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Soghomon Tehlirian

Page history last edited by Lydia Fay Ropp 14 years, 11 months ago

http://www.worldpolicy.newschool.edu/journal/articles/wpj05-3/cooper.html

 

Atatrk himself admitted and decried the killings of Armenians several times in the early postwar years, and his Ankara-based nationalist movement even agreed that accountability was necessary. At the urging of the occupying Allies, abortive trials of those responsible for the Armenian genocide were held in 1919, and they provided important factual evidence. But after the founding of the republic, denial set in. The actions of Ottoman forces were framed as a courageous defense of the empire against Western and Russian ambitions and the encroachments of Christianity. A number of the republic�s founders had been involved in the Armenian genocide; they were glorified as heroic founding fathers, and their crimes disappeared from official histories.

Armenians, meanwhile, scattered in a worldwide diaspora, with large communities settling in the United States, Europe, and Russia (a small Armenian community also remained in Turkey, and now numbers roughly 80,000, living mainly in Istanbul). As with Jews after the Second World War, the trauma of the genocide became a defining element in diaspora identity, hardened by continued Turkish denial. Nursing a sense of injustice, some Armenians took matters into their own hands. In 1921, a survivor, Soghomon Tehlirian, assassinated Talaat Pasha, one of the architects of the genocide, on a Berlin street. Decades later, in the early 1980s, an Armenian extremist group killed 31 Turkish diplomats, creating an additional and particularly traumatic point of friction between Turks and Armenians.

Yet, beginning in the 1980s, Armenian groups also turned to diplomacy, lobbying national governments to adopt commemorative resolutions that termed the killings in the early part of the 'century genocide. Turkey responded by threatening sanctions, including the closing of military bases; given Ankara�s importance as a NATO ally, this generally sufficed to prevent political action. (As recently as 2000, Turkish pressure stymied an effort by the U.S. Congress to adopt such a statement.) Nevertheless, roughly a dozen countries, including France, Canada, Italy, Switzerland, and most recently Germany, have approved resolutions acknowledging the genocide, in some cases urging Turkey to do the same.

An additional complication ensued when the former Soviet republic of Armenia attained independence in 1991. That year, Armenia fought and won a war with Azerbaijan to annex the largely Armenian-populated Azeri enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. Turkey sided with Muslim Azerbaijan and closed its border with Armenia. The border has remained difficult to cross, Turkish Armenian relations continue to be frigid, and contact between Turkey and Armenia has been limited.

The G-Word

The term "genocide" was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a Jew born in Poland, who as a law student in his native country was struck by a paradox on reading about the trial of Talaat Pasha�s killer in Berlin. "It is a crime for Tehlirian to kill a man, but it is not a crime for his oppressor to kill more than a million men?" Lemkin is said to have asked at the time. Although the word itself did not exist in 1915, most qualified historians today agree that the events of 1915-20 constituted genocide. In 2003, the International Center for Transitional Justice, a nongovernmental human rights organization headquartered in New York, commissioned a legal opinion that concluded that the killing of Armenians did fit the accepted legal definition of the term.1 As defined in a United Nations convention, "genocide" connotes an intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part. It does not presuppose the murder of an entire people, nor even murder; the operative language refers to the intentional attempt to destroy a collective identity.2 Although the Holocaust remains the most notorious example, after a century of genocides or near-genocides—in Cambodia, Iraq, Bosnia, and Rwanda—we are sadly aware that the crime can take many forms.

Nevertheless, Turkey emphatically denies that the killings of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire were an intentional attempt to destroy a people. It maintains that the Armenians attempted to subvert the empire in wartime and themselves massacred countless Turks, and that Ottoman authorities simply wished to relocate Armenians from a vulnerable border with Russia. Somewhat contradictorily, the Turkish version argues both that many deaths occurred on both sides in this "civil war," and that the relocation involved little loss of life.

This view is not confined to government officials. Decades of silence, limited access to historical material, and more recently, active propaganda campaigns have persuaded much of the Turkish public of the truth of the official view. The government�s ability to frame the opposing campaign as an attack by foreign enemies on Turkish honor and national existence has given its interpretation broad popular resonance.

For Armenians, meanwhile, the word "genocide" has acquired an almost sacrosanct aura. Thus the struggle over use of the "g-word" today frequently has little to do with historical debate, but rather resembles a symbolic struggle over mutually exclusive collective identities that can deteriorate into political one-upmanship. Willingness or unwillingness to employ the term has for many become a litmus test, with Armenians taking the view that Turks must explicitly admit that the Ottoman Empire committed genocide before further discussion is possible, while Turks discount the credibility of anyone who employs the term.

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