It's No Use Papering Over Turkey's Past

[Yervant1]

IT'S NO USE PAPERING OVER TURKEY'S PAST

 

The Globe and Mail, Canada

Oct 26 2006

 

The Canadian government has taken the contradictory position of

recognizing the 1915 genocide of more than one million Armenians in

Turkey and, as of this week, supporting Turkey's proposal for a fresh

study of those events. It would be possible to square those two acts

if there were any reason to believe that Turkey is ready to openly

and honestly look at the historical truth. There isn't.

 

This is a country that persists in laying criminal charges for

"insulting Turkishness" against writers who dare to question the

official state denial that the genocide happened. Novelist Orhan

Pamuk, who won this year's Nobel Prize for literature, was one of

those charged. Turkey also persists in threatening to limit trade

with countries that use the g-word. In May, after Prime Minister

Stephen Harper explicitly recognized the genocide, Turkey recalled

its ambassador and withdrew its jet fighters from NATO exercises at

CFB Cold Lake in Alberta.

 

Turkey did do Canada the courtesy this summer of taking in thousands

of its nationals who otherwise would have been stuck in a war zone

in Lebanon. But surely Turkey does not expect that every time it does

a favour for a North Atlantic Treaty Organization ally, the quid pro

quo will be some form of symbolic support for the Turkish denial of

its past.

 

As an act of realpolitik, this support for more "study" is far from

Canada's first sop to the Turks. In 1996, when a Bloc QuïMcois MP

put forward a motion to recognize the genocide, none other than the

Liberal secretary of state for multiculturalism, Hedy Fry, amended the

motion to say tragedy instead of genocide. When a Reform MP amended

that amendment to say "the tragedy of genocide," the government voted

to defeat the motion. Mr. Harper is not the first to bow to Turkish

pressure, but his backtracking is at odds with the principled stand

he prides himself on taking on international issues.

 

Twenty years ago, Benjamin Whitaker of Britain, a special rapporteur to

the United Nations Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination

and the Protection of Minorities, included the massacres of the

Armenians on a list of 20th century genocides. "At least one million,

and possibly well over half of the Armenian population, are reliably

estimated to have been killed or death-marched by independent

authorities and eyewitnesses."

 

Corroborating information, he said, was in reports in U.S., British

and German archives and in those of contemporary diplomats in the

Ottoman Empire; as he noted, Germany was Turkey's ally in the First

World War. The Turkish position was that all evidence to the contrary

was forged.

 

Some day Turkey will have to do what most of Europe has done and

acknowledge its genocidal past.