Turkey Keeps Genocide Controversy Alive
Earlier this year, the House Foreign Affairs Committee narrowly passed a resolution to officially label Turkey's state-orchestrated murder of 1.5 million Armenians, which began 95 years ago this month, a genocide -- a move that in turn led the Turkish government to recall its ambassador from Washington.
Then, in March, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened to expel 100,000 Armenians living in Turkey illegally if foreign governments continued to agitate for the genocide designation for the mass killing (earning a filleting from Christopher Hitchens in Slate). It wasn't Erdogan's first such fulmination, but it also is in keeping with long-standing Turkish policy when it comes to discussing the deliberate Ottoman destruction of Armenians during and immediately following World War I.
So why can't Turkey own up to its bloody past?
"Fear of rewriting history is the main fear of modern Turkey," says Hayk Demoyan, director of the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute in Armenia's capital of Yerevan.
Indeed, the founding of modern Turkey and the state's campaign against Armenia go hand in hand. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey's revered "founding father," who secularized the country, is implicated in the killings of Armenians, Demoyan says. "It is a fear of facing historical reality and causing a total collapse of the ideological axis that modern republican Turkey was formed around. Turks get panicked when you compare Ataturk's legacy to Lenin."
Instead, Turkey and various pro-Turkey groups have consistently maintained that the Armenian death toll has been exaggerated, and that while hundreds of thousands may have died, it was because of starvation and disease -- not at the hands of Turkish troops. Increasingly, this account has been challenged by both foreign governments and dissenters within Turkey itself.
"The country's best-known novelist, Orhan Pamuk, was dragged before a court in 2005 for acknowledging Turkey's role in the destruction of Armenia," Hitchens writes. "Had he not been the winner of a Nobel Prize, it might have gone very hard for him, as it has for prominent and brave intellectuals like Murat Belge. Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink, also prosecuted under a state law forbidding discussion of the past, was shot down in the street by an assassin who was later photographed in the company of beaming, compliant policemen."
Turkey's continued denials come at a high cost, most notably endangering its entrance into the European Union. But even if Turkey's ideological foundations are as fragile as Demoyan contends, many nations have had to confront their unsavory pasts, to own up to them and make amends (even if only symbolically) in order to move forward. Germany's done so for its Nazi past. Australia apologized to its Aborigine population. Congress has apologized for slavery and the mistreatment of Native Americans. Such measures may do little, but they are at the very least an acknowledgment of wrongdoing, and part of a growing process that Turkey, to its own detriment, refuses to engage in.
By Paul Wachter
AOL news