Talking turkey about Armenian history
By Christopher Atamian
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_ID=10&article_ID=76503&categ_id=5
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Few issues in recent memory have incited as much fervor, debate, applause and concomitant outrage as the recent bill passed by the French Lower House, which proposes making denial of the Armenian genocide punishable by law. Not surprisingly, Armenians around the world have supported the initiative almost unconditionally, while most Turks have opposed it on historical grounds - i.e. they still refuse to label the massacres of 1915-1923 as genocide.
A few Turkish scholars accept the genocide label, but along with many in the West, oppose the bill as an encroachment on free speech. Should the bill pass and become law - an unlikely event given political realities such as Turkey's EU bid - it would mirror the existing Loi Gayssot,which criminalizes the public denial of the Jewish Holocaust.
Ordinarily, the right to free speech should be protected with only
limited constraints and exceptions. For example, if an American citizen
wants to insult the United States, it is his or her right to do so,
as it is his or her right to desecrate the American flag. The first
amendment is clear on these and other issues of free expression. In
certain instances, however - for example, when national security
is endangered - it is acceptable for the state, after the proper
consultations and votes, to step in to (hopefully momentarily) curtail
certain rights. The fact that George W. Bush has now shamelessly
abused this right on more than one occasion should not mean that the
French government should not, conversely, use its full powers to protect
its Armenian citizens from continued insults and affronts - by Turks or
anyone else. Similarly, the French state ought to protect its Turkish
citizens from anti-Turkish or anti-Muslim attacks as well.
The French bill, as already mentioned, follows legal precedent, namely the existing Loi Gayssot. Le Monde and other publications have claimed that the two laws are different because the latter essentially serves as a bulwark against existing and future anti-semitism. Yet the Armenian genocide law, nay-sayers to the contrary, would function in exactly the same way, given the existing racism and discrimination against Armenians in France.
Armenian genocide monuments in the country have recently been desecrated, while Armenians have been subject to all sorts of vile abuse - physical and otherwise - including violent attacks by French Turks at a recent Armenian genocide commemoration.
The question then becomes: Do Armenian citizens of France (and other countries who have passed similar anti-Holocaust denial laws) not deserve the same protections as their Jewish compatriots?
Is the suffering of one people to be placed above that of another?
When push comes to shove, what applies to one group should also apply
to the other. Furthermore, the French quite rightly consider historic
memory to be a basic human right, and thus denial of
historic events that incite or abet racism a violation of that right.
The positive human rights reforms that have occurred within Turkey in
recent years (discussion of the Armenian genocide in newspapers and
certain intellectual circles, the opening of a Kurdish-language
television station etc.) have been cosmetic at best: anti-semitism and
anti-Armenianism are in fact rampant in the land of the Moon and Stars,
and Islamic fundamentalism on the rise. And although Elif Shafak, the
noted Turkish novelist, and Armenian journalist Hrant Dink have been
acquitted of charges of "insulting Turkishness" under the nefarious
Article 301 of the Turkish criminal code, they have both been harassed
to a degree beyond the norms of any civilized country.
Dink has now been accused five times by the Turkish state, each time under the same ludicrous law that smacks of the worst in state fascism. His life has been threatened and he has become persona non grata almost everywhere he goes - within Turkey where nationalists want his head,as well as within the Armenian Diaspora, where he is alternately seen as an accommodationist or a traitor for his views on the issue at hand and the Armenian genocide in general.
The problem, then, is not just that Turks deny the Armenian genocide
within Turkey, but that they have exported this denial to European
countries. To deny the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians, as well as
another 1.5 million Christian Pontic Greeks and Assyrians, is malevolent
and in and of itself a denial of Armenians' basic human dignity. France
has every right to tell Turks: "You can spew your
venom in Turkey, but leave your denialism at home." The degree to which
France acknowledges its own colonialist past in Algeria is beside the
point, although one would hope that it does so as well.
Turkey has threatened to "retaliate" against the French by passing laws about the "Algerian genocide," further polluting the historical debate. Algeria may have been many things - colonialist, insulting, invasive - and French dominion there may in fact have visited wide-scale killings on a foreign population of differing religion and language, but genocide it was not, according to accepted definitions.
Armenians endured the loss of lands, property and self-respect during the Armenian genocide. From 1915 to 1923, they watched their men slaughtered outright, and their children and women raped, tortured and sent to their deaths in the most inhumane ways, including the torching of sulfur caves and churches, where practitioners seeking refuge were burned alive. Mass drownings in the Black Sea, hangings and crucifixions were commonplace. Billions of dollars of goods, property and lands were expropriated.
Unlike the Germans vis-a-vis the Jews, the Turks have not only failed
to apologize or compensate Armenians, but they continue their vile
campaign of denial, which they now export all over the
globe. As Elie Wiesel has accurately pointed out, denial is the last
stage of genocide and a symbolic re-enactment of the crime itself.
In this case, the French have said: Enough!
You cannot kill the victims again, at least not within our borders.
It is disingenuous to suggest that because of a French law, Turks
will now have an added excuse to
continue what they have been doing for 90 years - i.e. finishing off the
complete annihilation of its native Christian populations. The correct
response from Turks should be shame and an acknowledgment that yes
indeed, these sad events took place, rather than the bombastic
nationalism that has kept the country on the margins of the civilized
world for the better part of the 20th and 21st centuries.
As Jacques Chirac rather pompously declared in his recent speech in Yerevan: Vive la France! Vive L'Armenie!
Christopher Atamian is a New York-based writer and journalist of Lebanese origin who writes frequently on culture and politics for the The New York Times, Gourmet, New York Press and more. He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR.
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