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The Guardian View On Turkey And The Armenians: History Matters

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  • The Guardian View On Turkey And The Armenians: History Matters

    THE GUARDIAN VIEW ON TURKEY AND THE ARMENIANS: HISTORY MATTERS

    Editorial

    The battle over the word genocide is all but won, but the official
    Turkish state remains in denial Recep Tayyip Erdoðan's government
    in Turkey 'has essentially decided that its distorted version of
    the origins of the state will remain in place'. Photograph: Kayhan
    Ozer/AFP/Getty Images

    Thursday 23 April 2015 19.48 BST

    It is a hard thing to admit that the state to which you belong was
    founded on a crime and that the history taught in your schools is
    full of lies. Yet there is no redemption without repentance and,
    on the centenary of the beginning of the genocidal campaign against
    the Armenians, it is sad to record that Turkey has still not faced
    the facts about what happened in 1915. The answer is quite simple in
    outline, if complex in its dreadful detail. The Armenians, who had
    lived in Anatolia since long before Turks arrived from central Asia,
    were killed, deported, or forcibly converted to Islam. Estimates
    suggest that at least 600,000 perished, while hundreds of thousands
    were expelled from or fled the Turkish lands, never to return.

    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

    For a shamefully long time the world was complicit in Turkey's
    insistence that the suffering of the Armenians, and of Assyrian
    Christians as well, was not different in kind from that of other
    peoples, including ethnic Turks, during the convulsions caused by the
    first world war across Europe, and, in particular, that it was unfair
    to call it genocide. But scholarship, including some distinguished
    Turkish work, has increasingly ruled out the "bad things happen in war"
    thesis, while an extraordinary effort among Armenians of the diaspora
    to rescue and deepen their own national memory of events and to pass
    that on to others has gradually changed public opinion in Europe and
    America. The United States still avoids the word genocide, as does
    Britain. But legislature after legislature has passed resolutions using
    the word, with Austria and Germany, which had long resisted its use,
    the latest to do so. The German formulation is still equivocal, and so
    is the position of Pope Francis, who pronounced on the issue earlier
    this month. But the battle over the name has essentially been won.

    This struggle has mattered intensely to Armenians and Turks, but it
    has also sometimes stood in the way of a more historically grounded
    understanding of events. The Armenian-American writer William Saroyan
    has a character in one of his plays say: "The world is amok ... Life is
    on fire; caught in hurricanes; submerged in deep and blind waters ..."

    He might have coined those words to describe the Ottoman empire as
    it drifted towards a final shipwreck in the late 19th century. It
    is not too much to say that those who were in charge of the empire
    were for most of the time in a state of despair, or that they hardly
    understood the forces that were changing their once multiethnic state
    into something else.

    By the middle of the world war "a government had come to believe that
    among its subject peoples whole nations presented an immediate threat
    to the security of the state," the historian Ronald Suny writes.

    "Defence of the empire and of the nation became the rationale for
    mass murder." And there was tinder available: Armenians and Kurds had
    for a long time been in competition for power and land in territory
    they both thought was theirs. The empire, when it worked, had kept
    that rivalry, in which the Kurds were the persistent aggressors,
    below a certain level of violence. But when the reins were slipped,
    the Turkish government had eager executors of its will to hand.

    The Kurds, ironically, then suffered from Turkish ethnic chauvinism
    in their turn. There was no attempt to physically destroy them as a
    people, but their language was suppressed and their identity denied.

    They were supposed to turn into Turks, but refused to do so, a refusal
    that recent Turkish governments have reluctantly come to accept. The
    Kurds now, after their own bitter experience, are well to the fore
    in recognising and regretting their role in 1915. Some, perhaps many,
    ethnic Turks also know that the national narrative is problematic.

    But the official Turkish state remains wedded to its threadbare myth,
    fulminating and recalling ambassadors whenever the word genocide
    is pronounced. This year it has even moved the anniversary of the
    Gallipoli campaign so it coincides with the Armenian anniversary,
    hoping to obscure one remembrance with another. Ministers will attend
    some other, tamer ceremonies. But the Erdoðan government, which in
    earlier years gave some cause for hope on this issue, has essentially
    decided that its distorted version of the origins of the state will
    remain in place.

    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/23/guardian-view-turkey-armenians-history-matters

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