Genocide-Denial Bill Rocks Turkish-French Relations
A while back, Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu announced that his country had embarked on a foreign policy based on “zero problems with our neighbors.”
But it would seem that Turkey’s “zero-problems” policy has in recent years been anything but—with Turkey most recently and loudly at loggerheads with Israel (over Palestine), Cyprus (over the extent of territorial waters and gas-drilling zones and rights), Syria (over the Assad regime’s bloody suppression of internal dissent), Iraq (over anti-Kurdish cross-border incursions by the Turkish army) and Greece (over Greece’s planned border fence to keep out would-be infiltrating Turkish emigrants bound for the EU).
Recently, it was the turn of Turkish-French relations, with Turkey recalling its ambassador from Paris and suspending all bilateral contacts and relations—political, economic and military—in the wake of the passage by the French lower house of parliament, the National Assembly, of a law prohibiting genocide denial, including the Armenian genocide of World War I.
Armenian spokesmen at the time and many subsequent historians of the period have alleged that the Ottoman Turks murdered between a million and 1.5 million Armenians in the Middle East and the Caucasus in a series of planned and systematic massacres. Though these actions often were camouflaged as “deportations,” the intent, according to historians, was to exterminate the Armenian race, i.e., genocide.
Successive Turkish governments, including the incumbent Islamist government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, have consistently denied the allegation, arguing that Istanbul had merely put down internal Armenian rebellions—an Armenian “stab in the back,” as it were—as the hard-pressed Ottomans were fighting the Russians, British and a variety of Balkan Christian states during World War I. They have insisted that the death toll amounted to no more than three hundred thousand Armenians (alongside tens of thousands of Turks allegedly murdered by Armenians). Occasionally Turkish spokesmen have conceded that there had been some “excesses”—but by local Ottoman officials and units.
Most non-Turkish historians dealing with World War I have concluded that the Turks, assisted by Kurds, Circassians, Tatars, Azeris and Arabs, committed genocide. For example, Donald Bloxham, a respected historian at Edinburgh University, recently wrote:
It may be said categorically that the killing did constitute a genocide—every aspect of the United Nations’ definition of the crime is applicable… . [There was among the Turks] a general consensus of destruction of the Armenian national community, a consensus which developed and was augmented over time around broad principles of discrimination and xenophobia, progressing from notions of removal by dilution and\or assimilation to physical removal by deportation and\or murder.
Increasingly Turkish historians, especially those working in democratic countries outside Turkey, have reached the same conclusion. The Turkish-born and educated Taner Akcam, who teaches at the University of Minnesota, investigated the evolution of Turkish policy toward the Armenians. In his major study A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, he called what happened to the Armenians “the deliberate destruction of a people.” It was preceded by a plan by the Turkish ruling party, the Committee for Union and Progress. One of the triumvirs who ruled the Ottoman Empire during World War I, Talat Pasha, reportedly explained: “Necessary preparations have been discussed and taken for the complete and fundamental elimination of this concern [i.e., the Armenians] … What we are dealing with here … is the annihilation of the Armenians.”