Reading Current Events

So now the Turkish ambassador to the US is gone, because a Congressional committee declared the murder of between 1 and 1.5 million Armenians between 1915-1918 in the Ottoman Empire to be a genocide.

Let me see how quickly I can go through this all without boring you, dear readers.

Prior to WWI, a group of intellectual revolutionaries calling themselves the Young Turks (modelling themselves after the Young Ottomans) came to power on a platform of reviving the decaying Ottoman Empire which had, for half a century, suffered losses of territory and population to separatist states. When the Great War broke out, the Ottoman army faced a number of embarassing and brutal defeats early on. In the face of waning support, they blamed their troubles on other "separatist" groups within the Empire, in large part the roughly two million Armenians in the Caucasus. Starting in 1915, the Young Turk government began rounding up Armenians, beginning with soldiers in the Army and then civilians, and eventually undertook a campaign in which thousands were murdered and hundreds of thousands were forced to march through the desert, overseen by the "Cetes," bands of mostly freed criminals used to control their captives so that soldiers could remain on the front lines.

The word genocide was coined by a Polish academic named Raphael Lemkin, a man who was first drawn to the cause of preventing mass murder in the name of identity by, you guessed it, the senseless slaughter of the Armenians (as well as the Armenian retaliation against the "Three Pashas" who led Turkey at the time) during WWI and further pressed after losing a great deal of his own family in the Holocaust. He spent the latter half of his life lobbying first the League of Nations and then the UN to recognize the horrors of this newly-conceived horror of modern society.

As it stands today, there is a specific UN Convention for the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide. Now, admittedly America is not perhaps the most stellar example of supporting this convention and decrying the horrors of genocide (we didn't ratify the treaty until the 1980s, when Reagan made a bit of a mistake in foreign relations by visiting a German cemetary that housed a large number of Waffen-SS soldiers). However, the state of Turkey to this day refuses to recognize this crime as genocide, even though Mehmet Nazim Bey rallied the Turkish parliament to eliminate every Armenian man, woman, and child. Even though Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the father of the modern Turkish state himself recognized that the Young Turks had specifically attempted to eliminate an entire race from their empire. Even though Germany, Turkey's ally in WWI, themselves pleaded with the Young Turks to halt their atrocious behavior because it was ruining the morale on their side of the war.

It just boils my blood to see that it is still illegal in Turkey to "slander Turkishness" by pointing out the wrongs of a previous government, to watch Turkey withdraw their ambassador due to a non-binding act of Congress that has yet to be passed by anything more than a small committee. Is it any suprise that the international community still sits idly by, that nations like Russia and China continue to support states like the Sudan while they carry out new genocides, when only a handful of nations have recognized the Armenian genocide for what it is? It's disgusting to know that good men like Raphael Lemkin have worked themselves to death (in Lemkin's case, rather literally) only for obstreperous nations like Turkey to piss on their life's work.

I'll believe in anything if you'll just believe in anything

I watched a program about the Armenian genocide probably about a year ago. Many Turks, both those in their government and regular citizens, deny that it ever took place. It was appalling. It definitely took place, the evidence is all there. Thanks for bringing this to the attention of some who might not know.