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Anahit Shirinyan December 02, 2008
The previous weeks have shown that the question of the Armenian Genocide remains one of the factors impeding the normalization of Armenian-Turkish relations. This, even though the joint Armenia-Turkish collaboration in the recent period would seem to testify to the fact that for Turkey the Genocide issue is no longer viewed as a precondition for the normalization of relations.
However, the consequence of the election of Barack Obama as the new U.S. President has given rise to new commentary. During his pre-election campaign Obama, as widely noted, made promises to recognize the Armenian Genocide and later confirmed his willingness to keep his promise.
Even before the U.S. elections, Turkish Primes Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan went so far as to call Obama “a political dilettante” for his statements on the Armenian Genocide.
Turkish political players and the Turkish press reacted to Obama’s statement with a sense of unease and called on the U.S. to pull back from such moves for isn’t it true that Turkey is now coming across with its own initiatives to safeguard peace and stability in the region and intends to maintain direct relations with Armenia.
Two weeks ago in New York’s Columbia University Prime Minister Erdogan in a speech entitled “Turkey’s role in shaping the future” where he noted that Turkey and the Unit5ed States had a negative period in 2007 due to terrorist attacks emanating from the north of Iraq and due to Armenian claims surrounding the events of 1915 and expressed the hope that the new American administration would take into account Turkish sensitivities on matters of vital import.
Erdogan termed the efforts of the Armenian lobby in America as “cheap” and noted that, ““I hope the new U.S. administration would take into account Turkey’s efforts. It is not fair to make a judgment upon such cheap political lobbying.”
During his speech the Turkish PM once again voiced the Turkish proposal to create a Joint Conference on the Genocide comprised of Turkish and Armenian historians. «Our proposal is still on the table. Let's leave the issue to the historians» declared Erdogan. «We have opened our archives and the Armenians must do the same. To date, we have studied over one million documents.» Erdogan first made this proposal back in 2005 and it was essentially refused by Yerevan.
The newspaper Asbarez notes that while the Turkish archives appear to be open they still remian under heavy censorship and those experts who reserach thye genocide are followed and menaced by Turkey's Security Services.
In the opinion of Aram Hamparian, Executive Director of the Armenian Assembly of America, the renewed call for a conference of historians on the part of Turkey is just another tactic in its campaign of genocide denial. In his view, this proposal essentially comes into conflict with Article 301 which is used to label all sincere discourse on the Armenian Genocide that takes place in Turkey as «injurious» and prosecutable in the Turkish court system.
Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan in a recent interviw with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper, when answering a reporter's question, noted that there was absolutely no necessity to create such a commission. «We didn't believe that such a move would lead anywhere. We want to establish diplomatic relations between the two countries without any preconditions, to open the borders and then will we be able to discuss all issues relating to neighboring countriesd on an intergovernmental level. We do not view the recognition of the Genocide by Turkey as a precondition for the establishment of relations. We desire such a thing but not at all costs.”
What created much more of an uproar was the statement by Turkey’s Defense Minister Vecdi Gonul where he questioned whether "If Greeks continued to live in the Aegean and Armenians continued to live in many places in Turkey, I wonder whether there would be today's nation-state," The Turkish Defense Minister mad the statement during ceremonies at the Turkish Embassy in Brussels marking the death of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. "I don't know how to tell you about the importance of this exchange. But if you look at the old balances, the importance of this would very clearly arise," he added. The 1923 exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey involved some two million people, of whom 1.5 million were Greeks and were forced to leave their homeland in Asia Minor in a treaty promoted and overseen by the international community as part of the Treaty of Lausanne.
In his statement the Defense Minister alluded to the fact that Armenia assists the KPP, “We cannot deny that those people who consider themselves victims of the establishment of this nation and particularly subject to forced exile have played a role in the struggle taking place in southeastern Anatolia.”
More than 40 Turkish Armenians responded to this statement of Vecdi Gonul by issuing an open letter to Prime Minister Erdogan labeling the remarks of the Defense Minister as “praise for ethnic cleansing and criminal acts.” A few Turkish intellectuals also signed the open letter including Taner Akcam.
In the letter it is noted that the observations of Gonul contradict the Turkish constitution in which it is stated that every citizen of Turkey is a Turk. The letter rhetorically asks, “It is hard to understand that when we are talking about the Turkish nation, why Armenians and Greeks (non Muslims) can’t be part of that nation when Kurds, Arabs and Albanians (Muslims) can be. To what extent does the mentality stressed that there must be religious unity in order to form a nation actually correspond to the current law of the state?”
The statement by the Defense Minister also elicited a reaction by the Greeks. George Koumoutsakos, the Greek Foreign Ministry spokesperson stated that the destruction of the Armenian and Greek communities in Turkey was an imperative in the process of the creation of the modern Turkish state.
Negative reactions also came from various Turkish intellectuals. Soli Ozel a Professor of International Relations at Bigli University in Istanbul stated to Hurriyet News & Economic Review that 80 years later, the population transfer had led to the impoverishment of Turkey’s society and culture. Professor Ozel stated that that the eviction of Armenians and Greeks from Anatolia postponed the industrialization of Turkey by some fifty years, from an economic point of view and that due to ethnic and religious cleansing the variety of thought in Turkey had been erased. Vecdi Gonul was forced to issue a public statement noting that his comments had bee misconstrued.
During the recent period, the Genocide has been more frequently discussed in the social and political life of Turkey. A few weeks ago in the liberal newspaper Taraf, there appeared an interesting article penned by Judge Faruk Ozsun. In the article he severely criticized Article 301 and labeled the supporters of the official line of Turkey regarding the Armenian Genocide as “blind patriotism”.
Commenting on recent guilty charges levied against three Turks in Switzerland for denying the Armenian Genocide Judge Ozsun comments that Switzerland, rather than restricting their right to freedom of speech, defended human dignity, by honoring the memory of the victims. Accepting that the denial of genocide is a continuation of genocide, the Turkish judge noted that Switzerland merely didn’t allow “for the victims to be sacrificed a second time.”
This is perhaps the first time than a presiding judge has expressed such criticism. The recent discussions of the Armenian Genocide and Armenian-Turkish relations that have occurred are clearly a step forward in the life of Turkey’s society and politics. Such discussions will inevitably lead to the creation of a variety of thought regarding the issue and the removal of that ill-fated Article 301. And perhaps this time as well Armenians will have their input in the process, something that they have always strived to do as ethnic Armenian citizens of Turkey, in the name of Turkey’s democratization and development.
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