Armenian, Assyrian and Hellenic Genocide News

What happens now is what is important
by Mehmet Ali Birand - Turkish Daily News
Posted: Saturday, October 21, 2000 00:50 am CST

The withdrawal of the Armenian resolution does not save Turkey from being branded a nation of genocidal murderers: we should now wake up and spur ourselves into action.

We escaped the Armenian resolution being seen at the U.S. Congress by the skin of our teeth. Had not President Clinton put his foot down, the resolution would have been passed.

Let us not whoop for joy, claim victory and consider ourselves off the hook as regards allegations of genocide. It is not over yet. It will come back to haunt us again. We are going to face the same old situation every election time. And then we might not be so lucky.

We cannot continue our opposition by issuing threats. The resolution was blocked, but the reasons were that Clinton is not taking part in these elections and he views Turkey differently. The other is that international developments have worked in our favor.

The clashes in the Middle East, the Saddam factor that has refused to go away, the wish to see no more tension in the Caucasus. Thanks to all this, the White House applied all its muscle on Congress.

There is a lesson we must learn and digest from all this. There are 26,000 Armenian publications. Should we not be asking ourselves now whether or not we got ourselves into this situation?

Just imagine you have been accused of a genocide you did not commit and, worse, that the entire world comes to believe in it.

How did this all happen, then? How is it that Turkey has been identified as a murderous, genocidal nation?

The Armenians have managed to achieve this, hard though it is. Let us not deceive ourselves. Most of the Western media, politicians, young and old alike believe that the Armenians were the victims of Turkish genocide. The Armenians are simply not going to abandon this campaign they have been pursuing for the past 35 years. They first started taking this issue seriously in 1965. They never got fed up or exhausted. They resorted to everything.

They killed Turkish diplomats to attract the world's attention. There is no book they have not written, no expert they have not commissioned to write them. They have stuffed the world's libraries with 26,000 books, journals and documents. They have managed to put their tales into school text books and history books.

Turkey remained a bystander.

The Armenians managed to turn incidents of tit-for-tat massacres into genocide. So, was all this carried out under cover, without Turkey's knowledge? No, it was carried out in broad daylight and Turkey looked on impassively.

What is worse, Turkey hid the truth from its people, from everyone. It was such an embarrassing situation that Turkish society, our own generations, were only able to understand the depth and breadth of the Armenian incident when they started killing Turkish diplomats in 1975.

At first we asked ourselves: "Why are they killing our diplomats? Whatever have we done to them?" This is because the official ideology of the Turkish Republic had not seen the "need" to let the Turkish public know about the Armenian incidents.

We were given a wake up call.
We looked and realized we just might have done some nasty things back then. Not genocide, but we had done things to our Armenian compatriots that do not make one proud.

But they carved us up and we bled too. It was not one-sided. A small war was fought in a corner of Anatolia.

The Armenians have kept alive the pain of what happened to them. We, on the other hand, preferred to forget.

Look at where we are now.
Let us not get up and start accusing the Armenians and the Americans. Let us not blame everything on the distortions of Turkey's enemies. We have to accept that our refusal to get involved is partly to blame for all this. We should act now and dispel these allegations of genocide. Not with threats, but by convincing people.

Mehmet Ali Birand's article is translated by TDN staff

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