April 24 of this year marks a tragic milestone in world history. It is the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, which claimed 1.5 million lives in a vortex of industrial-scale organised killing and ethnic cleansing.
Solemn commemoration ceremonies of this unforgettable catastrophe are being held across the world. But the century-old pain and agony of the Armenians has not subsided with any meaningful closure because the perpetrator, the state of Turkey, still denies that the genocide occurred at all.
In the lead-up to the centenary remembrances, Pope Francis has been denounced by the Turkish government for using the term “genocide” to describe what Ankara claims were a series of clashes amidst a “civil war” in which both Christian Armenians and Muslim Turks perished. Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned the Pope “not to repeat this mistake” and reissued Ankara’s sophistic call for a “joint commission of historians” to arrive at the truth.
But barring nationalistic, state-sponsored Turkish historians, every impartial academic study confirms that the wholesale slaughter of the Armenian minorities in Turkey’s eastern Anatolia region was premeditated by the Turkish military in the twilight of the Ottoman Empire.
In the words of Ronald Grigor Suny of the University of Michigan, “The Armenian genocide was the result of long-term, deep-seated (Turkish) elite and popular hatreds, resentments and fears (about disloyalty of Armenian minorities) intensified by war and defeat” of the Ottoman Empire before and during World War I. Genocide was the preferred option of the Young Turk rulers of that time who feared their “rule was in peril and that the Armenians were particularly dangerous as the wedge that the Russians and other powers could use to pry apart their empire.”
The mass annihilation and deportation of Armenians was carried out as a matter of state policy to save the declining Ottoman Empire and ethnically purge it of non-Turks deemed as “traitors”. It was a shameful endgame for the Ottomans who, in earlier centuries, had boasted of a highly tolerant, pluralistic and multi-ethnic empire in which minorities, including Christians and Jews, were believed to enjoy safety and security.
But when the chips were down by 1915, and the Ottoman Empire sensed its own mortality, it vented savage fury on the hapless Armenians. The logic of national security triumphed over human decency and the rest is history. For Ottoman apologists, whatever military action the Young Turk regime took against the Armenians was necessitated by the doctrine of strategic necessity and not caused by any intention to eliminate them as an ethnic group.
Even after the abolishment of the Ottoman Empire and its Islamic Caliphate, and its replacement by a secular Turkish republic under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1924, the myth-making and cover-up of the Armenian genocide went on in the name of Turkish nationalism and pride.
Ataturk painted Armenians as “murderous” minorities and defended the Turks as an “oppressed nation” that had been at the mercy of foreigners. The word “genocide” was erased from Turkish educational curricula and dissenting opinions which dared to open the Pandora’s box about 1915 were persecuted.
Military despots in Turkey who succeeded Ataturk, hewed to the same hardline approach of refusing to admit that their predecessors had undertaken what is unquestionably the first genocide of the 20th century. Today although President Erdogan has effectively ended the era of military domination of Turkish politics, he has not moved beyond the default hawkish position that Turkey never committed genocide.
Mr Erdogan’s Islamist government leaves no stone unturned to publicise Israel’s “genocide” of Muslim Palestinians, but it bristles and fumes about alleged “racism” against Turks when the European Parliament passes resolutions demanding that Turkey acknowledge the Armenian genocide. The present resentment which Turks feel towards European governments and the Catholic Church for delaying and denying their admission into the European Union, is being channeled to reject the historical truth of the Turkish genocide against Armenians.
Genocide denial and spin-doctoring of one’s terrible past misdeeds is not limited to Turkey. The government of Pakistan, whose military butchered one million of its own citizens during the 1971 war of liberation, does not accept that it ordered genocide against Bengali-speaking people. Like the Ottomans, who became sadistic while losing their empire, the panicky Pakistani state used the pretext of crushing a rebellion in its eastern wing to unleash unspeakable crimes against humanity in the hope of preventing the formation of independent Bangladesh.
Today Pakistani history textbooks have been designed to brainwash younger generations to believe that the war of 1971 was an act of Indian aggression and “international conspiracy” led by Hindus to break up their country. No reckoning is thus possible with the ugly reality that the Pakistani Army got away with genocide and is still unaccountable for its ghastly deeds.
Likewise, ultra-nationalistic elites in Serbia have been whitewashing the role of the Serbian Army and paramilitaries in the genocide against Bosnian Muslims and Croat Christians in the mid-1990s. Government policy, legal provisions, educational curricula and media discourse have all been twisted to keep Serbian people in a state of darkness about the grave crimes in erstwhile Yugoslavian territories executed by Serbian ethnic entrepreneurs like Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic.
Denial of genocide is not only harrowing for descendants of the victims of minority groups like Armenians, but also a supreme disservice to the future of countries that were originally responsible for it. Turkey, Pakistan and Serbia have suffered immeasurably from dictatorships and relentless violence on minorities in recent decades owing to their official failure to square with the ghosts of their past. Western societies, which denied the first genocide in history by their settler forefathers on aboriginal people in North America, Australia and New Zealand, later embarked on brutal colonialisation of Asia and Africa in the guise of a “civilising mission”.
Post-genocidal states which are unrepentant and unwilling to face up to their historical baggage cannot move ahead humanely. The weight of the accumulated falsification of truth is a heavy burden that drags them down and leaves oppressive value systems in place. Turkey, Pakistan and Serbia can at least belatedly heal themselves by focusing the mirror on themselves.
The writer is a professor and dean of the Jindal School of International Affairs
