Our Only Lesson

In June 2005, Turkey introduced a new penal code including Article 301, which states: "A person who, being a Turk, explicitly insults the Republic or Turkish Grand National Assembly, shall be imposed to a penalty of imprisonment for a term of six months to three years."

Soon after, Orhan Pamuk, who recently won the Nobel Prize for Literature, was retroactively charged with violating this law. In an an interview he had given four months earlier Pamuk had stated that "one million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed in Turkey" (between 1915-1917). This is seen as an insult to Turkishness as the official line in Turkish government, academia and society is that there was no Armenian Genocide and proposes extreme statement such that 56,000 Armenians perished during the period due to war conditions, and less than 10 thousand were actually killed.
Taken from the official statements of Yusuf Halacoglu, The President of the Turkish Historical Society Ref.

Ironically, a bill adopted by the French National Assembly two months ago would make statements such as Halacoglu's, tantamount to publicly denying the Armenian genocide, illegal in France. Thus we see a blatantly clear contradiction on the factual basis of history enshrined in Turkish and French law- it is impossible to make any consistent and legal reference to the nature of the Armenian genocide in Paris in the morning and Istanbul by night.

Reminiscent of the "study the controversy" campaign to befuddle logical perceptions of evolution with "Intelligent Design" doctrine, in 2005 Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for an international Commission "to establish the events of 1915". His offer was rejected by Armenia and its foreign minister remarked that "The historians have already said their piece and it is now down to Turkey to determine its attitude."

Furthermore, the International Association of Genocide Scholars sent an open letter to Erdogan in response stating-

"The Armenian Genocide is corroborated by the international scholarly, legal, and human rights community:
1) Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin, when he coined the term genocide in 1944, cited the Turkish extermination of the Armenians and the Nazi extermination of the Jews as defining examples of what he meant by genocide.
2) The killings of the Armenians is genocide as defined by the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
3) In 1997 the International Association of Genocide Scholars, an organization of the world’s foremost experts on genocide, unanimously passed a formal resolution affirming the Armenian Genocide."
International Association of Genocide Scholars, June 13, 2005.

In the terminology of modern debate, Erdogan just got "pwned".

The number and nature of the deaths, necessary for defining genocide, is as complex as any feature of history however, "There seems to be a consensus among Western scholars with the exception of few dissident and Turkish national historians, as to when covering all the period between 1914 to 1923, over a million Armenian might have perished, and the tendency seem recently to be, either presenting 1.2 million as figure or even 1.5 million, while more moderately, "over a million" is presented, as the Turkish historian Fikret Adanir provides as estimation". Ref.

This is not merely a case of differing interpretations, it is an active denial of reality, an affront to the dead and evidence of deeper neurotic avoidance of national history; a dangerous discord for any aspiring "open society". It is evidence of blinding doctrine- one that makes it a crime to study and speak the truth as an objective search will reveal.

The open letter to Erdogan finishes, "We believe that it is clearly in the interest of the Turkish people and their future as a proud and equal participants in international, democratic discourse to acknowledge the responsibility of a previous government for the genocide of the Armenian people, just as the German government and people have done in the case of the Holocaust."


Post Script on Iran

The above piece lay unfinished for the last few months until I was stirred by the abhorrent news on the Iranian Holocaust Conference. Their motives are clear, as Iranian Foreign Minister Mottaki declared in a speech that: "If the official version of the Holocaust is thrown into doubt, then the identity and nature of Israel will be thrown into doubt."

Although I find this anti-Israeli hate mongering dangerous and exactly what is not needed right now, it is pretty much more of the same thing that has been in the press across the region for decades. What really sickens me is the official reinterpretation of history- guided by dogma and political agenda. That is what is really terrifying- escalating this dangerous precedent- not only for Israel or Jews, but Iranians and indeed all humanity. History is our only lesson. It is one for which we have paid our highest price and if we fail again the cost of our ignorance is surely the blood of our children. This is my fear.