Armenian, Assyrian and Hellenic Genocide News

Athens and Ankara at odds over genocide
by Robert Fisk, The Independent - 13 February 2001
Posted: Thursday, February 15, 2001 01:36 am CST

A holocaust memorial "war" is sweeping the eastern Mediterranean. No sooner has Turkey begun to take its economic revenge upon France for acknowledging the Armenian Holocaust of 1915 in which up to 1.5 million Christian Armenians were massacred by Ottoman Turks than Greece has decreed a "Genocide Day" to commemorate the bloody destruction of the Greek community in eastern Turkey by the forces of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1922.

Not to be outdone, Ankara's city council is itself now taking political action against the French government by announcing plans to erect a "genocide" monument to the one and a half million Algerians killed in the 1954-62 war of independence against France.

What started as a Franco-Turkish dispute over a slaughter during the First World War the Armenian demands partly inspired by Jewish Holocaust memorials commemorating the killing of 6 million Jews during the Second World War thus now embraces long-buried Greek anger over the mass killing of Greek civilians in Smyrna and the brutal anti-colonial conflict that almost tore France apart only four decades ago.

Earlier this month, Turkey announced the cancellation of offers to build a motorway across the bay of Izmit by the French companies Bouygues et Campenon Bernard SGE in retaliation for the promulgation by President Jacques Chirac of the law on the Armenian genocide. Both companies operate with Turkish consortiums and were bidding for a tunnel or bridge over the bay costing $1bn (£700m). Referring to the Armenian genocide as "a fraud", Ankara had already cancelled a $200m contract with the French electronics defence company Thales to modernise the navigation system on 80 F-16 fighter jets a contract that may now go to the one country that has always condemned those who deny the Jewish Holocaust: Israel.

The Armenian president, Robert Kocharyan, who met President Chirac in Paris yesterday, called for the world to recognise the Armenian genocide, in an interview with Le Figaro. Greece's own demand for a Genocide Day is certain further to infuriate the Turks. The Ministry of Culture in Athens has decided that 14 September will be set aside to commemorate the killing of tens of thousands of Greeks on the Turkish mainland; the date marks the day on which Turkish forces under Ataturk, the founder of the modern-day Turkish state, finally captured the Greek city of Smyrna (now Izmir). In 1994, the Greek parliament had named 19 May as its "Pontios Day of Genocide" to mark the flight of Greek citizens >From the shores of the Black Sea between 1916 and 1924.
The eminent Greek historian Angelos Elefantis has expressed his shock at the use of the word "genocide" in relation to the Smyrna massacres, hitherto referred to in Greek history books as "the great catastrophe". In fact, it was Greece that provoked the disaster when its army, encouraged by the British, attacked central Turkey after the 1914-18 war. In a brilliant counter-offensive, Ataturk broke the Greek supply lines and swept the Greeks back to Smyrna.British, French and American ships rescued thousands of Greeks and Armenians as the Turks raped and pillaged Smyrna, although many Allied naval officers refused to help. At least a million Greeks were driven back to their homeland an equal number of Turks were evicted from their homes in Greece and sent back to Turkey in one of the first acts of mass "ethnic cleansing" of the 20th century. Mr Elefantis says the Greek parliament is acting "like an idiot".

No Turkish writer has dared to say the same of his own government. Having never previously expressed its horror at the Algerian death toll and without any apparent demarché to the present-day Algerian government the Islamist mayor of Ankara, Melih Gokcek, has announced a memorial will be put up close to the French embassy recalling "the atrocities committed by France in Algeria". An exhibition of photographs of massacres committed by French troops will be opened in council offices. Mr Gokcek also plans to rename the Avenue Charles de Gaulle in Ankara, as well as roads named after Strasbourg and Paris. The daily newspaper Hurriyet said: "Chirac's signature has destroyed our friendship."

One of the few journalists to urge restraint, writing in the daily Sabah,insisted that Turkey must find "more constructive ways of breaking the circle of hostility which is overwhelming the country". But Turkey still maintains against all the evidence of witnesses and historians thatthe Armenian Holocaust was "a pretence".

A recent statement by the Turkish Community in Britain, acknowledges that Armenians with other Ottoman citizens "endured great suffering",but says only that an uprising by Ottoman Armenians who joined Tsarist forces "led to the relocation [sic] of the Armenians ... to other provinces away from the zone of conflict". During this "relocation", tens of thousands of civilian men were slaughtered and their families sent into the Syrian desert to be raped and starved to death.

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