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T\u00dcRKKAYA <\/span>ATA\u00d6V \u00a0<\/p>\n Why Not? <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Close to a hundred years have elapsed since the outbreak of the First World War. Armenian-Turkish relations during those four years are politicized that miscolour historical facts. Exclusively one-sided views, reflected in the sways of some third party parliaments, only convey rash pre-arrangements serving power politics instead of justice. In some Western mainstream media and legislative organs one perceives calls for \u201ccoming to terms with the past\u201d. The presumption is that the Turks will have to do that.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Why not? However, the occasional discourse over the hastily-suggested and irresponsibly repeated phrase is misleading in several ways<\/span><\/a>[1]<\/span><\/span>. Coming to terms with the past needs to be, above all, an exercise in good faith, free from domestic and international politics. Befitting endeavour entails the establishment of a correct historical record, including the scholarly duty to question the validity of the mainstream ideas. The <\/span>challenge is not a legal requirement, but a probe into history, and as such one ought to expect the same scientific methodology to be utilized in its analysis. One has to be clear, then, as to the aim, procedure and techniques of such a venture. To determine what actually occurred in the past commands independence of the past and present decision-makers. At stake are the legitimacy of arguments and the identity of the peoples involved. No historical truth can be treated justly if all of its parts do not come out. There is an ingrained bond between non-discriminative truth and non-selective justice.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n If we agree that only unbiased scientific research can bring out all historical facts. We should also concur that attempts to explain past events via political organs may eventually usher Orwellian \u201ctruth ministries\u201d. If, for instance, some reliable third party publications publicly state that the Armenians had \u201cslaughtered\u2026120.000 non-Armenians\u201d in Eastern Anatolia while the Turks were only mobilizing for war, and if there is reference to such facts even in some mainstream sources,<\/span><\/a>[2]<\/span><\/span> historical truth is being sacrificed on the pedestal of powerful pressure groups and\/or political interests.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Do the parliamentarians always know who they are being lobbied by? Does the media display enough scrutiny of lobbying campaigns? Is the civil society provided with alternative explanations? The answer to these inquiries should be an emphatic \u201cno!\u201d. For instance, the register of lobbyists with full-time access pass even to the European Parliament only lists name and organizations, not who these people are lobbying for, or what issue and how much budget is involved.<\/span><\/a>[3]<\/span><\/span> Who can claim that this the way to write history?<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Irrefutably, then, coming to terms with the past demands all-inclusive, meticulous, and accurate research based on solid evidence beyond reasonable doubt. It urges for scholarly effort, not political propaganda designed to mislead especially third parties whose public knows little or nothing about the issue. In case the ultimate intent is limited to imposing a selected interpretation on foreign decision-makers, such a scheme has obviously reached alarming proportions. The name of the commitment is, then, academic work, not prejudice entangled with half-knowledge and naivet\u00e8. <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Initially, we must agree on dispassionate, non-partisan and open-minded treatment of the controversy. That guideline happens to be the indispensable criterion from which other imperatives follow. For instance, if one searches for \u201cguilt history\u201d, we should also agree<\/span><\/p>\n that legal or moral modus operandi <\/em>does not allow for a concept called \u201ccollective responsibility\u201d. Assuming that there exists a guilt, the accused may only be a person or a group related to an executed policy. The blame cannot be put on the shoulders of a whole people, or people, or on the future generations. Correspondingly, one cannot reactivate the out-dated theologian concept of \u201coriginal sin\u201d and deduce from it the obsolete assertion that the new generation are born with guilt for all.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Guilt is personal. It remains personal even in case of decisions made by a so-called central body, which is composed of individuals. However, no personal responsibility can be put, in ethical, rational or legal terms, on contemporary individuals for the behaviour of some of their predecessors. If present-day generations would be blamed for the misdeeds in the past, this would revive the so-called collective historical responsibility of a whole people, reintroducing the metaphysical and the irrational concept of perpetual guilt. A cumulative and everlasting accountability transceting ages would bring back the theoretical notion of guilt which some people may be unjustly accused to be born with. Doubtless it is absurd to entertain, even to tolerate such a primitive assumption.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n There are no \u201cgood\u201d and \u201cbad\u201d nations, then. To insist on hearing and propagation one version of events is accepting the Manichaean co-existence of God and Satan, or a division of world based on a belief that disappeared centuries ago. Personal responsibility was one of <\/span>the bases of the N\u00fcrnberg and the Tokyo trials in 1945-46. The classification of international crimes and the individual responsibility of the person who might have received from superiors are the two outstanding principles relevant even in our day. Accusations were levelled at some individuals because they were alive then. No individual may be dragged to a court if the culprits are no longer alive. Concomitantly, in terms of measures of redress, compensation is also out of the question if the culprits are no longer alive.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Assuming that the accused are living, the instrument of justice should not be misused, however, as an opportunity for revenge. This is the case at the end of wars, when ruthlessness mixed with \u201cgetting even\u201d is greater than ever with the cessation of armed hostilities. The defeated party that loses the war no longer enjoys sovereignty over public affairs<\/span><\/a>[4]<\/span><\/span>. Emotions prevent rational analysis. Only the privileged victors judge the behaviour of the defeated, moreover according to their own interests. Enjoying immunity from prosecution themselves setting up the tribunal, formulating the terms of criminal procedures, and drawing the list of indicted persons, the victors also become judge in their own cases, which has no place in justice. This privileged position may be appropriately labelled as \u201cvictor\u2019s justice\u201d. The Ottoman trials after the First World War, during which no Armenian appeared before the tribunal and only the Turks were punished, should be described as such.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Had the International Criminal Court (ICC)<\/span><\/a>[5]<\/span><\/span> based on the Rome Statue (1998) and formed (2002) after ratification, existed after 1918 and had both the Armenians and the Turks applied to it with their own documentation and witnesses, such a tribunal, with some inherent weaknesses and later encroachments on its jurisdiction, but enjoying considerable transnational qualities, would have probably ruled out genocide on any side, noting in the process armed revolts, occupation, secession, war casualties, losses on account of contagious diseases, migration and the like.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n The ICC cannot prosecute crimes if they were committed before the entry into force of the Rome Statue ( 1 July 2002). Another question within the framework of time limits is the following: How far back may one look in order to come to terms with the past? If one stretches to far away periods in history, for instance to the founding days of some nations, one may meet myth that cover terrible barbarities. The experience of many powerful states. Including the days of old of the contemporary superpower, abound in monstrous atrocities. To bring all of them back will hardly serve the criterion of international understanding. <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n But Not Only the Turks: <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Justice abhors double standards, and historical fact-finding demands balanced recording. Many safety measures are involved in thorough exploration. Probing into the past cannot be restricted only to a nation, region, date, or to an ethnic\/religious group. No nation can demand from another to examine solely the past of the latter. No nation may be singled out by others and made a scapegoat. Moreover, no nation may be forced <\/span>to serve the interests of another under the label of \u201ccoming to terms with its past\u201d. If need be, the records of all countries, without any exception, and no veto privilege operating in favour of anyone of them, should be open for close scrutiny. Coming to terms with the past can only have a universal and comprehensive proportion, leaving no room for power politics.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Especially, when the legislative bodies of countries that have often undermined human rights in the past, and moreover continue to do so, insist on others to examine their past, their position may well be described as hypocritical. Among them, those countries that have never or not fully come to terms with their own past, even their present, cannot designate themselves as impartial decision-makers in others\u2019 cases.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Can the histories of Asia, Africa, the Americas and Australia be fully written without appropriate references to what happened to the so-called \u201cRed Indians\u201d, Chinese, Filipinos, the Maghribi Arabs, the South Africans, the Australian Aborigines, and the like. None of our contemporaries in the Western world are now collectively or individually responsible for what some of their forefathers might have done in all the continents. But world-wide criminal acts, one more brutal than the other, are nevertheless in the annuals of history.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n The civilization peculiar to the soil were reduced to rabble with the coming of Cristobal Colon to the New World. The \u201cAmerican Indians\u201d, who had previously scattered all over the land mass of the Western Hemisphere, were reduced by warfare and disease in the past, and are now very poor and discriminated against<\/span><\/a>[6]<\/span><\/span>. \u201cThose pernicious creatures\u201d, so described by the Puritan Cottton Mather, were hunted down mercilessly almost to the degree of total extermination. Colonel Chivington struck (1862) without warning a Cheyenne encampment that flew the Stars and Stripes, scalping even screaming women. Army fire (1890) on the Oglala Sioux dancers at Wounded Knee ended the armed conflict that had begun three centuries ago. If some in-group in the United States are still searching to commemorate a date for the inhuman treatment of fellow beings by other homo sapiens <\/em>, one of these two occasions may well suit the land.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Nor are the present-generation Americans accountable for the slaves imported from Africa. It was this American state that developed an explicit ideology that crowned racism as a dominant force.<\/span><\/a>[7]<\/span><\/span> Some brutal men from Western civilization tore African blacks from their lands, stacked them in the unhealthy holds of ships, threw some into the ocean, and hurled them into a new hostile environment. They tilled the soil for the 2Lords of the Land\u201d and served the \u201cBoses of the Buildings\u201d. Although they raised enough cotton to clothe the whole nation, they had no matrasses to sleep on, and their bleeding bodies were, at times, dragged through the streets.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Canada\u2019s aboriginal peoples, who once owned that vast land, are discriminated against in the whole white society of English and French settlers, and now live in squalor amongst colossal wealth.<\/a><\/span>[8]<\/span><\/span> <\/span>How this divergence came about is the topic of the historians. Moreover the image of the Amerindians in Canada\u2019s textbooks risk instilling into young people prejudices against them.<\/a><\/span>[9]<\/span><\/span> Not only the native peoples and the Afro-Canadian, but the \u201cInuit\u201d who are the Arctic dwellers of Canada, Alaska, Greenland and (Russian) Siberia, are placed at the very bottom of the social ladder. The Catholic French-speaking Canadians as well aspired for a society unlike the one created by the English Canadians.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n The \u201cIndians\u201d in parts of Central and South America were treated as sub-humans from the very outset. Various indigenous (comunidad native) <\/em>, Afro-Latin Americans and some immigrants are discriminated against. Neither the Zapatista movement, nor the Nicaraguan Revolution should be surprising. In some Latin American countries, massacres (Matanzas) <\/em>were carried out of even those who wore indigenous dress. The \u201cRastafarians\u201d<\/span><\/a>[10]<\/span><\/span> were inspired by Marcus M. Garvey, who advocated a total exodus from the cruel white world. In South America, the native people were exterminated, expropriated and enslaved. Economically helpless, politically impotent and culturally isolated, the natives have been marginalized even in countries where they are more than half of the total population.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n The 197 forest-dwelling indigenous group in Brazil face extinction<\/span><\/a>[11]<\/span><\/span>. For the first time in 1972 in Colombian history, a group of white people was put on trial for the murder of natives. They were acquitted initially, on the grounds that they thought their victims were not humans; they were convicted only at the end of a retrial<\/span><\/a>[12]<\/span><\/span>. Argentina has been a pluri-ethnic country with numerically significant immigrants of European origin, against whom there has been manifestations of racism in different forms as ethnically, social class, occupational rank and religion. The Mapuche people in Chile, who now posses a little over 1% of the land they owned at the time of the initial European invasion, were repressed especially during the Augusto Pinochet regime. In Ecuador, indigenous peoples of the land, who had lived where Texaco dug its first oil well, have since then become extinguished. The French colonists threatened the life of the original inhabitants of the French Guiana. Human rights violations against Uruguay\u2019s eighteen indigenous peoples have been shocking especially under general Alfredo Stroessner\u2019s regime. Guerrilla group Sendero Luminoso <\/em>(Shining Path), eager to maintain its violent control over the lucrative cocaine traffic, made life for the Ashaninka, who strive to exist in the Peruvian rain-forests, even more difficult. Venezuela\u2019s indigenous groups have been historically neglected<\/span><\/a>[13]<\/span><\/span>. <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Western Europe has three categories of minorities, some of whom have frequently been objects of discrimination. They are (a) the indigenous people such as the Sami<\/a><\/span>[14]<\/span><\/span>. (b) the so-called \u201chistoric minorities\u201d<\/a><\/span>[15]<\/span><\/span>, such as the Alsatians, and (c) \u201cnew\u201d minorities such as the Magribi Arabs in France, or the Turks in Germany<\/a><\/span>[16]<\/span><\/span>. The Sami, who traditionally lived in the far North, are now outnumbered in those areas that were once inhabited only by them. The ten million or more Roma\/Gypsies, originally from India and the first 2blacks\u201d in Europe, are rejected almost in every part of that continent. Nazi Germany killed at least 300.000 of them.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n The Alsatians, Breton and Corsicans have historically fallen behind the average French citizens. Resettled French people, formerly from Algeria (pieds noirs) <\/em>since then dominated Corsican economy. Occitan, spoken in parts of southern France, never enjoyed public or official status. The war-time Vichy government had introduced anti-Semitic legislation deporting 47,000 Jews to the Nazi death chambers. The French extreme right is likewise anti- Muslim when it comes to the move than 3,5 million \u201cnew\u201d minorities, the citizenship of whom even born in France were withdrawn in 1993.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n In Belgium, an aggressive anti-immigrant Flemish Vlaams Blok <\/span><\/em>(Our Own People First) grew in popularity. In the Netherlands, there is a rise in racist attacks against the new minorities from the Mediterranean and the former Dutch colonies. The grievances of the Basques and the Catalans in Spain go back to the pre-Civil War years, futher complicated by the Franco regime. The British had conflicts with the Irish Scots, Welsh, the coloured by the new minorities. The pan-Germanic voters increased their strength in Austria, where the historical Burgenland Croat <\/span>minority is losing its identity, and the guest workers are under duress. The \u201cneo-fascists\u201d in Germany carry out attacks on foreign workers, more frequently on the Turks, and their children born there. They have set Turkish <\/span>dwelling on fire, burning alive men, women and children. The so-called \u201cskin-heads\u201d acquired an identity mixed with the traditions of past totalitarianism or remnants of it in the present hate and enemy figures. The treatment of the Swiss of each other has been generally considered as the best handling of any minority anywhere. That country gives little or no protection, however, to fremdarbeiter <\/em>(foreign workers). <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n To paraphrase an oft-quoted famous statement \u201c a specter is haunting Europe\u201d, the specter of racism, ethnic cleansing and expulsion, the last victims being unarmed Bosnians and the families of guestworkers, principally the Turks. Racism became more and more significant, not only on account of violent attacks on minorities and immigrants, but also by the power of extremist political parties which increased their influences on some mainstream parties that compete for the right-wing vote. Rising unemployment, coupled with waves of refugees from the former communist bloc, led large portions of the European electorate to search for scapegoats. While minorities and foreigners are denounced in various regions, the collapse of the regimes in Eastern Europe unleashed ethnocentric feeling in the whole continent.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Recent history of Eastern Europe and the Balkans experienced wars, ethnic cleansing, exiles, population transfers and re-emergence of old feuds. One of the little-known facts of the histories of the Balkans. Crimea and the Caucasus is that the vast \u201cMuslim land\u201d, inhabited predominantly by the Turks among the Muslims, disappeared since the Greek revolt of 1821, leading (until 1922) to the loss of over five million Muslims and with the forced migration of 5,5 million more<\/span><\/a>[17]<\/span><\/span>. Only small pockets of Muslim (or Turkish) settlements were left in the new independent states founded on the suffering of the departed inhabitants. The Bosnian ethnic cleansing of much later date was only one of the last hoops of a long chain of events. The Bosnian case was \u201ca slur on the face, not only of Europe, but the entire civilized world<\/span><\/a>[18]<\/span><\/span>. Pogrom <\/em>were notorious in Russia and elsewhere. <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n The Second World War eliminated much of the European Jewry and the Roma, Poland has no pressing minority problem mainly because close to 2,5 million Jews were exterminated during that war. In Lithuania, Russians and Poles recurrently charge that the authorities discriminate against them. The Gagauz, who officially did not exist for a long time and generally but falsely considered \u201cTurkish-language Bulgarians\u201d, are culturally and linguistically\u2026 a Turkic people\u201d<\/span><\/a>[19]<\/span><\/span>. In the 1980s, authorities in a Balkan state had forced the Turks to change their names and to abandon their ethnic and religious customs as well their language.<\/span><\/a>[20]<\/span><\/span> This particular discrimination is no longer enforced. Greece also claimed to be a country exclusively inhabited of Greeks. On may assert, however, that just before the Balkan Wars (1912-13) even only in Aegean Macedonia and Western Thrace there were ( in addition to Greeks) Macedonians, Muslim Turks, Muslim Pomaks, Christian Turks (the Gagauz), Muslim Cherkez (Circassians), Muslim Albanians, Christian Albanians, Christians Vlachs, (Aromanis), Muslim Vlachs, Jews, Armenians, the Roma, and other. The Muslim Turks of Western Thrace are the most numerous minority in Greece<\/span><\/a>[21]<\/span><\/span>. <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n There is some struggle between the central authorities and the non-Russian territorial units in the Russian Federation. The Crimean Tatars, the Volga Germans, and the Meshkhetian (Ahiska) Turks have long stood out in a different category among the several nationalities forcibly resettled in Central Asia and Siberia during the Second World War<\/span><\/a>[22]<\/span><\/span>. Armenia and Azerbaijan brawled and fought over the Nagorno-Karebagh conflict, and the Armenian occupation of parts of Azeri territory, in addition to Nagorno-Karabagh, was criticized in strong terms by the U.N. Security Council<\/span><\/a>[23]<\/span><\/span>. <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n The Armenians as Well:<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Omission is the most virulent form of censorship. Many Armenian argument omit a mass of crucial facts. They cast aside the dimensions of their armed revolt, they count out the deaths that they have caused, they skip the frequent wars in which they participated, they overlook the memoirs oh their own commanders who admit Armenian carnage of non-Armenians, they ignore the destructive effect of contagious diseases especially in war conditions, and they withhold a series of facts that weaken their case. This ensemble of facts are indeed troubling for the Armenian version of events.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Foreign Christian missionaries, who entered the vast Ottoman territory, convinced at least some Armenians that the latter were superior to the Muslim. The circumstances of the imperialist are added fire to the religious\/ethnic conflict that the foreign preacher\/propagandists had started in the alluring target of the Ottoman East. Foreign interventions in the form of ascendancy of alien clergy, enforced legal adjustments new trading conditions privileges for the outsiders, diplomatic threats, and outright military expedition turned the Ottoman society into an engine of ethnic conflagration.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Imperialist mechanism favoured, not only different people or different classes, but also different ethnic groups<\/span><\/a>[24]<\/span><\/span>. The system rewarded some nations, hierarchies and ethnic\/religious groups over other. The most privileged minority then was the Ottoman Armenians. The missionaries, the assessments then and some publications even today describe the Armenians as calm, weak, gentle, helpless, unprotected, unarmed, non-belligerent, good Christian, and totally vulnerable civilians, mostly old men, women and children, ostensibly upon whom well-armed regular Ottoman troops ascended with their full force, killing perhaps millions. This is a cock-and-bull story that many third party documents and certainly the Ottoman archives, even considerable Armenian confessions belie. <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n While the teachings of some foreign missionaries, willing or unintentionally, provided the mental ingredient of armed Armenian action, great power appetite over Ottoman territories supplied the memory, logistics, arms, and equipment even down to uniforms. The following Chicago publication on the very even of 20th<\/sup> century by an American Protestant missionary and the president of the Armenian Patriotic <\/span>Union in New York is a case in point. It reflect a deep-seated racist attitude, which nevertheless pulled wool over the eyes of the forefathers of some present-day decision-makers equipped with such inherited misinformation. The book says that the Turks are \u201cnot members of the best or the second best human race\u201d and as such \u201cincapable of assimilating complex ideas\u201d and further that their \u201cmental inferiority\u201d is matched with a \u201creligion of a very low order\u201d which has made them \u201cworse than savages\u201d. While the soul of Christians, like the Armenians, \u201cgrows race and strength\u201d the Turks, the authors conclude, \u201cis a wild beast to be caged\u201d. The missionary and his Armenian colleague \u201cbeg pardon of the hounds, hyenas and\u2026 other wild beasts for using their names in simile or metaphor to describe the\u2026ferocity of Kurd or Turk.\u201d<\/span><\/a>[25]<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\nProfessor of International Relations
\nTurkish Forum Advisory Board Member<\/em><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n