Turkey and the Armenian Genocide

David Aikman

“This is a choice between condemning genocide and endangering our soldiers in Iraq,” was how Tom Lantos, Democratic chairman of the House committee and himself a Jewish Holocaust survivor, summed up the dilemma. Should the House Foreign Affairs committee approve a resolution designating a barbarous mass killing by the Turkish government in 1915 “genocide”? If the full House votes within a few weeks to pass the resolution, which is non-binding on the administration, the White House warned that vital transportation and communication links with U.S. forces in Iraq might be endangered. Turkey could slow down or even halt the passage of U.S. military goods and personnel through the Incirlik airbase in eastern Turkey. To underscore the threat, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan last week in a phone call with President Bush specifically threatened a Turkish retaliation against the resolution. The day after the Congressional Committee vote, Turkey recalled its ambassador to the U.S.

How could an event in the Balkans 92 years ago cause such friction between two NATO members in 2007? The answer lies at the heart of how the Turks view themselves and their history. The successor state of the proud and once-powerful Ottoman Empire, an empire that besieged Vienna and terrified Europe as recently as 1683, the Turks have been struggling with their historical, religious, and cultural legacy since the modern Turkish state was established—amid the ruins of the Ottoman Empire—in 1922.

Attaturk, modern Turkey’s dynamic founder, wanted to drag his ancient Islamic nation into modernity and secularism. But one of his principal ideological tools to do so was Turkish nationalism, a concept that has been prickly in practice and resistant to the views of Turkish history entertained by other components of the multi-ethnic former Ottoman Empire. It’s an infraction of Turkish law (Article 301, “insulting Turkishness”) to make public accusations of Turkish genocide against the Armenians. Turkey’s first Nobel literature laureate, Orhan Pamuk, actually faced criminal prosecution in Turkey for saying in an interview that “Thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody dares to talk about it.” The charges were dropped after intense international pressure.

No ethnic group has more fiercely resisted the Turkish view of Ottoman history than the Armenians. An ancient Christian people-group who had lived in eastern Anatolia long before the Turks first migrated there, the Armenians had the status of “protected” minority, or dhimmi, under Islamic law. In practice, from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, the distinct economic progress of the Armenians (and other Christian minorities) compared with Turks aroused envy and hostility on the part of the Muslim ethnic Turks. There were massacres of Armenians by the Turks from the 1890s onward.

The real tragedy for the Armenians, however, occurred because they became caught between advancing Russian troops and retreating Ottomans in World War I. In May 1915, the ruling party, the Committee of Union and Progress, also referred to as the Young Turks, passed a decree ordering the deportation of all Armenians in Turkey. Hundreds of thousands were marched out into the desert without any food or shelter and died of starvation and exposure. Others were shot, hanged, raped, and hacked to pieces. Estimates of the Armenian deaths range from the “hundreds of thousands” to 1.5 million. Former U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt described the Armenian killings at the time as “the greatest crime of the war.” There were hundreds of eyewitness accounts, including those by consular officers of Germany, which was during World War I an ally of Turkey.

So far, twenty-one foreign countries have officially described the Armenian massacre as “genocide.” The U.S., however, despite having a large Armenian community in its midst, has never made an official pronouncement on whether the killings constituted “genocide” or not. The Turkish government, while admitting that perhaps some 300,000 Armenians lost their lives, attributes the deaths to the chaos ensuing the defeat and collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

Until this week, that is. Despite strong warnings from the White House and State Department that the genocide resolution would not only anger Turkey but alienate it from its close alliance with the U.S., the Foreign Affairs Committee passed the bill. Turkey warned that, if the House of Representatives confirmed that vote when assembled in full, there would be serious consequences.

The possible Turkish reaction, however, is not limited to slowing down or halting U.S. Air Force access to the airbase at Incirlik, through which so much Iraq-bound American material flows. Israel warned that Turkey’s good relationship with the Jewish state could be endangered by the resolution. In addition, it seemed more likely that Turkey would mount an incursion into northern Iraq to punish PKK Kurdish rebels who have taken refuge there after mounting attacks on Turkish targets in Turkey. Any attempt by the U.S. to dissuade Turkey from acting against the Kurds in northern Iraq is likely to be compromised by Turkish anger at the Congressional resolution.

There seems little historical doubt that the Armenian massacre was indeed genocide. The eye-witness accounts of the time are overwhelming, and Ottoman government documents talking openly about eliminating the Armenians as a people group are plentiful from the period 1915–1917. But with the U.S. dependent on the friendship of Turkey to support a difficult war in Iraq, it seems at the very least an ill-timed notion to rub Turkey’s face in the judgment of history. True, all Armenians and American-Armenians will feel affirmed by official American national recognition of the injustice they suffered. But isn’t it more important that the Turks themselves should finally come to acknowledge the truth of what happened to the Armenians 92 years ago? That may yet take decades to come to pass. Assuredly, it won’t be hastened by this week’s Congressional resolution. And what if resupplying American troops in Iraq is seriously compromised by a Turkish curtailment of U.S. base usage in Turkey? To rephrase Congressman Lantos’ well-stated dilemma: “Is the gratification of wounded Armenian sensibility worth the possibly serious risk that could ensure to American forces in wartime?” Perhaps not.  

Dr. Aikman, a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum, was for many years senior correspondent for Time.

3 Responses (comments are closed) • Columns, David Aikman, Good and Evil, Religious Liberty, War and Peace, Mon 15 Oct 2007