As they have been doing for almost a century, Armenians around the world today commemorated the genocide carried out by the Ottoman government under the cover of World War I.
In Moscow cars with Armenian flags drove in a column around the Garden Ring Road, but were prevented from entering the street where the Turkish embassy is situated. “Because there was no permit for this demonstration, they were asked to remove the flags,” said a representative of the law enforcement agencies.
As reported by Lenta.ru, acknowledgment of the Armenian genocide is considered one of the conditions for Turkey’s entry into the European Union. This source says the “violent deaths” of approximately one million Armenians has already been acknowledged by the EU, the US, and Russia, but Turkey insists the violence was “mutual.”
While it may be true that the US is on record saying hundreds of thousands of Armenians perished in Ottoman Turkey between 1915 and 1917, it continues to balk, officially, at naming it a genocide. Under pressure from Turkey and its friends, the US government continues to profess that the deaths and deportations were something that “just happened” in the course of a world war, where just about everyone was doing bad things to everyone else, and were not the result of a government policy that was deliberate, longstanding, and well thought out.
The Turkish historian Taner Akçam will have none of that. In A Shameful Act and other works making extensive use of primary sources in Turkish, Akçam methodically reconstructs the rationale and methodology of the genocidal campaign waged by the Committee of Union and Progress, using both official and unofficial (party) channels. There is much in Akçam’s book to give pause to us living in the United States during the George W. Bush years. The Young Turks knew they were engaged in illegal activities, but they counted on succeeding, in which case they felt it didn’t matter what was legal and what was not. History is written by the winners. When it became clear that Turkey would lose the war and was facing possible extinction as a nation, it systematically destroyed evidence of its wrongdoing. But as Akçam points out, in well-established bureaucracies, it is virtually impossible to destroy all copies of important documents and all copies of documents that refer to (and often quote from) those documents. The CUP was in the habit of issuing orders publicly (to mollify the European powers, who had taken a keen interest in the ethnic minorities in Turkey), only to countermand them secretly. Akçam presents abundant evidence of this practice, which would make the absence of certain key documents in the Ottoman archives perfectly understandable.
I had the pleasure of hearing a talk by Taner Akçam this past January. He was the guest of honor at a memorial service and dinner on the first anniversary of the murder of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in Istanbul. He is a small man, with round horned-rimmed glasses and a receding hairline—the quintessential academic. As he chatted with the Armenians at St. Mary’s Church in Washington, DC, smiling and clearly enjoying himself, it was hard to imagine that he has received death threats and has been harrassed for his research into the genocide.
Akçam was friends with Dink and devoted much of his talk to reminiscences. But during the question-and-answer period, he tried to offer a ray of hope to a young Armenian guy who wanted to befriend a Turkish guy and ran into a wall—he felt no progress is being made in improving relations with Turks and Turkey. Akçam said more and more frequently groups of Turkish students in the US are inviting him to speak to them—just them, not in an open public forum. They want to know what this fellow Turk has to say about the terrible events in their nation’s past, but they need to hear it in an uncharged atmosphere—as if it were a family problem that needs to be discussed in private first.
Akçam sees this as a positive development, and I do, too.
He understood how the young Armenian felt, but he asked that when he feels inclined to see all Turks as stubborn denialists, to think of “his friend Taner.” On this April 24, I’m thinking of Taner Akçam and hoping he is well.
