were rounded up, arrested, and either shot
    outright or put on deportation marches. Most often, the able-bodied
    men were arrested in groups, taken out of the town or city and shot
    en masse. The women and children and the infirm and elderly were
    told that they could gather some possessions and would be deported
    to "the interior". The Turks often told the Armenians, as the Nazis
    would later tell the Jews, that they could return after the war.

    Along the Black Sea region in the north, and from Adana and other
    Armenian cities in the south, the massacre network extended to
    the northern Syrian desert: east of Aleppo, in the region of Deir
    el-Zor, more Armenians died (400,000 or more) than anywhere else. The
    historian Richard L Rubenstein has described these events as the
    "first full-fledged attempt by a modern state to practise disciplined,
    methodically organised genocide". Even at the time of the mass
    killings, Turkey's interior minister, Talaat Pasha, adamantly denied
    to the press and foreign governments that massacres were taking place.

    FacebookTwitterPinterest Soldiers standing over skulls of victims
    from the Armenian village of Sheyxalan, during the first world
    war. Photograph: STR/AFP/Getty Images

    After the war, the denial of the extermination became, as the Turkish
    historian Taner Akcam has put it, one of the foundation myths of the
    modern Turkish republic. What happened to the Armenians was deemed
    to be their fault, and the subject became taboo.

    In Turkey's state-mandated educational system, in which critical
    inquiry is forbidden, the representation of the Armenian past is either
    absent or reduced to a couple of sentences, in which the Armenians
    are vilified. Turkey's authoritarian curriculum dovetails with its
    repression of intellectual freedom, giving it one of the worst human
    rights records; in the past two years, according to the Committee to
    Protect Journalists, Turkey has had more imprisoned journalists than
    China and Iran.

    The continuing denial is also linked to the fear of reparations. What
    legal recourse will there be for the lost Armenian property and wealth,
    or the 2,500 Armenian churches and monasteries and nearly 2,000 schools
    destroyed? Turkey has elevated national pride over historical truth
    and any ethical concerns. In 1997 the International Association of
    Genocide Scholars unanimously passed a resolution stating that what
    happened to the Armenians conforms to the UN's definition of genocide.

    Analysis The Armenian genocide - the Guardian briefing

    Turkey has never accepted the term genocide, even though historians
    have demolished its denial of responsibility for up to 1.5 million
    deaths

    Read more

    There are a few academics whom Turkey has cultivated to support
    its falsification of history. About these, the Holocaust scholar
    Deborah Lipstadt has said: "Denial of genocide, whether that of the
    Turks against the Armenians, or the Nazis against the Jews, is not
    an act of historical reinterpretation ... the deniers sow confusion
    by appearing to be engaged in a genuine scholarly effort. The deniers
    aim at convincing innocent third parties that there is 'another side
    of the story' when there is [none]; denial of genocide strives to
    reshape history in order to demonise the victims and rehabilitate
    the perpetrators."

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    But Turkish denial comes in many forms. This year, one of its tactics
    aimed at undermining the memory of the genocide includes holding a
    centennial event for the Battle of Gallipoli on 24 April - the day
    Armenians worldwide remember the genocide - rather than 25 April,
    the usual Gallipoli commemoration date. The offence is compounded by
    the attendance of Prince Charles and Prince Harry at this politically
    concocted gathering.

    That is why it was so important that last week Pope Francis affirmed
    that the slaughter of the Armenians was the "first genocide of the
    20th century". He showed that he would not be bullied by the Turkish
    state. Nor would he be cajoled by Turkey's specious rhetoric suggesting
    that if he used the word "genocide" he would create a crisis between
    Muslims and Christians. The pope took the moral issue even further when
    he addressed the corruption of Turkish denial: "Concealing or denying
    evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it."

    On the centenary of the genocide, Turkey would do its national honour
    well if it listened to him. There can be no reconciliation until
    there is truth.

    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/21/turkey-100-years-genocide-denial-armenia


    From: Baghdasarian
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