As genocide bills loom, Turkey must confront its history, say experts
In 2015, only four years from today, Armenians all over the world will be commemorating the 100th anniversary of the alleged genocide carried out at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. Regardless of whether the killings were systematic, or unfortunate casualties of pre-world war civilian unrest, experts predict 2015 will be good timing for more and more countries to join in genocide recognition and commemorate the tragic deaths along with the Armenian nation.
Landing a serious blow to Turkish foreign policy, one of the first countries to poke the “genocide” wound was France when it agreed last week to take a denial bill to its Senate for a final vote in two months — a vote that could make it a crime in France to debate whether the disputed Armenian genocide actually did happen or was a slightly different story.
In the belief that the French bill was blocking freedom of expression as well as research into history, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Thursday slammed France with a set of “initial measures,” which will be re-evaluated depending on the fate of the bill in the Senate. Speaking on Thursday, Erdoğan said Turkey was recalling its ambassador to France, as was planned last week. Official contact between the countries was also frozen on Thursday, and all bilateral conferences and workshops were cancelled. The measures also hit military agreements between the countries, as Erdoğan announced that military cooperation and joint drills were being suspended, as well as France’s automatic over-flight rights and port access. In an act of retaliation, he also promised Turkey would “point out all over the world” the history of the French, which Turkish officials consider to be filled with “blood and dirt.”
Prior to the vote, Turkish officials, businesspeople, scholars and civil society organizations embarked on a trip to Paris last week to assert that the bill was unfair and heard one side of the argument, limiting the other side’s freedom to debate otherwise and that the bill was aiming to reinforce the limitation with a prison sentence and a considerable fine. They also pointed to the possible side effects of the passage of the bill by Parliament, suggesting that the bill would “unfortunately but surely” hurt Turkish-French trade and business ties, which for now seem to be more beneficial for France than Turkey. Their calls were dismissed by the French Parliament.
While Turkish intellectuals and experts agree to a degree with the Turkish thesis that the French bill was politically charged in the pre-election environment of France and admit that French President Nicolas Sarkozy might have backed off of his word not to pass the bill when he first rose to power, some say it might be time for Turkey to wake up and get ready for a possible “snowball reaction” after the French bill, while others see the crisis as artificial and think the bill should be dismissed by Turkey.
Questioning whether the crisis perceived to have erupted between France and Turkey over the bill had any actual substance, Mehmet Ali Tuğtan, an academic at İstanbul Bilgi University, suggested matter-of-factly that every sovereign country has the right “to decide what is OK to say on its soil, and what is not,” and France has no say in what counts as valid in Turkey. Others claim that it would not only be the country’s image that would be marred if other countries follow suit after the French bill, but it might be “legally devastating” for millions of Turks living abroad who reside in countries where genocide is recognized and its denial is punishable. “The French bill might trigger a domino effect; I do not believe France will be the only country to feed on the wounds of Turkish-Armenian history as 2015 approaches,” Talip Küçükcan, foreign policy director of the Ankara-based Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research (SETA), told Sunday’s Zaman, concerned that foreign legislation about controversial genocide might quickly snowball and become harder to handle for Turkey.
‘Today’s Turkey can face history and deal with what comes out of it’
“Turkey is not the same country it was 10 years ago and is capable of candidly facing its own history,” Ergun Özbudun, a Bilkent University professor and constitutional law expert, told Sunday’s Zaman in a phone interview, arguing that France was now a “lost case,” just like several other countries that in the past recognized the term “genocide” in relation to the Armenian deaths. “Unwillingness to face history would seriously damage Turkey’s strength abroad,” Özbudun added, referring to speculation that genocide bills passing through foreign parliaments were weakening the country.
To what degree Turkey can freely discuss the facts about a genocide that not only politically concerns the Armenians but also represents a wound through which they have constituted their identities throughout the last century is a debate in its own right. Turkey’s infamous Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code (TCK) grants the judiciary the power to hold such arguments as a crime against Turkish identity, charging people, including genocide advocates of the past, on the grounds of “insulting Turkishness.” Under Article 301, Turkey in the past prosecuted many for discussing the mass killings of Armenians and raising the idea that the Armenian deaths might have actually reached beyond a million people at intentional hands and could amount to genocide. Among them was a Nobel laureate author, Orhan Pamuk, and Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, who was shot dead almost five years ago by an ultranationalist teenager, who another current case argues was used as a tool within a larger plot to silence intellectuals and create chaos in Turkey. Another prominent Turkish scholar, Taner Akçam, is still on trial for transgressing 301, and although the article was amended recently to allow slight improvement, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), where Akçam’s case was taken, ruled that it still threatened people’s freedom of expression.
“[Although 301 is still in force] many people today freely discuss the killings as a tragedy the state was responsible for; nothing happens to them today,” Özbudun said to highlight that a more democratic atmosphere now dominates Turkey. “The international community should know Turkey is now a different country,” he added, saying that Turkey can discuss its problems, on its own, without foreign interference.
Genocide bills attempt to force Turkey to cave in to pressure
While Tuğtan suggested not putting too much stock in the parliament’s vote, he found problematic the Armenian diaspora’s attitude toward the issue, regarding it as an attempt at “psychological pressure” on Turkey while trying to create a “general acknowledgement” of its genocide argument in the international arena. “The [genocide bill] method is quite a loud, annoying and disturbing one: To me, it is much like someone hiring a drummer to play on your driveway,” Tuğtan said of the argument the Armenian diaspora was trying to “shove down Turkey’s throat.” Considering such bills “a measure of the threat against Turkey to cave into doing something not of its own will,” the academic pointed out that such an attitude would block the path to a discussion of what is right and wrong, constituting sheer pressure and brute force. “I do not think Turkey will give into that,” he added.
On the flip side, “Turkey could have worked with Armenia when it signed protocols with the country and warmed relations but it strategically chose to let its foreign policy be hijacked by the concerns of another country, Azerbaijan,” suggested Küçükcan. His words also signaled that dealing with the Armenian issue is more than just a yes or no answer for Turkey and includes many other elements, such as the frozen relations between Azerbaijan, a country Turkey claims blood relations with, and Armenia, with which Turkey closed its border in 1992 following a disputed Armenian invasion of Azeri Nagorno-Karabakh.
France officially recognized the so-called Armenian genocide in 2001, causing a meltdown in Turkish-French relations and French exports to plunge by 40 percent. Ties had been on the mend since then and improved when the French Senate refused to discuss the same denial bill in 2006. Along with France, Argentina, Chile, Greece, Russia, Sweden and several others officially recognize the mass killings of Armenians as genocide. 2015 will mark the 100th anniversary of the Ottoman government’s arrest of 50 Armenian intellectuals and other prominent figures on charges of sabotaging the state, an event considered the start of the “genocide.” After the foundation of modern day Turkey a few years later, some of the Turks responsible for the killings were put on trial and executed, but many among the actual perpetrators fled Turkey.