EU-bound
Turkey has to
confront its demons
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
March 22, 2006
LONDON - Say what you like about
the U.S. State Department's mastery of foreign affairs,
its annual report on human rights practice remains a
beacon of precise, honest and clear thinking. Published
two weeks' ago it rightly chided China for going
backwards after years of progress. And here in Turkey its
sharp critique has been well covered in the press, giving
the country a chance to see itself in the round.
Despite phenomenal progress in
improving the parameters of free speech and beginning to
confront the legitimate demands of the Kurds, Alevites
and other minorities in recent years, Turkey still has
not faced up to its two big outstanding historical
questions - what has it done with all its Jews and
Christians? - a very big question since Istanbul was the
seat for centuries of the Byzantine Church and the
Ottoman Empire was the principle place of refuge for the
Jews after they were driven out of Christian Spain in the
fifteenth century. And when will it have an honest
discussion about the disappearance of the Christian
Armenians, which some say was an act of genocide?
If we' re all going to be forced to
make the clash of civilizations the principle item on the
geo-political agenda, as the Bush administration's new
National Security Strategy statement appears to suggest,
then those who oppose such polarisation need to face up
to why this modern, liberal Muslim state par excellence
has not come to terms with its terrible past. Ironically,
this law-abiding state, the creation of the pro-European,
Westernising, Attatürk, has a worse record on these
matters than its predecessor, the Ottoman Empire.
It is rarely acknowledged in the
West that Islam, and in particular the Ottomans, has a
much better historical record than Christianity in its
tolerance of the other religions of "The People of the
Book".
For 700 years Jerusalem was under
Muslim rule. The churches were open. The Jews were given
funds to rebuild their synagogues. Likewise, from the
fifteenth century on, when the majority of Arabs lived
under Ottoman rule, Christians and Jews were recognised
and protected.
Historically, there has never been
a sustained, continuous, clash between these great
civilizations. Undoubtedly there have been particular
clashes and until the fall of the Ottoman Empire the
Muslim world won most of them. Yet in victory the Muslims
invariably showed greater magnanimity and tolerance than
the Christian powers when they triumphed. So why is it
that the dying Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey have such
a poor record?
Some Turks would say in their
defence it is because, since the Great War of 1914-18 and
the break up of the Ottoman Empire by the victorious
British and French, the West has inflicted one grevious
blow after another on the Muslim world. This has pushed
Turkey - and much of the Muslim world in this region -
into an uncharacteristic degree of defensiveness and
intolerance.
Caroline Finkel, the author of the
big new study on the Ottomans much praised by Turkey's
most famous novelist, Orhan Pamuk, who was recently
prosecuted for speaking in favour of honesty about the
Armenians, argues that maybe it can't be legitimately
termed "genocide" when 80,000 Armenians have continued to
live unmolested all these years since in Istanbul.
Nevertheless, as she told me in her home in Istanbul,
"terrible massacres did take place on both sides. That's
not in doubt. But the devil is in the detail. No 'smoking
gun' has been found in the Ottoman archives", although
she adds that some documents could have been lost
"perfectly innocently or removed".
Finkel, whilst unsparing of the
savagery of Ottoman forces in killing off so many
Armenians, reminds her audience that more Muslim Turks
than Armenians were killed in the war and that the fifth
column activities of the Armenians made inevitable their
relocation to Syria and Iraq, well away from the
Ottoman-Russian front line.
An open reckoning of the evidence
by an independent panel of distinguished historians
should now be commissioned by the EU and paid for by the
Turkish government. The longer the Armenian issue is left
to stew, manipulated by the ignorant, the more damage to
the EU digestive tract, as the EU entry negotiatians
proceed, it is going to cause. Likewise, a separate
inquiry into what happened to the Jewish and Christian
minorities needs to be undertaken and why even today the
continued existence of a major Orthodox seminary near
Istanbul remains under threat.
The past weighs too heavily upon
modern Turkey, even though its media and intellectuals
can be very forthright about these issues. The Turkish
government still needs to open up. Denial is no
substitute for the whole truth. And if Turkey truly wants
to enter the EU it must get on with it, sooner rather
than later.
Copyright © 2006 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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