Good Thursday morning Fellow Seekers,
Turkey is threatening serious consequences in its relations with the United States to protest a vote by the House Foreign Relations Committee declaring the slaughter of more than 1 million Armenians to be an act of genocide.
Armenian-Americans have been lobbying for years to have what happened to their ancestors during World War I officially declared a case of genocide. It has been a perennial issue – noticed mostly by Armenian-Americans and by Turkey – in Congress and even in presidential campaigns.
Turkey denies that a genocide occurs, asserting that not so many Armenians died and that the deaths were an unintended consequence of a program to relocate troublesome Armenian nationalists out of a war zone.
Decide for yourself whether the cost, in damaged U.S.-Turkish relations, is worth the declaration that a genocide occurred. But make no mistake, it occurred.
In 2000, I interviewed historian Vahakn Dadrian, who has made it his life’s work to keep alive the history of the Armenian genocide. The full piece — but I warn you, the details of how the genocide was accomplished are grisly and disturbing — is here.
Good stuff, Eric, as was your 2000 piece. I would suggest a plug for a later book, by the U of M’s Taner Akçam. Taner’s “A Shameful Act,” 2006, 483 pages, is scholarly (107 pages of notes), but an absorbing read. I’ve known Taner but became aware of his book only when I saw a long, enthusiastic essay about it in the New Yorker. Similar praise followed in the NY Times Book Review, the Economist and the New York Review of Books. Taner’s research carries particular punch because he’s Turkish.
I am extremely sympathetic to the resolution, but in the final analysis, I wonder what will such a resolution accomplish other than alienate yet another people in the Middle East. My response, which Turkey could easily come back with: “physician, heal thyself.” We need to stop present and future genocides from occurring and as with other areas of morality, you teach more by example than you do with words. Perhaps we should apologize to African Americans for slavery or the Native Americans for genocide of their people before thinking about condemning what Turkey did.
I think it should also be said what Turkey’s main leverage is in this situation: we like to fly our planes out of their country. France also went through a similar situation last year.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6043730.stm
How do you define genocide? If you invaded and occupied a country and say, 650,000 residents of that country died, and 2 million of them fled the country, would the invading/occupying country be responsible for a genocide? This, of course, is just a theoretical question.
More leverage:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/2007/10/turkey_escalates_action_near_i.php
Turkish warplanes and helicopter gunships attacked suspected positions of Kurdish rebels near Iraq on Wednesday, a possible prelude to a cross-border operation that would likely raise tensions with Washington.
The military offensive also reportedly included shelling of Turkish Kurd guerrilla hideouts in northern Iraq, which is predominantly Kurdish. U.S. officials are already preoccupied with efforts to stabilize other areas of Iraq and oppose Turkish intervention in the relatively peaceful north.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters that preparations were under way for parliamentary authorization of a cross-border operation, and told private CNN-Turk TV that the motion might reach Parliament on Thursday. The preparations “have started and are continuing,” he said. An opposition nationalist party said it would support the proposal.
…there goes Biden’s partition plan. I know there were some charges of bribery a few years back that had something to do with the Turkish lobby urging people not to get this resolution going. This is the only link I can remember:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9774.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Is7XIiEygk
Here’s a BBC clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ-HcshI3cA
We humans tend to very tenacious about “territory.”
The Palestinians want “theirs” back, and the Israeli’s want to keep “theirs.”
Those in East Timor are engaged in a territorial dispute.
Literally thousands of wars have been fought over territory, or the need for it.
Governments love to grab “territory” from their citizens, and there is always a huge fight over it.
Gangs and organized crime families fight fiercely to protect their “territory.”
Even many homeowners think they should have the right to kill those who invade their “territory.”
Those rejecting the Catholic church in reformation Europe were partly opposed because of the threat they posed to the political status quo, involving “territory.”
The Jews were a special case in Europe. Wealth and financial influence may have been factors, but “territory” did not enter into the picture.
Blacks in America have also been a different case, where political and economic control may be factors, but “territory” does not seem to be in the forefront.
Still, “territory” has been in history the source of more conflict than nearly any other factor.
Acknowledging this, one can perhaps see how the Ottomans, sensing severe threats to the territory of their shrinking empire, would logically turn to the common tool in these cases: kill the would be attackers and their women and children as well.
No-one need deny the extent of the slaughter. But the historical context suggests that this was a reaction to the threat posed by a group seeking to break away, taking “territory” with it. That the Armenians were of a common ethnicity was not so much the threat as their objectives (also true regarding the Kurds today). This was not like the nazi pogrom against the Jews, who were not a territorial threat to Hitler.
In sum, while surface similarities appear, it seems to me comparisons to Hitler are not appropriate.
[…] as forthrightly as post-war Germany has. Why is this? How much does it matter? This resonates with the recent controversy in Congress over a resolution declaring that Ottoman Turkey had committed a g… against Armenians during World War I. Modern Turkey still strongly resists this […]