{"id":17917,"date":"2010-03-22T01:17:03","date_gmt":"2010-03-21T23:17:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishforum.com.tr\/en\/content\/?p=17917"},"modified":"2013-10-13T00:05:38","modified_gmt":"2013-10-12T21:05:38","slug":"uncomfortable-truth-mr-erdogans-unfortunate-threats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2010\/03\/22\/uncomfortable-truth-mr-erdogans-unfortunate-threats\/","title":{"rendered":"Uncomfortable Truth ; Mr Erdogan’s unfortunate threats"},"content":{"rendered":"
Re: Uncomfotable Truth – 18\/03\/2010 as below.<\/div>\n
Dear Editor,<\/div>\n
Mr Erdogan’s unfortunate threats are truly regrettable\u00a0especially as he does not represent the views of\u00a0most\u00a0Turkish People. His threats were quickly denied by his own Foreign Secretary Mr Davutoglu, indicating that this is not part of an Turkish Foreign Policy agenda. You are right in finding his intervention as demagogic and disreputable but he is still the same Prime Minister whose reputation and achievements have been held up as an example of a leader of a moderate Islamic government by most commentators in\u00a0EU and US until very recently!<\/div>\n
Regarding the Armenian genocide claims, this is far from being an accepted fact and an ‘uncomfortable truth’ for Turkey. The claims have been strongly disputed by hundreds of archives (English, French and Russian) and many non Turkish and Turkish scholars. By the way the Armenian\u00a0Government refuses to open its own archives. The real truth\u00a0is that there were awful killings\u00a0and deaths on both sides due to war, starvation and extreme cold and that in fact more Turks than Armenians had died tragically during this period. Unfortunately the powerful Armenian Diaspora continues to distort history and many people are blind to the obvious facts. Only last year Lord Avebury, along with Armenian activists were trying to lobby the Turkish Parliament by impressing\u00a0on them the notorious and discredited ‘Blue Book’ and had to be stopped ( details are available).<\/div>\n
We hope that we are all interested in the real truth and that it must prevail.<\/div>\n
Yours faithfully,<\/p>\n

Betula Nelson
\nMedia Relations
\nThe Ataturk Society of the UK<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

From The Times<\/div>\n
March 18, 2010<\/div>\n

Uncomfortable Truth<\/h1>\n

Turkish threats to expel Armenian migrants to make a political point are shameful<\/h2>\n
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  • 9 Comments<\/span><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
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    Deportations have powerful symbolism in modern European history. The notion that the government of a would-be member state of the EU might propose the forced collective expulsion from its territory of a specified nationality ought to be unthinkable. Yet that course was casually threatened yesterday by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish Prime Minister, against 100,000 Armenian migrants.<\/p>\n

    Its purported justification was the recent passage of non-binding resolutions in the US Congress and the Swedish parliament. These motions describe as genocide the mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during and after the First World War. Turkey takes strong issue with the claim of genocide. The history and politics of TurkishArmenian relations are convoluted, but the ethics of Mr Erdogan\u2019s remarks are not. His intervention is demagogic and disreputable.<\/p>\n

    The US and Swedish votes were carried by narrow margins and were opposed by their respective governments. The historical events that they recall began with the massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915. The very word \u201cgenocide\u201d is a post-1945 coinage, intended to define the peculiar barbarity of Nazism. Only gradually did the Armenian massacres come to be recognised as the first authentic case of genocide in the 20th century. But so they were. On conservative historical estimates, around a million Armenians were killed in a xenophobic purge that continued till 1923. It was a crime without precedent in modern history.<\/p>\n

    Historical truth matters. It is extraordinary that the Government of modern Turkey should resist it. No one alive today was responsible for these barbarities. They were committed by an imperial power that has long since passed into history along with Wilhelmine Germany, to which it was allied in the First World War. While running for the presidency, Barack Obama declared his intention of being a leader who would speak the truth about the Armenian genocide. In practice, while his views are a matter of record, Mr Obama has been conciliatory in relations with Turkey.<\/p>\n

    Mr Erdogan has little cause for complaint about the symbolic diplomacy of resolutions on historical events. He has no justification whatever for threats against Armenian migrants. Turkey is home to thousands of illegal immigrants from Armenia. Few would dispute that sovereign nations have the right to determine barriers to entry on the part of non-citizens, but these are migrants who have sought refuge from disaster. Forming an impoverished population that does necessary but low-wage work, they include many whose homes and livelihoods were destroyed in the Armenian earthquake of 1988. Mr Erdogan estimated yesterday that of 170,000 Armenians in Turkey, only 70,000 held Turkish citizenship. He threatened directly to tell the rest to leave.<\/p>\n

    Turkey is a member state of Nato and a strategically important power within the Western alliance. It borders Iraq, in whose stability the Western democracies have an intense interest. But the Government in Ankara cannot exploit that status in order to advance its own diplomatic goals at the expense of liberal values. To object to a proper historical accounting of awesome crimes is a demeaning and destructive stance. But then to retaliate against the most vulnerable people within Turkey\u2019s borders is unconscionable.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Re: Uncomfotable Truth – 18\/03\/2010 as below. Dear Editor, Mr Erdogan’s unfortunate threats are truly regrettable\u00a0especially as he does not represent the views of\u00a0most\u00a0Turkish People. His threats were quickly denied by his own Foreign Secretary Mr Davutoglu, indicating that this is not part of an Turkish Foreign Policy agenda. You are right in finding his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":43842,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[145,1571,78,120,204,1153,1018,2129],"class_list":["post-17917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-armenian-question","tag-barack-obama","tag-ahmet-davutoglu","tag-ergenekon","tag-gulen","tag-nagorno-karabakh","tag-politics","tag-recep-tayyip-erdogan","tag-turkey-and-armenia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17917"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17917\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}