A reign of terror which history has chosen to neglect

[rodeodance]

http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article3052373.ece

14 October 2007 18:09
Robert Fisk: A reign of terror which history has chosen to neglect
Published: 12 October 2007

The story of the last century's first Holocaust – Winston Churchill used this very word about the Armenian genocide years before the Nazi murder of six million Jews – is well known, despite the refusal of modern-day Turkey to acknowledge the facts. Nor are the parallels with Nazi Germany's persecution of the Jews idle ones.

Turkey's reign of terror against the Armenian people was an attempt to destroy the Armenian race. While the Turks spoke publicly of the need to "resettle" their Armenian population – as the Germans were to speak later of the Jews of Europe – the true intentions of Enver Pasha's Committee of Union and Progress in Constantinople were quite clear.

On 15 September 1915, for example (and a carbon of this document exists), Talaat Pasha, the Turkish Interior minister, cabled an instruction to his prefect in Aleppo about what he should do with the tens of thousands of Armenians in his city. "You have already been informed that the government... has decided to destroy completely all the indicated persons living in Turkey... Their existence must be terminated, however tragic the measures taken may be, and no regard must be paid to either age or sex, or to any scruples of conscience."

These words are almost identical to those used by Himmler to his SS killers in 1941.

[Pab Sungenis]

1. The killers were OTTOMANS, not modern Turks.

Turkey should be willing to own up to what a totalitarian regime that used to rule their area of the world did a century ago. It is not an attack against modern Turks to acknowledge the genocide than it's an attack on modern Germans to speak of the Holocaust or the modern U.S. government to talk about the smallpox-infected blankets.

It's acknowledging dark pages in our pasts, to prevent similar things from happening again.

[happyslug]

2. The switch between the Ottomans and modern Turkey is a gradual evolution.

And most of the evolution was pre-1914 as the Ottoman Empire switched from being a multi-ethic Greek/Turkish Moslem/Orthodox Christian Constantinople/Baghdad Empire to a Turkish state. The switch started in the 1700s (Through may predate the 1700s) as the ruling bureaucrats stopped being Christian Slaves who had been force to convert to being Moslem when they were purchased as soldiers for the Sultan, to being from Moslem families. This broke the connections the Christan's (Armenians, Greeks, Serbs, Romanians etc) with the moslem rulers. The slow decline in the empire seems to reflect this change. Finally in the 1830s th Sultan killed off these Bureaucrats and started to form a more modern nation. The problem was Turkey had become to Moslem for its Christian Subjects to stay, thus the Greeks fought a bloody Revolution it the 1830s for their Independence. The rest of the Balkans still controlled by the Turks did the same over the next 70 years.

While European part of the Empire was rejecting the increase Moslem/Turkish emphasis of the Empire, the Arab part was rejecting the Turkish part (Which would lead to the Arab Revolt during WWI). As you near 1900 it became more and more clear that the radical group inside Turkey wanted to emphasis TURKEY over any other aspect of the Empire. Even the Sultan had problem with this given the vast numbers of non-turks living under the Empire AND the problem that many non-turks lived between Turkey and Turkestan (The Armenians being the largest non-moslem group). The German high Command during WWI seems to have supported this movement i.e. uniting all the Turks under one country from Turkestan to Turkey, ignoring the Arabs, Iranians and other non-turks in between. This movement did NOT die in 1914 as Turkey backed Germany During WWI, in fact it expanded during the war. The Turks increased discrimination against non-turks, trying to get them to leave the country. The post WWI Turkish-Greek War seems to have come out of this same plan (With Greek desire to have what is now Western Turkey as part of Greece also a factor). It is only with the end of the Greek-Turkish war (do more to the fact Britain and France abandoned the Greeks for voting to reinstate their pro-German King) That modern Turkey came out of, but the people who lead Turkey into WWI, lead Turkey during WWI also help put the Modern Turkish state together when the Turkish Republic was declared in 1923. This anti-turk attitude about any non-turk living in Turkey continued throughout the 20th century, forcing most of the Greeks still living in Istanbul to leave by the 1950s (Huge anti-Greek riots during the 1950s), the discrimination against the Kurds, Armenians and other non-Turks.

My point is that while a 90 years is a long time to hold a crude, subsequent acts of the Turks to the Greeks living in Turkey and to the Kurds living in Turkey shows that this Turkish attitude still address. It can NOT be traced back to the Sultan, but to the Bureaucrats who rule under him and helped form the Republic in 1923.