Embarrassing Original Sin

[Aratta-Kingdom]

THE PAST IS DISTANCING ANKARA FROM EUROPE

by Vittorio Emanuele Parsi

 

La Stampa

March 6 2010

Italia

 

It was easy to predict that the Turkish Government would come up with

an extremely tough response to a vote taken by the US Congress' Foreign

Affairs Committee urging Turkey to acknowledge that the slaughter of

hundreds of thousands of Armenians in the course of World War I was

full fledged genocide, similar in every way to the Sho'ah that the

Nazi regime was to perpetrate a few decades later. But how come the

authorities in Ankara still adopt such an inflexible stance almost 100

years after those tragic events which, what is more, were perpetrated

by an institutional player (the Ottoman Empire) that is not the same

as today's Turkish Republic? The answer is that the Armenian people's

genocide is the most embarrassing thread linking the collapse of the

Ottoman Empire with the birth of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's Republic.

 

The genocide reflected a plan to "Turanize" ("Turkify" - La Stampa

editor's note) the empire, replacing people's previous and now obsolete

loyalty to the sultan with a new and vigorous loyalty to a national

Turkish homeland which had yet to be built, to be "invented," as was

the case with other countries that took shape in the course of the

century. The plan intersected and partly rerouted the last desperate

attempt to reform the empire made by young Turks from the mid-19th

century on.

 

The reforming movement's nationalistic slide finally prevailed after

the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913, and it was fuelled by the massacres

and enforced expulsions of the Muslim populace in the European

provinces that the empire had owned until that moment - massacres

perpetrated by Greeks, Serbs, and Bulgarians. The Turks responded

to those atrocities, which had not spared the Jews in Thessaloniki

either, with the first expulsions and massacres of Armenians and

Greeks in Anatolia.

 

Ethnic cleansing rose to new heights in World War I, reaching a peak

with the events of 1915. This cleansing operation was as ethnic and

it was religious, and it was explicitly and lucidly pursued by the

empire's new leadership class, a large part of which was to then

transfer to the new Republic established by Mustafa Kemal after the

victorious war against Greece and against the other occupying powers.

 

Even Kemal Ataturk himself, a renowned "nonconfessional," actually felt

that equating the concept of "a real Turk" with "a Sunnite Muslim"

served his cause perfectly. In fact, it is no mere coincidence that

he was hostile to all other religious faiths (including other branches

of Islam), or that he accorded Sunni Islam special treatment with the

Ministry of Religion, in accordance with a vision of the relationship

between "church and state" that bore a far greater resemblance to

King Henry VIII's English model than it did to the French republican

model with which it is often mistakenly compared.

 

In defending the Republic's origins from an embarrassing original sin,

Ankara's new overlords have shown that, albeit from a far more "pious"

standpoint, they continue to feel that Turkey's national identity is de

facto inseparable from its Islamic and Sunnite identity. In so doing,

they are taking another step that distances Turkey from the European

haven which they still formally claim to want to reach.

[Aratta-Kingdom]

Sierra Express Media, Sierra Leone (Africa)

March 14 2010

 

 

Genocide by any other name

 

By Owei Lakemfa, SEM Contributor

 

 

 

Turkey, one of America's staunchest allies in the Islamic world is

furious. Its anger is turned against the United States for a vote on

March 4, 2010 by the House, Foreign Affairs Committee which

characterized the wholesale massacre of Armenian minorities as a

`genocide'.

 

So angry is Turkey that it recalled its ambassador, Namik Tan to

Ankara. It had played a similar card when in 2007 an American

Congressional Committee had characterized the massacres as genocide.

On that occasion, then President George W. Bush had prevented the

resolution from going to the full House when Turkey threatened to

block US access to bases used for the unjust wars in Iraq and

Afghanistan. History may repeat itself as American Secretary of State,

Hilary Clinton said the Obama administration is opposed to the

resolution.

 

Ironically, Obama had in his campaign promises pledged to

characterize the massacres as genocide. But Clinton argues that: `The

circumstances have changed in very significant ways'. In truth, the

Obama administration has developed cold feet. Also, Turkey is a member

of NATO and during the Cold War, the Turks allowed their soil to be

used by America in anti-Soviet Union operations. Committee Chairman,

Howard Berman argued that the vote is in order because `at some point,

every nation must come to terms with its own history. And that is all

we ask of Turkey'.

 

Due to Turkey's unrestrained anger on the use of the word genocide,

only 20 countries have picked up the courage to so describe Turkey's

1915 to1918 holocaust against an helpless Armenian populace.

Interestingly, 42 US states also describe those crimes against

humanity as genocide. But like those who deny the German holocaust

against the Jews, the Turks deny the terrible sins of their grand

fathers against the Armenians. Turkish President Abdullah Gul

thundered: `We condemn this resolution which accuses the Turkish

nation of a crime it has not committed'.

 

The fact that Turkey lives in self- denial and blackmails countries

like America, will not wipe away its historical crimes. Armenia was

made a province of the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire under Selim II

(1524-1574). The Armenians were a Christian minority who were treated

as a sub- human group. At a point, they had no right to life or

property and were excluded from governance.

 

Under Sultan Abdul Hamid (1876-1909) some 300,000 Armenians were

killed. The genocide period was, however, during the Second World War

from 1914 when the Ottoman Empire joined the central powers of

Germany, Austria and Hungary, while its neighbor, Russia sided with

the Western allies. Armenia was tucked between the two countries.

 

Given the manner the Ottoman Empire had treated the Armenians and the

fact that this race also existed across the border in Russia, the

Turks did not trust them. On April 24, 1915, Interior Minister, Talat

***** accused the Armenians of trying ` to gain an administrative

autonomy' and ordered the arrest of Armenian intellectuals and

community leaders. On that day, about 250 of them were detained in

Constantinople.

 

Armenians in the army were disarmed and put on labor duties before

many were executed. Having uprooted the intellectuals, community

leaders and Armenians in the army, the government fell on the rest of

the populace . On May 29, 1915,it passed the `Temporary Law of

Deportation' which authorized the deportation of any one `considered a

threat to national security'. Under this law, the Armenian populace

was forced from their homes and driven like herds of cattle towards

the desert of what today is Syria. Mainly on foot, the deportees

unlike cows were not provided with food, water or resting place. So

they were death marches.

 

During the marches, the Turks unleashed death squads on the Armenians

putting many to death by the sword while rape was a legal weapon. Many

were massacred or burnt right in their homes or villages while those

who survived the marches were in many cases executed, burnt or

decapitated. The remnants fled across the globe or into neighboring

countries. Many who survived never returned to their ancestral homes.

 

The New York Times reported in August 1915 that: `The roads to the

Euphrates are sewn with corpses of exiles and those who survive are

doomed to certain death. It is a plan to exterminate the whole of

the Armenian people'. Oscar S. Heizer, the American Consul at the time

reported that: `Many of the (Armenian) children were loaded into boats

and taken into sea and thrown overboard'. The Italian Consul, Giacomo

Gorrini said: `I saw thousands of innocent women and children placed

in boats which were capsized in the Black Sea'.

 

The then American Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgewthau,

Sr wrote in his memoirs: `When the Turkish authorities gave the orders

for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to

a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations

with me, they made no attempt to conceal the fact'.

 

The German Military Attache, Major General Otto Von Lossow reported

that the Turks have embarked upon the `total elimination of the

Armenians¦Talaat's government wants to destroy all Armenians, not just

in Turkey but also outside Turkey'.

 

Some 1.5 million Armenians were wiped out by the Turks in what

became the world's first well documented case of holocaust. The

crimes were so horrendous that there were no words strong enough to

describe them. So a law professor, Raphael Lemkin coined the word

`genocide' in 1943. Part of Turkey's reasoning is that the word did

not exist back in 1915, so it cannot be used retroactively to describe

the Armenian massacres. For this, it is ready to go to war with

whomever or whichever country adopts the word. Hence its fury against

America.

 

If the world had stood against the Armenian genocide, it might have

been saved the Jewish genocide in the 1940s which claimed over six

million lives. The Germans had simply copied the Turks. Let us stand

against Turkey's fury today.

 

 

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