Affiliated with the University of Nicosia |
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The latest episodes of the policy of denial: Religion in the service of politics By Arba Jebejian
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Lecturer in Applied Linguistics, University of Nicosia |
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“If the
Holocaust was a hoax, why not the Armenian catastrophe also?
If Anne Frank’s diary was faked, who is to say that certain
documents signed by Talaat Pasha weren’t forged as well? … The Turkish
attack on truth exemplifies the new governing narrative, the one in
which truth is fugitive.”
Terrence Des Pres, On Governing Narratives: The
Turkish-Armenian Case. According to the
Armenian American comedian/painter, Vahe Berberian, the archetypical
Armenian, after 10 minutes into any conversation with foreigners,
informs his/her interlocutor of the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians in
1915 and the failure of the international community to make Turkey, the
perpetrator, acknowledge its massacre of the largest Christian minority
community in the Anatolian part of the Ottoman Empire, apologize for its
human rights atrocities, and make the necessary material and moral
amends. As an Armenian, I
attest to the truth of such anecdotal evidence.
Similar encounters usually begin with a simple interest in the –ian
suffix Armenian family names carry.
Intrigued and enlightened by the explanation, inquiries are then
made about the current political, economic, and social situation in
Armenia. Naturally, the
proper information is imparted; however, to be completely truthful and
not misleading, one adds, “But I don’t live in Armenia.
I was born in Cyprus.
My family settled in Larnaka after the 1909 Adana massacre.” Fascinated by the
fact that more than 7 million Armenians live in the diaspora as opposed
to the 2.5 million in Armenia and surprised by the impossibility of
going back to ancestral lands, most people express their incredulity at
the Turkish government’s continued denial of the facts and the moral
dimensions of this history.
Such discussions may
further the dissemination of critical information about the first
genocide of the twentieth century, yet, far from generating a cathartic
effect, they rouse feelings of injustice, oppression, cruelty, and gross
immorality in every Armenian.
As early as 1894-95
the sultan’s policy was to deny the very massacres he had committed, and
this has been the policy of every successive Turkish government down to
the present. Turkish
efforts to deny the Armenian Genocide not only undermine and vilify a
human rights crime of enormous scale but also according to Judith Herman
in her book Trauma and Recovery is akin to criminal behavior.
In 1915 alone, the
New York Times published 145 articles on the Armenian massacres,
reporting that the Turkish slaughter of Armenians was “deliberate,” and
that it was “systematic race extermination.”
There are some 4,000 documents totaling about 37,000 pages in the
US National Archives alone written by American diplomats that report in
depth the process and devastation of the Armenian Genocide. In 1915, Henry
Morgenthau Sr., the US ambassador in Constantinople, defied diplomatic
convention by personally protesting the atrocities and raising money for
humanitarian relief. When he left his post in 1916, he wrote, “My
failure to stop the destruction of the Armenians has made Turkey for me
a place of horror.” Morgenthau was
joined by former president Theodore Roosevelt, who called on the
administration of Woodrow Wilson “to take effective action on behalf of
Armenia. … The Armenian massacre,” Roosevelt believed, “was the greatest
crime of the war, and failure to act against Turkey is to condone it;
because the failure to deal radically with the Turkish horror means that
all talk of guaranteeing the future peace of the world is mischievous
nonsense.” Despite general
consensus that genocide should “never again” be allowed, the twentieth
century was one of the most deadly on record.
The oft-cited “Who after all, speaks of the annihilation of the
Armenians?” declared by Hitler in 1939 encouraged him to carry out the
next genocide of the century, the extermination of the Jews, followed by
the Khmer Rouge’s annihilation of 2 million Cambodians, Saddam’s Kurdish
Hiroshima in 1987, and the Rwandan Hutus’ systematic slaughter of 8,000
Tutsi a day for 100 days in 1994, just to name a few, were carried out
with little or no foreign intervention.
In the mid-nineties,
there seemed to emerge a culture of apology.
President Clinton apologized to the black families involved in
the medical experiments at Tuskegee.
The US Bureau of Indian Affairs marked its 175th
anniversary by apologizing to Native Americans.
The Catholic Church of France asked God’s forgiveness for its
silence during the Holocaust.
The Austrians returned artworks that were pillaged by the Nazis
from Jewish families. Swiss
banks negotiated settlements with Holocaust survivors and families of
Holocaust victims. Similarly, the time
has come for the closing of the Armenian wound and for the archetypical
Armenian to shift the focus of his/her small talk. Apparently, Turkey
does not think so, as the policy of unremitting denial recently
resurfaced for the sake of scoring political gains in the upcoming
parliamentary elections in June 2011.
Interestingly, the
two latest episodes are religious in nature in a so-called secular
country. First, it was
expected that more than 10,000 Armenian pilgrims from Turkey and the
diaspora were going to attend the Mass at the Holy Cross Church of
Akhtamar on September 19, 2010, the first Mass in nearly a century.
However, only several hundred turned out after Turkish officials
refused to place a cross atop the dome and the general feeling that the
Mass was a mere propaganda ploy by the Turkish government.
Second, interestingly enough, on Friday, October 1, the day the cross
was placed atop the church at Akhtamar, thousands of Turkish
nationalists performed Muslim prayers in one of the most important
Armenian churches of the Middle Ages in a high-profile ceremony
sanctioned by Turkey’s government. The
11th century Holy Virgin Cathedral at Ani is located in Kars,
less than one kilometer away from Armenia.
A statement issued
by the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin describes the latter action as “a
political provocation” and “an attempt to deny the Armenian origin of
the Cathedral of Ani that was deprived of prayers as a result of the
Armenian Genocide.” The
statement, expressing Armenian sentiment worldwide, observes that “the
Turkish authorities continue their actions aimed at extermination of
Armenian memory and appropriation of historical shrines and cultural
values.” Politics, policy,
party line, propaganda, puffery, publicity, power play, prerogative.
Still, after 95 years, the Armenian people and history are
waiting for that honest Turkish leader who will acknowledge his
ancestors’ biggest crime ever, who will apologize to the Armenian
people, and who will do his best to make material and moral reparations.
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