All political leaders manipulate history, but the decision by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to shift the 100th anniversary commemoration of the allied landings at Gallipoli forward 24 hours to Friday -- the same day as the anniversary of the Armenian genocide -- is unusually crass, Marc Champion writes in an article published on Bloomberg website.
According to him, it is not coincidental that the arrests of 250 ethnic Armenian leaders in Istanbul on April 24 took place just hours before a British-led force arrived in the Dardanelles strait to capture the city. “The three "pashas" who ran the Empire -- Cemal, Enver and Talaat -- in their paranoia saw all Christian Armenians as a potential fifth column. It's that paranoia that needs to be recognized and confined to history. And yet it lives on,” the author writes.
The author doesn’t doubt that religion played a much larger role for the defenders of Istanbul in 1915 than Turkish history books, shaped by the cult of Ataturk, allowed. Istanbul in 1915 was still nominally the seat of the caliphate. Yet by double-booking the commemorations, Erdogan is overlaying political and religious debates onto a systematic civilian slaughter, sending exactly the wrong message.
According to Marc Champion, Erdogan has placed this kind of religious filter on genocide before. In 2009, he said of the mass murder and rape occurring in Sudan's Darfur region, “It’s not possible for a Muslim to commit genocide.” Unfortunately, however, genocide has proved possible for humans of all religions, Champion writes.
These political games devalued the human misery of 1915 -- the mass murders, rapes and orphans left behind. The author refers to the British journalist De Waal, who describes in his book how the thousands of Armenian women and children were taken in by neighbors during the genocide (usually, though not always, for protection). They have lived as Muslim Turks ever since, though now some of these people are coming out as Armenians, and attempting to reconnect with lost family connections abroad. Some are even visiting Armenian churches to feel Armenian. These people need the genocide dispute, and the hostility and paranoia that go with it, to end.
According to Champion, whether a genocide is acknowledged matters, but it’s far more important to reopen the border between Armenia and Turkey.
