Genocide and Armenians
David Aaronovitch writing in The Times explains the background to an unseemly row between Turkey and the Vatican over genocide against Armenians.
Now the Turkish President, Recip Erdogan, condemned Pope Francis for calling a spade a spade preferring to use the term 'civil war' to explain, if not justify, the deaths of so many Armenians in the days of the old Ottoman Empire.
Yet it's difficult to understand how so many non-combatants could end up dead if they were not murdered outright or their deaths caused by deliberate mistreatment at the hands of their captors.
Certainly the American Civil War which took place 50 years earlier did not end in this way even though 620,000 people were killed during this terrible conflict.
So, genocide it is and it seems like a perfectly apt description of what happened to the Armenians, if you ask me.
We’re all capable of committing genocide
By David Aaronovitch - The Times
Turkey’s row with the Pope over the Armenian massacre highlights how no country can hide from its history
A row between the Pope and the Turks has a pleasingly antique ring to it, invoking 16th century tapestries of the Battle of Lepanto or the Siege of Malta. And the summoning of the ambassador of the Vatican to the foreign ministry in Ankara (not, alas, to the Sublime Porte in Istanbul) for a dressing down was indeed over a historical matter. But one that resonates even a hundred years after the event.
Last Sunday, Pope Francis referred to the “first genocide of the 20th century” as being that of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire. A century ago next week, it began with the arrest and murder of more than 200 Armenian intellectuals and politicians. In the succeeding months, between a million and a million and a half members of this Christian minority died in a series of forced marches and deportations into the desert areas of Ottoman Syria and Iraq. Those who were not murdered died from starvation, thirst and disease.
Why did it happen? The Armenians were seen by the government as fifth columnists aiding their Russian Christian brethren to the north, with whom Turkey was at war. Much of the brutality was abetted by neighbours of the Armenians who both feared them and stood to gain from their disappearance. By the end of 1916 the Armenian population of Turkey had almost completely disappeared, creating a bitter diaspora outside the country and leaving mass graves inside.
Turkey and Turkish patriots have refused to accept what happened as a genocide. Even in the 21st century to speak or write openly about the events of 1915-16 can be fatal. In 2007 the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, who had appeared in a documentary about the genocide, was shot dead in Istanbul by a teenage nationalist.
In one of those ironies defined by the inability of the perpetrator to appreciate irony, Dink was murdered by a man insulted by the idea that he was the kind of man who might murder people.
On the day Dink was killed his newspaper, Agos, carried a story about the restoration after 90 years of an Armenian church on an island in a lake in Turkey. It was a place I knew. Twenty years before I had stood outside that church — the Church of the Holy Cross on Akdamar island — and marvelled at its romantic location and the unique friezes on its outside walls.
When I was there it was ruined, having been abandoned at the time of the genocide. But then the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in its expansive, seemingly ideologically generous phase, first restored the building and then, four years later, permitted a Christian liturgy to be said there, followed in 2013 by the baptism of some Armenian boys.
I am something of a Turkophile. I love the country and its people and so I was pleased. If Erdogan could somehow drain the swamp of extreme Turkish nationalism then Turkey could make a great contribution to the modern world. But I knew too that at the reopening of the Akdamar church there had been a demonstration against the ceremony. A banner read: “The Turkish people are noble. They would never commit genocide.”
The elastic band snapped back. Almost as soon as Erdogan found himself under real political pressure he reverted to nationalism.
Critics of the government were not just wrong, they became unpatriotic. Opposition to Erdogan was not legitimate because it was somehow foreign — associated with conspiracies by outside powers to diminish Turkey.
Volkan Bozkir, Turkey’s minister for European affairs, criticised the Pope by reference to his native Argentina this week. In that country, said Mr Bozkir, “the Armenian diaspora controls the media and business” and that was why the Pope said what he did. You would have thought it was a too-obvious echo of Holocaust-deniers’ accusations about the Jewish lobby.
But Mr Bozkir was not finished with Argentina. Who, in any case, were the Argentinians to talk? Was not Argentina “a country that welcomed the leading executors of the Jewish Holocaust, Nazi torturers, with open arms”?
If Mr Bozkir’s “Armenian lobby” point was absurd and demeaning, his “Argentinians are not innocent” point was almost the opposite. Because, of course, he was right. And, indeed, he could have taken it further. Where, after all, were the original inhabitants of that long, grassy country? Dead, scattered and deprived of land and liberty by the ancestors of those now calling Mr Bozkir’s great grandparents genocidaires. He might have added (and Turks often do) the “whatabout” objection to any discussion of culpability. What about the Turks “ethnically cleansed” from the Balkans in the long decline of the Ottoman Empire after 1878? Or those displaced from Greece following the war of 1919 to 1922? Where are the minarets of Thessalonica now?
And much of that would have been true too. Because the awful reality of massacres and despoliations is not that any of us could become the victim of them, but that any of us — in the wrong circumstances — could become the perpetrators. For example, the tribal ancestors of the Kurds, a people whose aspirations to nationhood and democracy I support — played a horrible part in the genocide of the Armenians. By the 1980s they were themselves the victims of a genocidal campaign by Saddam Hussein of Iraq.
Our ancestors first profited massively from and then repented the slave trade, selectively massacred rebels in the colonies and presided neglectfully over terrible famines. It was not all they did, but they did it all the same. It is a necessary condition to not repeating such crimes, I think, that you must recognise that they were indeed crimes.
Nor does it end there. There is, of course, a moral difference between committing genocide and other gross violations of human rights, and looking on while others commit them. But the latter — the stance of the Bad Samaritan — is still morally hard to defend. I am thinking of Rwanda in 1994. And also I reflect that many thousands of Armenians ended up as corpses in the region of Syria and Iraq now held by Islamic State or after being barrel bombed by President Assad. To judge by our leaders, we’re happy to walk by on the other side.
Turkey’s row with the Pope over the Armenian massacre highlights how no country can hide from its history
A row between the Pope and the Turks has a pleasingly antique ring to it, invoking 16th century tapestries of the Battle of Lepanto or the Siege of Malta. And the summoning of the ambassador of the Vatican to the foreign ministry in Ankara (not, alas, to the Sublime Porte in Istanbul) for a dressing down was indeed over a historical matter. But one that resonates even a hundred years after the event.
Last Sunday, Pope Francis referred to the “first genocide of the 20th century” as being that of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire. A century ago next week, it began with the arrest and murder of more than 200 Armenian intellectuals and politicians. In the succeeding months, between a million and a million and a half members of this Christian minority died in a series of forced marches and deportations into the desert areas of Ottoman Syria and Iraq. Those who were not murdered died from starvation, thirst and disease.
Why did it happen? The Armenians were seen by the government as fifth columnists aiding their Russian Christian brethren to the north, with whom Turkey was at war. Much of the brutality was abetted by neighbours of the Armenians who both feared them and stood to gain from their disappearance. By the end of 1916 the Armenian population of Turkey had almost completely disappeared, creating a bitter diaspora outside the country and leaving mass graves inside.
Turkey and Turkish patriots have refused to accept what happened as a genocide. Even in the 21st century to speak or write openly about the events of 1915-16 can be fatal. In 2007 the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, who had appeared in a documentary about the genocide, was shot dead in Istanbul by a teenage nationalist.
In one of those ironies defined by the inability of the perpetrator to appreciate irony, Dink was murdered by a man insulted by the idea that he was the kind of man who might murder people.
On the day Dink was killed his newspaper, Agos, carried a story about the restoration after 90 years of an Armenian church on an island in a lake in Turkey. It was a place I knew. Twenty years before I had stood outside that church — the Church of the Holy Cross on Akdamar island — and marvelled at its romantic location and the unique friezes on its outside walls.
When I was there it was ruined, having been abandoned at the time of the genocide. But then the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in its expansive, seemingly ideologically generous phase, first restored the building and then, four years later, permitted a Christian liturgy to be said there, followed in 2013 by the baptism of some Armenian boys.
I am something of a Turkophile. I love the country and its people and so I was pleased. If Erdogan could somehow drain the swamp of extreme Turkish nationalism then Turkey could make a great contribution to the modern world. But I knew too that at the reopening of the Akdamar church there had been a demonstration against the ceremony. A banner read: “The Turkish people are noble. They would never commit genocide.”
The elastic band snapped back. Almost as soon as Erdogan found himself under real political pressure he reverted to nationalism.
Critics of the government were not just wrong, they became unpatriotic. Opposition to Erdogan was not legitimate because it was somehow foreign — associated with conspiracies by outside powers to diminish Turkey.
Volkan Bozkir, Turkey’s minister for European affairs, criticised the Pope by reference to his native Argentina this week. In that country, said Mr Bozkir, “the Armenian diaspora controls the media and business” and that was why the Pope said what he did. You would have thought it was a too-obvious echo of Holocaust-deniers’ accusations about the Jewish lobby.
But Mr Bozkir was not finished with Argentina. Who, in any case, were the Argentinians to talk? Was not Argentina “a country that welcomed the leading executors of the Jewish Holocaust, Nazi torturers, with open arms”?
If Mr Bozkir’s “Armenian lobby” point was absurd and demeaning, his “Argentinians are not innocent” point was almost the opposite. Because, of course, he was right. And, indeed, he could have taken it further. Where, after all, were the original inhabitants of that long, grassy country? Dead, scattered and deprived of land and liberty by the ancestors of those now calling Mr Bozkir’s great grandparents genocidaires. He might have added (and Turks often do) the “whatabout” objection to any discussion of culpability. What about the Turks “ethnically cleansed” from the Balkans in the long decline of the Ottoman Empire after 1878? Or those displaced from Greece following the war of 1919 to 1922? Where are the minarets of Thessalonica now?
And much of that would have been true too. Because the awful reality of massacres and despoliations is not that any of us could become the victim of them, but that any of us — in the wrong circumstances — could become the perpetrators. For example, the tribal ancestors of the Kurds, a people whose aspirations to nationhood and democracy I support — played a horrible part in the genocide of the Armenians. By the 1980s they were themselves the victims of a genocidal campaign by Saddam Hussein of Iraq.
Our ancestors first profited massively from and then repented the slave trade, selectively massacred rebels in the colonies and presided neglectfully over terrible famines. It was not all they did, but they did it all the same. It is a necessary condition to not repeating such crimes, I think, that you must recognise that they were indeed crimes.
Nor does it end there. There is, of course, a moral difference between committing genocide and other gross violations of human rights, and looking on while others commit them. But the latter — the stance of the Bad Samaritan — is still morally hard to defend. I am thinking of Rwanda in 1994. And also I reflect that many thousands of Armenians ended up as corpses in the region of Syria and Iraq now held by Islamic State or after being barrel bombed by President Assad. To judge by our leaders, we’re happy to walk by on the other side.
