10-12-07, 4:14 pm
A House committee yesterday passed a resolution to condemn the genocide carried out against the Armenian minority in the Ottoman Turkish Empire between 1915 and 1917 during World War I.
Twenty-one nations by my last reading have formally recognized this organized mass murder as genocide, and scholars generally regard it as the second most studied genocide in modern history, after of course the genocide of the Jewish people of Europe by Nazi Germany and its fascist allies. That genocide, carried out with the railroad cars and gas chambers of what were industrial killing factories saw the murder of a minimum of six million people whom the Nazis considered Jewish according to their racist ideology, along with many millions of other civilians who were murdered either for racist reasons or because they were anti-fascists.
The genocide was carried out against the Armenian minority by Pan Turkish racists and militarists (of the “Young Turk” movement praised by major capitalist states as “modernizers” before the war) in control of the collapsing Ottoman empire. As many as 1.5 million people were killed. But the fact that the perpetrators were largely forgotten after some fairly limited actions against a few of them after the war and the events largely buried outside of the Armenian Diaspora (along with a far less developed record keeping in the Ottoman empire than in Nazi Germany) makes it more difficult to say how many people perished.
In effect, the nationalist military leader Mustapha Kemal, known to the world knows at Attaturk, successfully fought off various armies in the collapsing empire, took power over what became modern Turkey, and after the war continued the extreme nationalism of the “Young Turks.” He combined that nationalism with a fierce anti-clericalism and coercive social reforms, and remains to this day the center of a huge personality cult in Turkey that connects secularism with an authoritarian nationalist tradition contemptuous of a any form of cultural pluralism for non-Turkish minorities in the present Turkish state.
That regime has made aggressive denial of the Armenian genocide into a prop for its anti-Kurdish policy and its general policy of suppressing liberal and humanistic criticisms of its treatment of minorities and denial of civil liberties. It is indisputable that there was a policy of mass forced deportations of Armenians established by law. The state viewed Armenians as a 'threat to national security' during a war that the Ottomans were clearly losing. The law ordered the confiscation of Armenian property, special units acting as killing squads against Armenian civilians, and policies that led to mass starvation among the Armenians herded like animals in death marches.
These events were big news in the neutral U.S. and allied countries in 1915. Henry Morgenthau, Sr., U.S. ambassador to Turkey, and father of Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury (who during the war fought against the developing Holocaust against the Jewish people of Europe) played an important and courageous role in disseminating information about the planned atrocities to U.S. sources and the atrocities, particularly the mass starvation, became widely known and commented upon in the U.S.
The allied powers condemned the actions of Turkey's military, and the New York Times wrote in 1915 that the murders were 'systematic' and 'organized by the government.' Britain and France and Czarist Russia, the allied powers, had good reason to condemn the mass murder. Turkey's wartime allies, the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, on the other hand, kept silent about the news of mass atrocities against Armenians. Ironically, some of the best documents historians have found that confirm the genocide are from German and Austrian sources who were on hand to witness what was going on as allied reporters were excluded. One could go on and on, looking at the international denunciations of Ottoman mass murder, the previous history of anti-Armenian prejudice which preceded the state organized mass murder, the specific Ottoman military disasters that were the immediate cause, the humanitarian campaigns in the U.S. and other countries to save the Armenians, the Turkish government's initial denials, portraying the Armenians as subversive agents and tools of its historic Czarist Russian enemies, with whom it was now at war, the receding of the policy in the wake of international condemnation and deepening military disaster, and the post WWI very limited attempts to punish perpetrators.
But what is at stake here is the opportunism and the hypocrisy of the Bush administration and previous U.S. governments whose example it is now following. The Bush administration playing crude politics with what was a genocide that prefigured the World War II genocide of the Jewish people of Europe. (It sought to round up and exterminate through starvation, forced marches, forced labor battalions and murder detachments the scattered minority population of a large multinational empire stretching from Suez to the Balkans.)
The nationalist Turkish government created by Attaturk, often in reality a de facto military dictatorship with political parties serving the military and threatened with removal if they challenged military prerogatives, has for generations refused to acknowledge the genocide, sought in recent years to sponsor genocide denial scholarship, and use diplomatic and economic forms of blackmail and retaliation against those nations which have formally condemned the genocide That is what the present government, in which a clerical party plays a leading role, is doing at the moment.
The official Turkish government positions minimizing both the number of Armenians killed and explaining the killings as a regrettable response to anti-Turkish Armenian rebellions in which Turks also died are not worthy of serious discussion (even though the Turkish government has bought scholars who do will make some version of those arguments). The fact that some left forces in Turkey, opposed to U.S. imperialism rhetorically, have found it useful for themselves to identify with the Turkish nationalism of Attaturk and support the genocide denial argument of right-wing Turkish nationalists is also not worthy of serious discussion (such opportunism is both unprincipled and almost always politically unsuccessful for left parties and movements).
The Bush administration, in opposing the House resolution has in effect taken the Turkish government position. 'We deeply regret the tragic suffering of the Armenian people that began in 1915,' Bush said, 'but this resolution is not the right response to these historic mass killings and its passage would do great harm to a key ally in NATO and to the war on terror.'
Morally and ethically, although those are not terms one would usually use for the Bush administration, this would be like a U.S. cold war government, having established a West German state after World War II in which German militarists and open supporters of the Hitler regime played a much more direct and leading role than they did in reality and contended that the genocide against the Jewish people during World Wa rII was greatly exaggerated and also the result of Jewish pro Soviet and pro Communist activities against Germany (a version of Hitler’s contentions) supported that West German government’s campaign to keep the U.S. Congress from passing a resolution denouncing the Holocaust.
The Turkish government, which has praised Bush's position, has used its denials over the generations to, in effect, bolster and sustain deep racist prejudices against Armenian people, prejudices which are very similar to the historic prejudices that existed against Jewish minorities in European states, that is, members of a minority religion loyal to their own members, controlling the economy, the traditional scapegoats for the problems and failures of Muslims and Turks.
One could of course mention that the Bush administration, which has done so much to aid fundamentalist Christians and undermine the separation of church and state, has now counseled against the U.S. Congress joining other civilized nations in a formal condemnation of a genocide carried out against a Christian minority. One might also mention that Bush is by no means the first to do this – successive U.S. governments in effect winked at the Armenian genocide as part of a policy of supporting Turkey as a NAT0 state and military ally against the Soviet Union through the cold war era.
The racist denial of language and other cultural rights to Turkey's Kurdish Muslim minority was also not a problem for these governments as for that matter Saddam Hussein's persecution of the Iraqi Kurdish minority was no problem for the Reagan administration when they supported his regime in the1980s in its war against Iran. (Iran of course had and has its own history of abuse against its Kurdish minority, but this has never been an issue in U.S. policy toward Iran and isn't today.)
But the issue should be to support and pass this resolution and then have Bush speak to the world, if he would dare, in condemning it. How can Turkey become a state that is worthy of support if it continues to support and subsidize genocide denial internationally and take repressive actions against those Turkish citizens who acknowledge the Armenian genocide? How can Turkey be in the long run an ally against the ultra-right clerically based terrorist groups in the region if it sustains policies of separation and ethnic religious hatred that these groups feed upon? It does the Turkish people no good to continue to wink these historic crimes against humanity in order to use the Turkish military for U.S. ends, which essentially has been the policy of successive U.S. governments.
Theodore Roosevelt, a former Republican president called the mass killings against Armenians 'the greatest crime of the war.' In reality, it there was a much greater international outcry against the Armenian genocide during World War I by the Allied powers and neutral states than there was against the WWII genocide directed against the Jewish people of Europe (perhaps because the victims were Christians) and this may have played a role in limiting the extermination policy.
But the existence of a post World War I Turkish state, in which nationalism and military elites have played a leading role, led to a situation where these real crimes against humanity can be denied or at least hidden by the government of the United States for its own geopolitical reasons. And that is not a small thing. In 1931, Adolph Hitler, two years before the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship said 'we intend to introduce a great resettlement policy....remember the extermination of the Armenians.' In 1939, in advocating a policy of mass killing in Poland to take the 'Living Space' for Germans, he said privately to his officers, 'who, after all speaks today, of the annihilation of the Armenians.
Who does? Civilized people throughout the world for whom human rights aren’t an empty slogan. But not the Bush administration, its State Department, and its policy planners who have gone from one disaster after another in the Middle East and everywhere else.
Hopefully, the U.S. Congress will remember.
Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs.
