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TURKEY AND ARMENIA: GENOCIDE? WHAT GENOCIDE?
Open Democracy
March 2 2015
John Lubbock, 28 February 2015
April 1915 saw the start of the Turkish genocide against Armenians
and other minorities. Erdogan hopes he can ignore the anniversary
and it will go away--while Armenian politics is stuck in victim mode.
With the centenary of the onset of the Armenian genocide less than
two months away, the economically aggrandising but politically
repressive Turkish state needs to take stock--for the sake of its
international relations as well as its domestic rapport with its
minority communities.
Although many Turks now accept that hundreds of thousands of Armenians,
Assyrians and Greeks were massacred during the first world war,
their government is increasingly unwilling to negotiate with Armenia
to establish diplomatic relations and reopen the land border.
Reconciliation is a low priority as the executive seeks to increase
its authority over the remaining semi-independent state institutions,
like the central bank and the judiciary. In the run-up to important
elections in June, the ruling AK Party cannot afford to alienate its
base of nationalistic, religious Turks or divert its attention from
the Kurdish peace process--around 3.5m Kurds vote for it.
Gallipoli manoeuvre
The plan which the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, seems to
have formulated to deal with the awkward genocide anniversary is to
ignore it completely. The commemoration of the Battle of Gallipoli,
in which the Ottoman army halted the Allied invasion, has been moved
from the usual date of 18 April to 24 April--the day the genocide is
marked annually.
Erdogan even invited the Armenian president, among other world
leaders, to the Gallipoli observances. Zaman, the opposition media
group influenced by the Cemaat movement of Erdogan's ally-turned-rival
Fethullah Gulen, reported that so few foreign leaders had accepted
the offer to attend that the event was being cancelled. This is
likely to be an exaggeration, intended to make Erdogan look bad,
but it seems to reflect Turkey's increasing political isolation.
One country Turkey does count as a close ally, Azerbaijan, is more
important than any European validation, due to its natural gas reserves
and ethnically Turkic population. It is the conflict between Azerbaijan
and Armenia which seems to be the biggest obstacle in Armenian-Turkish
relations, though Turkey could be using Azerbaijan as an excuse.
While hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed
Nagorno-Karabakh region ended in 1994, tensions have never been
resolved and there are periodic border clashes. Last year, the
Azerbaijani president, Heydar Aliyev, went on a long Twitter rant about
the strength of his army after some of its soldiers had been killed.
Posturing
The emotive nature of the genocide lends itself to political posturing
and exaggeration of all kinds. Armenian media are reporting that
Turkey paid the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to destroy 'Armenian
genocide documents kept at an institute'--which it's very unlikely
Egypt would have had in the first place. In Turkey, there are still
extreme nationalist groups willing to display banners praising their
ancestors for the 'cleansing' of 1915. Erdogan maintains that an
'impartial board of historians' should decide if the Ottoman
authorities were guilty at all.
A number of diaspora groups and some Armenian parties are demanding
that Turkey provide compensation--including all of 'Western Armenia',
in what is now eastern Turkey. Western, or 'Wilsonian', Armenia was
granted to the latter in the Treaty of Sevres, which partitioned the
Ottoman Empire and large parts of Anatolia among the victorious allies
in 1920. Its terms were seen as vindictive and spurred a nationalist
rebellion, led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, which ejected the occupying
forces of Britain, Greece and Italy. The treaty was largely unratified
and unimplemented, and was replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.
The 1920 treaty has given rise to a reflex in Turkish politics so
common it has a name: Sevres Syndrome. This manifests itself as a
paranoia that outside forces are conspiring against Turkey. Armenian
groups demanding that Turkey voluntarily cede territory play perfectly
into this fear.
Giro Manoyan is a politician with the Armenian Revolutionary Federation
(ARF), a small leftist party in Armenia with a big social and cultural
role among the diaspora. Asked why such groups demanded the unlikely
return of territory which no longer contains an Armenian population,
Monoyan said: "For the ARF, the territorial claims are a strategic
issue. When Turkey asks Armenia to sign agreements that it has no
territorial claims from Turkey, then it becomes a priority for us not
to sign such a document or make such an announcement. It is actually
Turkey which by its preconditions to Armenia to establish diplomatic
relations is making the territorial issue a priority."
Progress stalled
In 2009 a provisional roadmap towards restarting a diplomatic
relationship and reopening the border was announced by the two
countries, but progress stalled and Armenia withdrew, saying
Turkey was imposing preconditions such as a deal with Azerbaijan on
Nagorno-Karabakh and the dropping of territorial claims. Armenia has
however never officially demanded territorial reparations, though
groups like the ARF and Armenia's prosecutor general have done so.
Both states look on the complex issue of compensation legalistically.
Turkey is intent on securing a legal declaration from Armenia that
it does not seek any Turkish territory, while Armenians, many of
whose families had property confiscated during the genocide, insist
on legal compensation for their losses. What Armenian groups like
the ARF are effectively saying is that they are insulted that Turkey
wants them to drop legal claims to material compensation--and that
that is exactly why they are going to keep making them.
While Erdogan took the unprecedented step in 2014 of offering
'condolences' to the families of those killed in 1915, the government
is reluctant to offer a formal apology. This stems partly from fear
that it could be used to support claims for reparations--similar to
the reticence of the British Foreign Office about apologising for
colonial-era crimes.
Respected figure
A final strand to the complex interplay of national groups within
Anatolia and the wider region is the pro-Kurdish HDP, now the only
serious left-wing party in Turkey. It has a female as well as a male
leader but the latter, Selahattin DemirtaÅ~_, is undoubtedly more
prominent. He is a respected figure with undeniable charisma, in
stark contrast to the old-fashioned and uninspiring leadership of the
secular-nationalist (now social-democratic) CHP, founded by Ataturk.
>From my conversations with leftist Turks, Armenians and Kurds in
Istanbul, the HDP is seen as the only promising trend in Turkish
politics. Many wealthier Armenians and Kurds vote for Erdogan's AKP
but those of a more liberal disposition like what the HDP is saying.
They hope that, by pushing its support above 10% in June, they
will prevent the AKP from winning the 330 seats it needs to pass
constitutional amendments giving Erdogan even more power. This could
be a risky strategy, as falling short of the 10% threshold would see
the HDP win no seats at all.
The HDP has recognised the 1915 massacres as a genocide. In a recent
interview, DemirtaÅ~_ said that "as long as democracy does not develop
in Turkey, as long as freedoms aren't improved in Turkey, it will
not be possible to solve any of the country's problems. Firstly,
there is a need for freedom of expression, the freedom to openly
express thoughts ... As long as this freedom is not provided, how
can we talk about, for example, the Kurdish problem, the Armenian
genocide or the Alevi issue?"
The HDP is sponsoring reconciliation projects in eastern Turkey;
allowing Armenian churches to be rebuilt and conferences to be held. A
new generation of Kurds are talking about the historical guilt felt
by the descendants of those who participated in massacres, only to be
subsequently persecuted by the Turkish state themselves. Projects such
as these, and the social progress promised by the HDP in the areas
it administers, offer the best prospect of reconciliation between
the Turkish state and its minorities.
Silent
Armenians in Istanbul live today much as their ancestors did in
the 19th century--economically, socially and culturally integrated
in Turkish society. Unless they were to broadcast their ethnic
affiliation, nobody would know they were part of any minority, as
the ethnic mix of those who today call themselves 'Turks' is drawn
from all over the former Ottoman Empire. "Happy is the one who says
'I am a Turk'," said Ataturk, but the reality was that thousands who
were not Turks simply kept silent about the fact.
The AKP's rise to power and its removal of the old Kemalist power
structures in the military, government and education was associated
with a period of relative freedom of expression in Turkey. Although
the authorities attempted to prosecute Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel Prize
winning author, for recognising the genocide in 2005, the charges
were eventually dropped.
Once the AKP was fully in control, however, it found that it quite
liked being in charge. Life has remained difficult for journalists in
Turkey, particularly if they are from a minority. If the government
continues its slide into 'competitive authoritarianism', things will
get worse for poorer Kurds, Alevis, Armenians, Jews and members of
other minorities.
The undercurrent of hatred created by the unresolved historical
question continues to create violence, such as the murder of
the Armenian Turkish journalist Hrant Dink in 2007, who was being
prosecuted for 'insulting Turkishness'. His crime, ironically, was to
appeal to Armenians to let go of their demand for Turkey to confess
its historical guilt, to "replace the poisoned blood associated with
the Turk, with fresh blood associated with Armenia". This statement
was read by extreme Turkish nationalists as suggesting that Turkish
blood was somehow dirty and probably inspired those who commissioned
his murder. But his words still stand: both sides must let go of
their hatred if there is to be any progress.
Further away
The centenary of the Armenian genocide is a milestone, to be sure,
but it will have little impact on the political direction of the
Turkish and Armenian states. If anything, the emotional significance
of the anniversary seems to have pushed any possible diplomatic
reconciliation further away.
On 24 April in Yerevan, System of a Down, the famous Armenian-American
rock band, will play to a crowd including thousands of diaspora
Armenians who will be travelling to the country for the first time.
They will find an impoverished country in an unstable region, with
thousands of new Armenian refugees from the Syria conflict. Meanwhile,
in Canakkale, the nearest town to the site of the Battle of Gallipoli,
as well as the historical site of ancient Troy, Turkish officials
will be remembering how their ancestors bravely fought off the
invading allies, while in the provinces Turkey's minorities were
being systematically liquidated.
Away from the international posturing, though, in the newly
reconstructed Armenian church of Sourp Giragos in Diyarbakir, eastern
Turkey, Armenians and Kurds will hold a remembrance service likely
to be attended by many of Turkey's 'hidden Armenians'. While the
government's history books still deny that the events of 1915 amount to
a genocide, many of the younger generation are looking again at their
national mythology and concluding that Turkey is no longer the victim
of Western political meddling--but an economic powerhouse which could
use its influence to bring greater stability to a troubled region.
----John Lubbock is a journalist and research and advocacy officer
for the Bahrain Center for Human Rights.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/node/90896
Open Democracy
March 2 2015
John Lubbock, 28 February 2015
April 1915 saw the start of the Turkish genocide against Armenians
and other minorities. Erdogan hopes he can ignore the anniversary
and it will go away--while Armenian politics is stuck in victim mode.
With the centenary of the onset of the Armenian genocide less than
two months away, the economically aggrandising but politically
repressive Turkish state needs to take stock--for the sake of its
international relations as well as its domestic rapport with its
minority communities.
Although many Turks now accept that hundreds of thousands of Armenians,
Assyrians and Greeks were massacred during the first world war,
their government is increasingly unwilling to negotiate with Armenia
to establish diplomatic relations and reopen the land border.
Reconciliation is a low priority as the executive seeks to increase
its authority over the remaining semi-independent state institutions,
like the central bank and the judiciary. In the run-up to important
elections in June, the ruling AK Party cannot afford to alienate its
base of nationalistic, religious Turks or divert its attention from
the Kurdish peace process--around 3.5m Kurds vote for it.
Gallipoli manoeuvre
The plan which the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, seems to
have formulated to deal with the awkward genocide anniversary is to
ignore it completely. The commemoration of the Battle of Gallipoli,
in which the Ottoman army halted the Allied invasion, has been moved
from the usual date of 18 April to 24 April--the day the genocide is
marked annually.
Erdogan even invited the Armenian president, among other world
leaders, to the Gallipoli observances. Zaman, the opposition media
group influenced by the Cemaat movement of Erdogan's ally-turned-rival
Fethullah Gulen, reported that so few foreign leaders had accepted
the offer to attend that the event was being cancelled. This is
likely to be an exaggeration, intended to make Erdogan look bad,
but it seems to reflect Turkey's increasing political isolation.
One country Turkey does count as a close ally, Azerbaijan, is more
important than any European validation, due to its natural gas reserves
and ethnically Turkic population. It is the conflict between Azerbaijan
and Armenia which seems to be the biggest obstacle in Armenian-Turkish
relations, though Turkey could be using Azerbaijan as an excuse.
While hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed
Nagorno-Karabakh region ended in 1994, tensions have never been
resolved and there are periodic border clashes. Last year, the
Azerbaijani president, Heydar Aliyev, went on a long Twitter rant about
the strength of his army after some of its soldiers had been killed.
Posturing
The emotive nature of the genocide lends itself to political posturing
and exaggeration of all kinds. Armenian media are reporting that
Turkey paid the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to destroy 'Armenian
genocide documents kept at an institute'--which it's very unlikely
Egypt would have had in the first place. In Turkey, there are still
extreme nationalist groups willing to display banners praising their
ancestors for the 'cleansing' of 1915. Erdogan maintains that an
'impartial board of historians' should decide if the Ottoman
authorities were guilty at all.
A number of diaspora groups and some Armenian parties are demanding
that Turkey provide compensation--including all of 'Western Armenia',
in what is now eastern Turkey. Western, or 'Wilsonian', Armenia was
granted to the latter in the Treaty of Sevres, which partitioned the
Ottoman Empire and large parts of Anatolia among the victorious allies
in 1920. Its terms were seen as vindictive and spurred a nationalist
rebellion, led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, which ejected the occupying
forces of Britain, Greece and Italy. The treaty was largely unratified
and unimplemented, and was replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.
The 1920 treaty has given rise to a reflex in Turkish politics so
common it has a name: Sevres Syndrome. This manifests itself as a
paranoia that outside forces are conspiring against Turkey. Armenian
groups demanding that Turkey voluntarily cede territory play perfectly
into this fear.
Giro Manoyan is a politician with the Armenian Revolutionary Federation
(ARF), a small leftist party in Armenia with a big social and cultural
role among the diaspora. Asked why such groups demanded the unlikely
return of territory which no longer contains an Armenian population,
Monoyan said: "For the ARF, the territorial claims are a strategic
issue. When Turkey asks Armenia to sign agreements that it has no
territorial claims from Turkey, then it becomes a priority for us not
to sign such a document or make such an announcement. It is actually
Turkey which by its preconditions to Armenia to establish diplomatic
relations is making the territorial issue a priority."
Progress stalled
In 2009 a provisional roadmap towards restarting a diplomatic
relationship and reopening the border was announced by the two
countries, but progress stalled and Armenia withdrew, saying
Turkey was imposing preconditions such as a deal with Azerbaijan on
Nagorno-Karabakh and the dropping of territorial claims. Armenia has
however never officially demanded territorial reparations, though
groups like the ARF and Armenia's prosecutor general have done so.
Both states look on the complex issue of compensation legalistically.
Turkey is intent on securing a legal declaration from Armenia that
it does not seek any Turkish territory, while Armenians, many of
whose families had property confiscated during the genocide, insist
on legal compensation for their losses. What Armenian groups like
the ARF are effectively saying is that they are insulted that Turkey
wants them to drop legal claims to material compensation--and that
that is exactly why they are going to keep making them.
While Erdogan took the unprecedented step in 2014 of offering
'condolences' to the families of those killed in 1915, the government
is reluctant to offer a formal apology. This stems partly from fear
that it could be used to support claims for reparations--similar to
the reticence of the British Foreign Office about apologising for
colonial-era crimes.
Respected figure
A final strand to the complex interplay of national groups within
Anatolia and the wider region is the pro-Kurdish HDP, now the only
serious left-wing party in Turkey. It has a female as well as a male
leader but the latter, Selahattin DemirtaÅ~_, is undoubtedly more
prominent. He is a respected figure with undeniable charisma, in
stark contrast to the old-fashioned and uninspiring leadership of the
secular-nationalist (now social-democratic) CHP, founded by Ataturk.
>From my conversations with leftist Turks, Armenians and Kurds in
Istanbul, the HDP is seen as the only promising trend in Turkish
politics. Many wealthier Armenians and Kurds vote for Erdogan's AKP
but those of a more liberal disposition like what the HDP is saying.
They hope that, by pushing its support above 10% in June, they
will prevent the AKP from winning the 330 seats it needs to pass
constitutional amendments giving Erdogan even more power. This could
be a risky strategy, as falling short of the 10% threshold would see
the HDP win no seats at all.
The HDP has recognised the 1915 massacres as a genocide. In a recent
interview, DemirtaÅ~_ said that "as long as democracy does not develop
in Turkey, as long as freedoms aren't improved in Turkey, it will
not be possible to solve any of the country's problems. Firstly,
there is a need for freedom of expression, the freedom to openly
express thoughts ... As long as this freedom is not provided, how
can we talk about, for example, the Kurdish problem, the Armenian
genocide or the Alevi issue?"
The HDP is sponsoring reconciliation projects in eastern Turkey;
allowing Armenian churches to be rebuilt and conferences to be held. A
new generation of Kurds are talking about the historical guilt felt
by the descendants of those who participated in massacres, only to be
subsequently persecuted by the Turkish state themselves. Projects such
as these, and the social progress promised by the HDP in the areas
it administers, offer the best prospect of reconciliation between
the Turkish state and its minorities.
Silent
Armenians in Istanbul live today much as their ancestors did in
the 19th century--economically, socially and culturally integrated
in Turkish society. Unless they were to broadcast their ethnic
affiliation, nobody would know they were part of any minority, as
the ethnic mix of those who today call themselves 'Turks' is drawn
from all over the former Ottoman Empire. "Happy is the one who says
'I am a Turk'," said Ataturk, but the reality was that thousands who
were not Turks simply kept silent about the fact.
The AKP's rise to power and its removal of the old Kemalist power
structures in the military, government and education was associated
with a period of relative freedom of expression in Turkey. Although
the authorities attempted to prosecute Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel Prize
winning author, for recognising the genocide in 2005, the charges
were eventually dropped.
Once the AKP was fully in control, however, it found that it quite
liked being in charge. Life has remained difficult for journalists in
Turkey, particularly if they are from a minority. If the government
continues its slide into 'competitive authoritarianism', things will
get worse for poorer Kurds, Alevis, Armenians, Jews and members of
other minorities.
The undercurrent of hatred created by the unresolved historical
question continues to create violence, such as the murder of
the Armenian Turkish journalist Hrant Dink in 2007, who was being
prosecuted for 'insulting Turkishness'. His crime, ironically, was to
appeal to Armenians to let go of their demand for Turkey to confess
its historical guilt, to "replace the poisoned blood associated with
the Turk, with fresh blood associated with Armenia". This statement
was read by extreme Turkish nationalists as suggesting that Turkish
blood was somehow dirty and probably inspired those who commissioned
his murder. But his words still stand: both sides must let go of
their hatred if there is to be any progress.
Further away
The centenary of the Armenian genocide is a milestone, to be sure,
but it will have little impact on the political direction of the
Turkish and Armenian states. If anything, the emotional significance
of the anniversary seems to have pushed any possible diplomatic
reconciliation further away.
On 24 April in Yerevan, System of a Down, the famous Armenian-American
rock band, will play to a crowd including thousands of diaspora
Armenians who will be travelling to the country for the first time.
They will find an impoverished country in an unstable region, with
thousands of new Armenian refugees from the Syria conflict. Meanwhile,
in Canakkale, the nearest town to the site of the Battle of Gallipoli,
as well as the historical site of ancient Troy, Turkish officials
will be remembering how their ancestors bravely fought off the
invading allies, while in the provinces Turkey's minorities were
being systematically liquidated.
Away from the international posturing, though, in the newly
reconstructed Armenian church of Sourp Giragos in Diyarbakir, eastern
Turkey, Armenians and Kurds will hold a remembrance service likely
to be attended by many of Turkey's 'hidden Armenians'. While the
government's history books still deny that the events of 1915 amount to
a genocide, many of the younger generation are looking again at their
national mythology and concluding that Turkey is no longer the victim
of Western political meddling--but an economic powerhouse which could
use its influence to bring greater stability to a troubled region.
----John Lubbock is a journalist and research and advocacy officer
for the Bahrain Center for Human Rights.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/node/90896