Erstellt am: 17.04.2006 Autor: Ulf Gartzke Status: Bisher nicht definiert
Turkey's Dark Past and Uncertain Future
“You are Talaat, you are Ataturk, take your flag and come demonstrate.” With this rallying cry, the Talaat Pasha Committee—named after Turkey’s mastermind of the Armenian genocide who was assassinated in Berlin in 1921—planned to kick off a mass demonstration in the German capital several days ago to denounce the “genocide lie” about the murder of up to 1.5 million Armenians between 1915 and 1923. Amid wide-spread public condemnation of the planned negationist gathering, German police sought to ban the demonstration based on Article 189 of Germany’s penal code, which prohibits offensive acts against the deceased. While the Turkish organizers managed to overturn the ban by virtue of their right to freedom of assembly, Berlin’s highest court allowed the demonstration to go ahead only on the strict condition that there would be no written or oral denial of the Armenian genocide.
By then, several Turkish organizations had already withdrawn their public support from the demonstration’s organizers, who had earlier distributed leaflets in Berlin threatening “Europeans to abandon their false, unjustified, and unscrupulous accusations against Turkey to prevent that their capitals are burning like Paris.” In the end, only 1,700 people, a number of them flown in from Turkey, bothered to show up in Berlin. During the demonstration, however, Dogu Perincek, leader of Turkey’s radical left-wing Workers’ Party, denied the Armenian genocide—an act that will most likely lead German authorities to completely ban any such Turkish demonstrations in the future and to bar Perincek from re-entering Germany again.
The Talaat Pasha Committee, headed by Rauf Denktash, former leader of the Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus, is an umbrella organization founded in Turkey in January 2006. It is supported by, among others, Islamist M.P.s from Turkey’s ruling AKP party of Prime Minister Tayip Erdogan, as well as Turkish ultra-nationalist and radical leftist parties. This coalition of rather strange bedfellows has joined forces to counter Germany’s official recognition of the Armenian genocide in July 2005, to protest the teaching of this crime in some German and European schools, and to absolve Talaat Pasha of his historic guilt. In sharp contrast to Germany’s atonement for the Holocaust, Turkey has so far failed to come to terms with this dark chapter of its national history. To this day, Ankara has not recognized that the Armenian genocide ever happened—let alone apologized for it. Commenting on this unholy political alliance, Turkish-born analyst Zeyno Baran observes in the current issue of The National Interest that “the one issue that unites the Islamists and the nationalists is the perceived threat from the [Christian] missionaries.”
This negationist sentiment is not only prevalent among Turkish Islamists and nationalist/ left-wing radicals, but even among the country’s Western-educated intellectuals. When I discussed this issue with a Turkish friend a few days ago, he argued that the jury was still out on whether the killings of Armenians in 1915 really constituted genocide. “We don’t know what really happened. You see lots of different figures, ranging from 100,000 to 1.5 million victims.” Interestingly enough, he lamented the West’s double standards, drawing an immediate parallel between the Danish cartoons scandal and the banned Turkish demonstration in Berlin: “Why is it O.K. to draw cartoons that insult the Islamic faith, while at the same time it is not allowed to hold a protest challenging whether or not something actually occurred in the past?”
Turkey’s growing nationalist backlash—also illustrated by the stunning success of the anti-American, anti-Christian, and anti-Semitic Turkish blockbuster movie “Valley of the Wolves”—casts a long shadow on the country’s aspirations to join the European Union. Both German Chancellor Angela Merkel (who, along with President Bush, ranks among Turkey’s most unpopular foreign leaders) and Nicholas Sarkozy, France’s leading 2007 presidential contender, are opposed to Turkey’s full E.U. membership and are favoring a “privileged partnership” instead. Europeans are also increasingly concerned about the creeping Islamization engineered by Prime Minister Erdogan’s Islamist AKP party, which targets, in particular, the country’s educational system.
Finally, Turkey’s foreign policy has also gone off track recently. The AKP’s invitation to Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal to come to Ankara in February for talks with Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, purportedly only at the “party-to-party level,” has sent political shockwaves throughout Europe and the United States. In sum, Turkey’s entry into the E.U. would be a serious political and economic liability for a Europe that is already reaching the limits of integration. Even relations between Ankara and Washington—so far the chief advocate of Turkish E.U. membership—have hit new all-time lows. Turkey’s key geostrategic location straddling Europe and the troubled Middle East, along with its explosive domestic political mix, make it a pivotal country with an uncertain future.
