Ellen Bork: The Armenian Genocide

Roundup: Talking About History

[Ellen Bork is deputy director at the Project for the New American Century.]


Although it received far less attention abroad than the prosecution of novelist Orhan Pamuk for speaking publicly about the deaths of over one million Armenians and tens of thousands of Kurds, the conference was just as significant, demonstrating Turkish civil society's growing self-confidence in questioning the official line on the Armenian genocide--and the ruling AKP party's messy flexibility in allowing such questioning to take place. Postponed, then blocked in court after the justice minister called it a "stab in the Turkish nation's back," the conference finally took place with the public support of the prime minister.


Describing the fate of the Armenians in Turkey as genocide is much less charged in the United States. "Turkish deniers are becoming the equivalent--socially, culturally--of Holocaust deniers," says author Samantha Power in The Armenian Genocide, a documentary by Andrew Goldberg and Two Cats Productions, to be broadcast Monday, April 17, on PBS. The one-hour program provides a compact, evocative, and visually rich treatment of the massacres by the Ottoman sultan's Hamidiye regiments in the late 19th century, and the 1915 deportations and massacres of approximately one million Armenians, including intellectuals from Constantinople, as Istanbul was then called. It also includes the campaign of assassination against Turkish diplomats by Armenian terrorists in the 1970s and '80s.



Paradoxically, the importance of the Holocaust to Americans ensures both sensitivity to the Armenian tragedy and a reluctance to accord it the significance of genocide. There is also a disinclination to criticize Turkey, a valuable Muslim ally of Israel. These considerations inform the views of Turkey's allies in the foreign policy establishment, of which conservatives constitute a significant part. Within the conservative camp, criticism of Turkey recently has been concerned mainly with an Islamic tilt under the ruling AKP, and growing anti-Americanism across the Turkish political spectrum. And, of course, Turkey's refusal to provide support for the Iraq war.


As The Armenian Genocide demonstrates, it is precisely this historical background upon which a specious, yet persistent, objection to recognition of the genocide is based. In its most respectable form it is the contention that the deportations, massacres, and starvation of Armenians took place in a particular "context"--that is, amid (or in response to) rebellion and treachery from Turkey's Armenian population, in league with Russia.

"So, if the Armenians killed and were killed," Yusuf Halacoglu, head of the Turkish Historical Society, says in the film, "the fact is there were two sides involved in a civil war." The argument boils down to a claim that the events were not genocide but a response to provocation in which the victims, including unarmed women, children, and the elderly, brought on their fate.

It is a variation on the argument, made by some in the 1990s, that there was no obligation to stop the killing of Muslims by Serbs in Bosnia since the people of the region had been "killing each other for centuries." Both justifications are red herrings, which can be effective when made with confidence by articulate proponents.

In the documentary, Turkish historians reject this claim, providing historical context that enhances rather than undermines an understanding of the fate of the Armenians as genocide. The loss of Balkan territory, the flow of refugees from these Christian quarters of the empire telling of persecution--all combined, says Taner Akcam, to make "fear of collapse . . . [the] basic factor of the emergence of Turkish nationalism."

The effects of this fear have been profound, and the documentary's most compelling moments come when the Turkish historians describe their experience with their society's most stubborn taboo. Halil Berktay received death threats for being a "Turkish historian inside Turkey that has spoken up." He argues that the new Turkish republic, launched in 1923, dissociated itself from the past by adopting attributes of Western society, including secularism, and found itself embraced and courted by Western powers.

"All kinds of reasons like this made it undesirable for the young republic to maintain an honest memory of what had been done in 1915," says Berktay, and "as a result, you have an enormously constructed, fabricated, manipulated, national memory."

After decades of denial and silence, it took an act of courage for these historians to question the official version. Fatma Müge Göcek expresses the confusion she felt upon realizing "you could actually live in a society, get the best education that society has to offer, which I did, and not know about it or have any books or anything available to read about it."



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Arnold Shcherban - 5/1/2006

For many decades by now the US administrations and mass propaganda
have been unwilling to officially condemn and even acknowledge the genocides commiitted by their "official" allies, while commiting war crimes in their actions
against the other perpetrators of genocides... when those actions matched the strategic goals of the US governing elite.