Ermeni meselesi hakkında 2005 yılında Avrupa Parlamentosunda yaptığım konuşma

15 Haziran 2005’te ARI Hareketi Avrupa Parlamentosu’nda Ermeni meselesi üzerine bir panel organize etmişti. Prof. Justin McCarthy, Etyen Mahçupyan ve ben konuşmacı olarak yer almıştık. Aradan geçen 10 yılda değişen fazla bir şey yok – konuşmam hala güncelliğini koruyor.

Önce İngilizce’sini paylaşıyorum. İlk fırsatta Türkçe tercümesini de yayınlayacağım.

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I am honored to be here in the European Parliament to share a different perspective on the Ottoman / Armenian question.

To start with, I would like to say a few words on ARI. We are an NGO, focused on improving political process and discourse according to our values of rationality, rule of law, transparency, accountability, participation, ethics and human rights. We have taken an interest on the Ottoman / Armenian question in recent years, as we believe it is important for several reasons:

-        Peace and stability in Eurasia

-        Long term peace and understanding between Christian and Muslim peoples

-        Political maturity and democratisation in Turkey

-        The EU project

ARI has been among the first institutions in Turkey which took part in the open discussions on the 1915 events. We believe in friendship and solidarity among all human beings. We are against discrimination and strive to ease ethnic and religious tensions. We believe in long term peace and harmony between Christian and Muslim cultures in Europe and in the rest of the world. This is the philosophical reason why we have an interest in the Ottoman / Armenian question.

Many of us at ARI including myself also have a personal stake in this matter. Four of my eight great-grandparents have been subject to some form of ethnic cleansing or mass deportation. Interestingly, the family line of one of them has been subject to mass deportation twice in two generations: once from the Caucasus into Ottoman lands by Russians, and a second time from Rumelia (part of present day Bulgaria) where they were settled by the Ottomans into Istanbul by invading Bulgarian armies in 1913.

Today I stand before you as an individual from a secular Muslim European country, an NGO member, a part-time politican and a descendant of ethnic cleansing survivors. My goal is to present a different perspective on the Ottoman / Armenian question. 

-        I will not express a view whether or not what happened in 1915 can be classified as genocide

-        I will not make any legal statements

-        I will not talk about the history of Turks and Armenians

-        I will not talk about current Turkish-Armenian relations

Instead, I will address the issue from a human perspective and a political perspective, attempting to put it in the context of Christian / Muslim relations in Europe.

I shall start from the human perspective. What happened in 1915 was a tragedy for the Armenian nation and the whole region. It is a dark page in Turkish history. Yet, it is a dark page in a dark book. This book is the 150 year long history of Christian and Muslim mutual ethnic cleansing in Europe – spanning the Balkans, Caucasus and Anatolia. 

Starting from the late 1700s, gaining speed in the late 1800s and reaching its peak in the 1908-1922 period, the former Ottoman lands in Balkans and Caucasus were cleared of almost all Muslims and Anatolia was cleared of almost all Christians. This is a simple and undisputable fact. This large scale ethnic cleansing was accomplished in several different ways. Least bad on either side was official transfer or population exchange: in the 1920s between Greece and Turkey and in the 1930s between Bulgaria and Turkey. Worse was intimidation during peacetime: Crimea in the late 1700s, Balkans in the 1830s and 1880s. Worse was mass deportation during war:  Balkan Turks in 1912, Armenians in 1915, Crimean Tatars in 1945. Worst of all was mass murder: small scale continuously, large scale during the wartime mass deportations. As a result, between two and three million Muslims and between two and three million Christians were “ethnically cleansed”.  It is estimated that one to one and a half million on each side were killed. 

The issue was put to rest because of its immense pain on both sides. Turks and their neighbours chose to look forward, not backward in the late 1920s. Turkish-Greek relations flourished until the emergence of the Cyprus problem in the late 1950s. The Armenian diaspora did not share this view, as they were not living in the region and they did not have anything to lose by continuing hatred. The Ottoman / Armenian question was rekindled with the 1970s murders of Turkish diplomats. This was followed by political action in Western parliaments to pass genocide recognition acts.

It is impossible not to be moved by the great Armenian suffering in 1915. I share their pain and I do respect wholeheartedly their demand for the recognition of this suffering. But an honest intellectual needs to ask another question: roughly the same number of Turks had been ethnically cleansed out of the Balkans just 4 years earlier. The Balkan population statistics are quite good and the demographic changes during and immediately after the Balkan Wars are well documented – at the peak of the forced migration, several hundred thousand people were moved over few months under wartime conditions in winter. So where are the pictures of the Turkish and other Muslim suffering? Unfortunately, there were no Christian missionaries, diplomats or journalists who were interested to tell their tale. Americans and Europeans whose hearts were bleeding for Armenians in 1915 did not offer the same humanity to Turks in 1912.

The Western powers of the time were not outside observers of the events that unfolded in our region. They were active players, and they took a position to support the ethnic cleansing of all Turks and Muslims from Europe.  One needs to look no further than the speeches of Wlliam Gladstone in the UK House of Commons. In summary, what happened in the Ottoman lands in the second decade of this century is a dark page in American and European history as much as a dark page in Turkish history, because Christians of Europe and America chose not to see it as a humanitarian issue but an issue of solidarity with their Christian brethren.

Let us now move on to the political perspective. As you all know, Turks are very sensitive on this issue. Some claim that Turks are uninformed by facts and sensitive simply because their government is not allowing them to see the facts. This is quite wrong. The events of 1915 have been quite openly debated in Turkey in recent years. Turks are sensitive because they are unaware of facts. Are Turks “overly nationalistic” or “less sensitive to human tragedies than Europeans”?  Not at all. There are several good reasons for our sensitivity:

1. We believe that it is racist and discriminatory to evaluate the events of 1915 without referring to the context of 200 years of ethnic cleansing directed against Muslims, especially Turks, first by European powers (including Russia) and then by Christian European nations who split from the Ottoman Empire
2. We assert that the Ottoman / Armenian question has not been analysed and debated openly and widely in the world
3. We think that the West has not taken an objective position on the matter. Specifically, we observe that different standards are being applied to the human rights violations committed by Western Imperial powers and Eastern Imperial powers
4. We feel that the classification of the Armenian tragedy as equal to and even inspiration of the Holocaust is not a fair representation of facts and a blatant display of racism

I have already discussed the wider context of the 150 years of mutual ethnic cleansing earlier in my speech, so I will elaborate on the other points. 

Has the Ottoman / Armenian issue has been debated properly? As we all know, the case was originally closed in Lausanne in 1923. Why was it closed? Not because Turks were the only side to be embarrassed about discussing the issue. It was because Turks and neighbours chose to look forward, not backward in the late 1920s. I speculate that had there been an independent Armenia in the 1920s, Turkish / Armenian relations would have evolved very similarly to Turkish / Greek relations. Instead, the issue has been kept alive by the Armenian diaspora who continuously used it to cement its cultural identity abroad. 

In the last fifty years, there was never an invitation for debate that was turned down by the Turkish side. The issue was never debated on equal tems. There has been only one sided propaganda by the Armenian diaspora directed at the public opinion in the major Western countries, which happen to be the Allies of WWI. Now Turks are asked to sign on to a story written without taking into account even a minimal part of the Turkish perspective. It is not realistic to expect this to happen. It is not scientific, fair nor logical. Turks have gone through several similar tragedies over a 150 year span, so we cannot accept that our ancestors’ stories not be told.

Unfortunately, the West not taken an objective position on the matter. We take issue with the way evidence is presented and analysed. What you often hear in Western Europe and the United States, based on the view presented by the Armenian diaspora is that Ottoman archives are biased, but allied papers are objective. There is no justification whatsoever to this approach. The events of 1915 took place during a war. An analysis of recruiting documents in those times, shows how the warring parties were presenting each other. In a context where Germans were called Huns trying to overrun Western civilisation, the place given to Muslim Turks was obviously much worse. Therefore, we cannot review allied documents, especially press reports independently of the wartime propaganda angle. To base arguments on Allied documents while discarding Turkish ones as biased cannot be characterised as scientific or fair

We should also briefly touch upon the matter of missionaries. Missionaries came to the region in the late 1800s, some of them with the explicit aim of creating a Christian state in the region. They perpetuated an us vs. them view of the world in the region and helped deepen ethnic divisions. So in any analysis of Christian and Muslim ethnic cleansing in the region, missionaries should be treated not as disinterested outsiders but active participants of the struggle. 

I would also like to point your attention to the treatment accorded to acts of Western Imperial powers vs. Eastern Imperial powers. The 19th century was a time when European empires dominanted the world. Weak and declining as it was, the Ottomans were a European empire. Like Czarist Russia, the Ottoman empire was a pre-modern autocracy. This brings us to an important issue on the 1915 debate – why are no comparions made between Ottoman actions in Eastern Anatolia and actions of Russia and Western powers in their lands?

I will use IAGS (the International Association of Genocide Scholars) as an example – its web site, conferences, papers focus on the Holocaust, Ottoman / Armenian debate and African genocides. There seems to be no debate on England and Ireland. No focus on colonialism. No focus on slavery. Not even a single word on the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No mention of Belgian colonial administration in Congo, or the French administration in Algeria. No mention of American and Australian natives. There seems to be an unwritten convention that acts committed by the United States, Great Britain, France and Russia (the victorious powers of WWI and WWII) cannot be judged under the genocide label under any circumstances. It is impossible to accept this as fair or scientific.

But the most insulting and unfair claim of all are the attempts to classify the Armenian tragedy in the same category of the Holocaust. Some even go so far as to point to the Armenian tragedy as the inspiration for the Holocaust. This is the best example on which to illustrate the racist and discriminatory nature of the Armenian genocide claims.

The Armenian tragedy in 1915 is on of the last pages in a 150 year long story of mutual Christian and Muslim ethnic cleansing. It may be a key page, but it is a page in this European book nonetheless. This is a clear and fundamental difference from the Holocaust. To attempt to classify the Armenian tragedy with the Holocaust is revisionist history at its worst, as there was no wider background of mutual ethnic cleansing for the Holocaust.

On the inspitation point, if Nazis in Germany needed inspiration for the cleansing of Europe from Jews, they would have looked back to Spain 1492. In modern times, they would need to look no further than England 300km away, not Eastern Anatolia 3000km away. Gladstone’s speeches at the UK House of Commons are well documented and open for all to see. He suggested removing Turks from Europe, “one and all, bag and baggage”, a wish that was implemented by Balkan nations 30 years later. 

Where do we go from here? We have two choices:

1. To look forward and not to dwell too much on the past. This was the post-1919 strategy for the states in the region. Unfortunately, Pandora’s box is open – it is very doubtful this choice is available any longer.
2. To analyse and debate the issue objectively and fairly. The Ottoman / Armenian debate should not turn into a defamation of the Turkish nation. All European countries have to jointly come to terms with their shared history, specifically the destructive Christian / Muslim mutual ethnic cleansing in Europe in the 19th century. Turkey has come a long way towards openly debating 1915, but will bring the wider ethnic cleansing context to the table.

It is best to bring things out in the open. Healthy debate may create an opportunity for reconciliation. 

I believe the European Parliament is the best place to start. This is why I am here today. We can get inspiration from the European ideal of the late 1940s. German / French antagonism in the earlier part of the century was as intense as the current Armenian / Turkish antagonism. The European project changed this. We already see positive developments in Turkish / Greek relations, so I sincerely hope that a wider Turkish / Armenian reconciliation will follow shortly therafter.