Aijaz Zaka Syed :
With the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide approaching (April 24), this seems to be open season on Turkey. This week, an angry Ankara summoned the Vatican ambassador and recalled its own to register its protest after Pope Francis uttered the ‘G’ word to describe the Armenian tragedy.
“The first genocide of the 20th century struck Armenian people,” said the pontiff during a mass in St Peter’s Basilica to mark the centenary of the tragedy in which a million Armenians are said to have perished at the hands of the Ottoman army of course.
Turkey, however, rejects the charge arguing that thousands of Turks died as well in civil strife when Armenians rose up against the Ottoman rulers and sided with the Russian and Western forces. Thousands of Muslim besides Armenians were killed in conflicts that engulfed the eastern Ottoman Empire during World War I.
Some 20 nations however recognise the 1915 killings as genocide. In 2008 Barack Obama condemned them as such although in 2009 as President he was more circumspect: “My interest remains the achievement of a full, frank and just acknowledgment of the facts.”
Exactly! The two sides need to move on and it cannot happen without Turkey acknowledging its past. As independent accounts suggest, excesses may indeed have been committed by a dying empire, desperately trying to hold on to its fast slipping dominions. Confronted with the Russian aggression and combined onslaught of European powers, the Ottomans were fighting for their survival.
The Battle of Gallipoli saw the entire West ganged up against the world’s only surviving Muslim empire, eventually dismembering it into bits and pieces. And like all empires under siege, the Ottoman troops crossed redlines and were guilty of excesses in Armenia. And it’s about time modern Turkey acknowledged them. There’s no point in living in denial.
But while what happened in Armenia was truly horrific, was it a coldblooded and calculated genocide along the lines of Jewish Holocaust at the hands of Nazis or the ethnic cleansing of Balkan Muslims in 1990s?
The Armenians may have borne the Ottoman wrath for siding with the invaders but were they picked and eliminated for what they were and believed in as had been the case with Jews and Muslims in the Balkans?
So the attempt by Pope Francis to give the Armenian tragedy a religious overtone comparing it with Christians fleeing oppression at the hands of Daesh is intriguing. Equally over the top has been Turkey’s reaction to the pontiff’s comments. Whatever the historical circumstances, what happened in 1915 resulting in the loss of hundreds of thousands of innocent lives was unfortunate and unconscionable and deserves to be condemned in strongest terms.
War crimes and crimes against humanity are among the gravest crimes in international law and they are to be dealt with as such no matter who the victims and their tormentors are. Martin Luther King rightly argued that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. More often than not though it’s not genuine humanitarian concerns but realpolitik and hypocrisy that dictate such denunciations. We are selective in our outrage and choosing our victims, as has been the case with the Armenian tragedy. It has become an annual ritual for Western politicians and media to beat Ankara with this big stick.
To be fair to Turkey, in the past few years it has gone out of its way to reach out to its neighbours, including Armenia and Greece, in an attempt to heal the past. Erdogan surprised everyone, including his own people, in 2009 when he acknowledged Turkey’s troubled past: “Those with different ethnic identities were expelled from our country. This indeed was the consequence of a fascist approach.”
On the other hand, those rushing to condemn and burn Turkey at the stake hardly come across smelling of roses. Who can feign ignorance of Europe’s own illustrious past? Almost every single European power once boasted and exploited vast, rich colonies in Africa, Asia and Americas. Besides denuding Africa of its fabled riches, they stole its most precious resource, enslaving millions of its people. How Americas were won for the West, nearly wiping out their indigenous populations, is hardly a secret. Thousands were hanged in India when it rose in revolt against the empire in 1857.
Millions died in the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, as a result of colonial wars. Thousands of Palestinians have been killed and millions driven from their homes after their country was gifted away to European Jews.
We have seen more than a million perish in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last decade alone, not to mention the chaos unleashed across the region. Who will account for these crimes? How would the European Parliament describe what some of its member states visited on their former colonies?
The Pope is right in cautioning humanity against forgetting the ‘senseless slaughter’ of Armenians. But while doing so, let’s spare a thought for the victims of imperial wars too. Selective memory, like selective justice, does more harm than good. Without acknowledgement, there is no reconciliation.
(Aijaz Zaka Syed is a Gulf-based writer)
