Where awards or consultations are concerned, there is yet greater cause for prudence. Zürcher’s later edition marks an advance over his earlier version where Armenians are in question. But where Kurds are at issue, it moves in the opposite direction, forthright statements in 1993—‘Turkey will have to become a binational state, with Kurdish as its second language in the media, in education and in administration. The south-east will have to be granted some sort of far-reaching autonomy with Kurds governing and policing Kurds’—vanishing in 2004.78 Since then, Zürcher has been awarded a Medal of High Distinction by the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and become an adviser to the EU Commission. Scholarship is unlikely to benefit from either honour. Nor are political brokers often brave speakers. It would be wrong to condemn the compromises of Western historians of Turkey, even of such an independent spirit as Zürcher, out of hand. The constraints they confront are real. But the pressures on Turks themselves are much stronger. Greater safety warrants less escapism.
The one signal exception in the field confirms the rule. Donald Bloxham’s Great Game of Genocide, which came out in 2005, is the work not of an Ottomanist but of a comparative historian of extermination, with no professional connexions to Turkey. Its ill-chosen title gives little sense of the clarity and power of this work, a succinct masterpiece on the killing of the Armenians, illuminating both its national context and its international aftermaths. The treatment of the CUP’s genocide by accredited historians in the West forms part of Bloxham’s story, but it is the attitude of states that moves centre stage in his account. Of these, as he shows, the US has long been the most important, as the Entente power that never declared war on the Ottoman Empire in 1916–18, and whose high commissioner to Turkey from 1919 to 1927, Admiral Bristol, advocated further ethnic cleansing after it. Since America contained Greek and Armenian communities that needed to be silenced, it was there that the casuistries of later negationism were first developed in the inter-war years, before they had much currency in Europe. By the thirties Hollywood was already cancelling a movie of Franz Werfel’s novel on Armenian resistance to massacres in Cilicia, after threats from the Turkish embassy that it was a calumny.
Since 1945 Turkey has, of course, acquired far more importance for the US as a strategic ally, first in the Cold War and now the War on Terror. In the past twenty years, increasing pressure from the Armenian community, now much more salient than in the twenties, and the emergence of an Armenian scholarship that has pioneered modern study of the exterminations of 1915–16 in the West, have made repression of the question more difficult. After previously unsuccessful attempts to get resolutions on it through Congress, in 2000 the House International Relations Committee voted for a bipartisan resolution condemning the Armenian genocide, carefully exempting the Turkish Republic from any responsibility for it. Ankara’s response was to threaten trade reprisals, withdrawal of American military facilities in Turkey and risk of violence against Americans in Turkey—the State Department even had to issue a travel advisory—if the resolution were passed by Congress. Characteristically, Clinton intervened in person to prevent the resolution ever getting to the floor. In Ankara, Ecevit exulted that it was a demonstration of Turkish power.
In 2007 the same scenario was repeated. This time, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—another Democratic champion of human rights—pronounced herself in favour of a resolution with 191 sponsors. But as soon as a string of party notables headed by Madeleine Albright intervened, she heeded the pleas of the State and Defense departments, and killed any vote on it. In the background, Turkish threats were now combined with bribes in an escalating drive to stop the resolution. Some $3.2 million were spent by Ankara on a lobbying campaign orchestrated by Richard Gephardt, former Democratic majority leader in the House, who had supported the resolution in 2000, when he was not yet on the Turkish payroll.79 Meanwhile, major Jewish organizations—AIPAC, ADL and others—far from expressing any solidarity with victims of another genocide, were closeted with Gül in Washington, discussing how to deny it.80 Ideology plays its part in this: the uniqueness of the Nazi destruction of the Jews as a moral patent not to be infringed. But there is also the close military and diplomatic relationship between Israel and Turkey—IDF jets train in Turkish air-space—that has led Tel Aviv to undertake, in the words of a sympathetic observer, ‘a concerted effort to educate American Jewry on the strategic significance of Turkey’.81 Not all consciences have been stilled quite so easily. Better Jewish voices have been raised against such collusion, but to little effect so far.
In Europe, Turkey’s candidature to the EU puts a set of issues on the agenda that is wider in Brussels than in Washington. Here, the situation of Turks themselves, in principle of Kurds, by extension of Cypriots, are the objects of attention, not the fate of Armenians. In practice, the Commission’s priority has been to get Turkey into the Union at least possible cost—that is, causing as little difficulty as it can for the AKP government, represented as a torch-bearer of progress, held back from fully realizing EU norms only by a retrograde judicial and military establishment. Annual reports on the country’s advance towards membership, invariably dwelling much longer on economic than political requirements, chalk up performances in privatization and torture in the same imperturbable idiom—‘proceeds were significant, but the agenda is not finished’; ‘the Turkish legal framework includes a comprehensive set of safeguards against torture and ill-treatment. However, cases still occur’. Shortcomings are noted, but the road always leads upwards.82
Naturally, all potential sticking-points are excluded from these bland memorials. Cyprus? The rubric ‘Regional Issues and International Obligations’ does not even mention Turkey’s refusal to recognize a member of the European Union it seeks to enter. Commissioner Olli Rehn, a boyish Streber from Finland with sights on his country’s presidency, has made no secret of his indifference to ethnic cleansing on the island, telling Cypriots they ‘should stop complaining against past injustice and rather work on future solutions with a pragmatic approach’—naturally, one that accepts occupation by Ankara in the wider interests of Brussels. After all, as the Commission can report with satisfaction, among other merits ‘Turkey has offered to train Iraqi security forces’, and demonstrated ‘close alignment with EU Common Foreign and Security Policy’.83
Kurds? Wherever possible, avoid mention of them. In the words of an authoritative study by two leading jurists of the record of the AKP in power and the way the EU has covered it, the Union tends to use ‘the term “situation in the southeast” as a euphemism for the Kurdish issue’. EU leaders have not only ‘singularly failed to issue any statement’ on the Kurdish question, or ‘promote any democratic platform or meaningful discourse about it’, but ‘the glossy picture of an overall dynamic towards democratization, respect for human rights and pluralism painted by the Commission belies the reality that Turkey’s attitude towards the granting of minority rights and the Kurds shows little sign of genuine change’.84 Embarrassed by such criticisms, the Commission’s latest report makes a weak attempt to meet them. Kurds and Alevis, well aware that its main concern is that they not rock the boat of accession, remain unimpressed.
Armenians? Their fate has no bearing on Turkish membership of the Union. The ‘tragedy of 1915’, as Rehn puts it in a now standard euphemism, can form part of ‘a comprehensive dialogue’ between Ankara and Erevan, but Brussels must keep clear of it. Widely regarded inside Turkey as an honorary consul for the AKP, Rehn is perhaps exceptional even in the ranks of the current Commission for vulgar self-satisfaction and tartufferie. His mission statement Europe’s Next Frontiers, replete with epigraphs from pop songs, and apothegms like ‘defeatism never carries the day’ or ‘the vision thing is not rocket science’, ends with a suitably naff conceit of his prowess on the football field: ‘Don’t tell the goalie, but I tend to shoot my penalty kicks to the lower left-hand corner. After all, it is goals that count—even in European integration’.85 Such are his skills at ‘democratic
functionalism’, we are told. Who could be surprised to learn, from the same mind, that ‘the Commission’s role in the accession process can be described as the friend who tells the truth’?86
The Barroso Commission is not, of course, either an independent, or an isolated, centre of power. It reflects the general outlook of the European political class as a whole. When the Parliament in Strasbourg, theoretically less subject to diplomatic constraints, was told by the Dutch MEP Camille Eurling, rapporteur on Turkey, that recognition of the Armenian genocide should be a condition of its accession to the Union, it was predictably the Green delegation, led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, that sprang into action to make sure the passage was deleted, confirming the general rule that the more any political group talks about human rights, the less it will respect them. The reality is an establishment commitment to Turkish membership that brooks no cavils. Emblematic is the Independent Commission on Turkey, hailed by an admirer as a ‘self-appointed group of European dignitaries’—its members included one former president, two former prime ministers, three former foreign ministers, not to speak of Lord Giddens—which ‘has been a beacon of how Europe can be very fair and diligent in the pursuit of the truth, and as such has gained much praise in Europe and in Turkey’. Its findings can be imagined.
A fuller handbook is offered by the Federal Trust’s volume The EU and Turkey: A Glittering Prize or a Millstone? No rewards for guessing the answer, but as one glowing prospectus follows another, with a decorous sprinkling of ifs and buts, more candid language occasionally breaks through. Opening the collection, its editor, Michael Lake—former representative of Brussels in Ankara—salutes the ‘noble, even heroic’ role of the Turkish Industrialists’ and Businessmen’s Association in propelling the historic process of reform of Turkey. With its entry into the Union, he points out, Europe will acquire a ‘strategic asset of the first quality’. Closing the volume, Norman Stone deals briskly with the Armenian question. The motives of those who raise it require examination: ‘Is it that hostility to Israel leads them into an effort to devalue Israel’s strongest argument?’ Not to put too fine a point on it, ‘Why do we have to talk about such things nowadays?’87
Respectable opinion in Europe generally avoids such bluntness. Mainstream liberalism puts it more tactfully. In Mark Mazower’s words in the Financial Times—variants can be found galore—‘what happened to the Armenians’ should be moved ‘out of the realm of politics and back into history’.88 Let scholars dispute, and the caravan of state pass on. The difficulty with such disinterested advice, of course, is that the Turkish Republic has always treated the fate of the Armenians as an affair of state, and continues to do so. As Bloxham writes: ‘Turkey has persistently lied about its past, bullied its minorities and other states in furtherance of its falsehoods, written the Armenians out of its history books’89—as well, of course, as spending large sums of public money to ensure that their fate stays ‘out of politics’ in the West, as Mazower and others would wish it.
Inevitably, such well-wishers are liable to be gingerly in their use of terms. Mazower studiously avoids reference to the G-word; Timothy Garton Ash speaks in the Guardian of the ‘suffering of the Armenians’, the circumlocution most acceptable to Ankara.90 It is true that ‘genocide’ is among the most devalued terms in contemporary political language, second only perhaps to ‘fascism’. But if it has been debased beyond any originating imprecision, that is due principally to the very apologists for NATO, claiming genocide in Kosovo—five thousand dead out of a population of a million—who are now most vehement that the term not be allowed to compromise fruitful relations with Turkey. Historically, however, as has often been pointed out, the jurist responsible for defining the notion of genocide for the post-war United Nations, Raphael Lemkin, a student at Lvov at the time of the Istanbul trials of 1919, was first prompted towards it by the killings of the Armenians by the CUP, just across the Black Sea.
Not coincidentally, another who noted their extermination was Hitler, who had a first-hand witness of it among his closest associates in Munich. The former German consul in Erzerum, Max von Scheubner-Richter, reported to his superiors in great detail on the ways they were wiped out. A virulent racist, who became manager of the early Nazi Kampfbund and the party’s key liaison with big business, aristocracy and the church, he fell to a shot while holding hands with Hitler in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. ‘Had the bullet which killed Scheubner-Richter been a foot to the right, history would have taken a different course’, Ian Kershaw remarks.91 Hitler mourned him as ‘irreplaceable’. Invading Poland sixteen years later, he would famously tell his commanders—referring to the Poles, but with obvious implications for the Jews—‘Who now remembers the Armenians?’ The Third Reich did not need the Turkish precedent for its own genocides. But that Hitler was well aware of it, and cited its success to encourage German operations, is beyond question. Whoever has doubted the comparability of the two, it was not the Nazis themselves.
Comparison is not identity. The similarities between the two genocides were striking, far closer than in most historical parallels.92 But they were not complete, and the differences between them are part of the reason for the enormous contrast in contemporary reaction to them. Both campaigns of extermination were launched in secrecy, under cover of war; their perpetrators were aware they were criminal, and had to be hidden. Both required special organizations of killers, controlled by political leaderships operating informally between apparatuses of party and state. Both involved selective participation by military officers. At elite level, both combined ideologies of secular nationalism with doctrines of social Darwinism. At popular level, both drew on ancient religious hatreds, targeting groups already victim of confessional pogroms before the war. Both involved a process of escalation from local killings to systematic extermination. Both draped their actions under the guise of deportations.
The differences between them lay essentially, not in scale or intent, but in the greater instrumental rationality, and civil participation, of the Unionist compared with the Nazi genocide. Jews in Germany numbered less than 1 percent of the population, no threat to any regime. Nor was there any state that attempted to use Jewish communities in Europe for political or military ends. The Nazi destruction of the Jews was ideologically, not strategically or economically, driven. Although there was wholesale seizure of Jewish property, the proceeds were monopolized by those in power, without any large-scale benefit to the mass of the population, and the costs of extermination, when the struggle in the East was already being lost, were a dead weight on the German war effort. The Turkish destruction of the Armenians, although fuelled by ethno-religious hatred, had more traditional economic and geo-political objectives. Over ten times the relative size of the Jewish community in Germany, the Armenian minority in the late Ottoman Empire not only possessed lands and capital on another scale, but compatriots across the border, in a Russian empire that saw Armenians as potential recruits in its own schemes of expansion. When war came, fear and greed in Istanbul combined in more time-worn fashion to detonate annihilation. Both participants and beneficiaries of the cleansing in Anatolia were more numerous, and its structural consequences for society greater. One genocide was the dementia of an order that has disappeared. The other was a founding moment of a state that has endured.
But if these are real distinctions between the two catastrophes, the contrast in the way each figures in the European imaginary is so complete as all but to numb judgement. One has become the object of official and popular remembrance, on a monumental scale. The other is a whisper in the corner, which no diplomat in the Union abides. There are some presentable reasons for the difference. One genocide occurred within living memory in the centre of the continent, the other a century ago in its marchlands. The survivors of one were far more literate than of the other, and left more personal testimonies. But since the Armenian genocide was denounced by the Western powers when it occurred, as the Judeocide was not, and there were more third-party witn
esses—official ones at that—of the killings as they occurred, something else is needed to explain the vastness of the discrepancy. What that is, strains no enquiry. Israel, a pivotal ally in the Middle East, requires recognition of the Judeocide, and has secured massive reparations for it. Turkey, a vital ally in the Near East, denies that genocide of the Armenians ever occurred, and insists no mention ever be made of it. The Union, and its belles âmes, follow suit.
This is not remote history, best left to antiquarians. The implacable refusal of the Turkish state to acknowledge the extermination of the Armenians on its territory is not anachronistic or irrational, but a contemporary defence of its own legitimacy. For the first great ethnic cleansing, which made Anatolia homogeneously Muslim, if not yet Turkish, was followed by lesser purges of the body politic, in the name of the same integral nationalism, that have continued to this day: pogroms of Greeks, 1955/1964; annexation, and expulsion of Cypriots, 1974; killing of Alevis, 1978/1993; repression of Kurds, 1925–2008. A truthful accounting has been made of none of these, and cannot be without painful cost to the inherited identity and continuity of the Turkish Republic. That is why leaders of the AKP relentlessly pursue the same negationism as their predecessors, with the same threats and yet more dollars. For all the tensions between them as traditions, Kemalism and Islamism have never been chemically separate. Erdoğan and Gül, too, are at home in the official synthesis between them, the ‘Turkish nation’ which, in what passes for a reform in Brussels, they have made it a crime to insult.
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