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10/14/2007 9:32:46 PM

Quote :

"That's why Turkey joining the EU is something you should support."

It's just two sides of the same coin. I will adamantly oppose the current Turkey getting in. A reformed Turkey's entrance I will applaud. Remember, someone has to be demanding all these changes as a condition of entry in order for them to work.

I want the country ostracized for its policies, not simply for being Turkey.

10/15/2007 12:34:10 AM

And that's all any of us can hope for. A nation who won't repeat its mistakes and will learn from its past. Turkey didn't for a very long time, but the last 10 years have shown an immense amount of maturity and development, and that is what gives me a sense of hope.

The problem is that 10 years worth of work could be spoiled by this bill. When the time comes, the Turks will re-open this issue and give answers. But that time isn't now, and it shouldn't be like this. I know that there are many Armenians and others who say that that has been our excuse for 90 years, but the reality is that Turkey wasn't ready for this issue for most of its history as a nation. The fact that Kurdish can be taught in schools now is a great sign that Turkey is beginning to understand where it sits as a nation and as a people. All of that will be undone by a single vote in the HoR.

If you really want what you claim you want, then tell the HoR to vote against this resolution, and in our lifetimes, you'll see the positive results. I know my grandparents never thought that would be true, and I know my parents probably doubt that statement, but we won't have to.

10/15/2007 1:47:53 AM

This is the best feature/commentary I have read on this issue. I was going to bold some good sentences, but I thought everybody should form their own opinion of it:

Quote :

"US Domestic Politics Behind Solicitude for Armenians Gwynne Dyer, Arab News Nothing much will happen right away. The Turkish ambassador to Washington has gone home for “consultations” after the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives approved a bill declaring that the mass killing of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I was a genocide. But he will come back to Washington, and it will be weeks before the full House passes the bill. This will be a slow-motion disaster. The White House tried hard to stop this bill. President George W. Bush declared that “This resolution is not the right response to these historic mass killings,” and all eight living former US secretaries of state, both Democratic and Republican, signed a joint letter to the Foreign Affairs Committee urging it not to approve the bill. But it did, by a 27-21 vote, and next month the full House will do the same: More than half the members have signed up as co-sponsors of the bill. Bush promises that it will die in the Senate, but by then the damage will be done. The US-Turkish alliance will be gravely damaged, and American use of Turkey as a major supply line for its troops in Iraq — 70 percent of US air cargo for Iraq goes through Turkey — will be at an end. Turkey may also send its troops into northern (Kurdish) Iraq, thus destabilizing the one stable and moderately prosperous part of that country. The United States will be the 23rd country to fall to the Armenian campaign to link the Ottoman Turkey of 90 years ago with the Nazi Germany of 60 years ago — and, by extension, to implicate the current Republic of Turkey in the crime of premeditated genocide. Once such a law is passed, to question the Armenian take on what happened is to become the equivalent of a denier of the (Jewish) Holocaust. The Armenian desire to have their national tragedy given the same status as the Jewish Holocaust is understandable, but it is mistaken. The facts of the case are horrifying, and certainly justify calling the events in eastern Turkey in 1915-16 a genocide, but the key elements of prior intent and systematic planning that distinguish the Nazi Holocaust are absent. When I was a young graduate student in Middle Eastern history, as a translation exercise I was given the hand-written diary of a Turkish soldier who was killed during the retreat from Baghdad in 1917. “Mehmet Cavus” (Sergeant Mehmet) was a youthful village school teacher who had been called up in 1914. At first he had a safe billet guarding the Black Sea entrance to the Bosphorus, but in 1915 his unit was suddenly ordered to march east to deal with a Russian invasion and an Armenian rebellion. And then, in the diary of this pleasant, rather naive young man, I read the phrase “iyi katliam etmistik.” Loosely translated, that means: “We really massacred them” — and he wasn’t making a sporting analogy. The diary was written in the old Ottoman rika, a version of handwritten Arabic script that never really served Turkish well, so I asked my teacher if it really said what I thought it did. “Oh yes,” he said. “Those were different times.” That excuses nothing, but it explains much. The foolish young officers who led the Ottoman Empire into the war panicked when they realized that the Russians were invading from the east and the British were about to land somewhere on the Mediterranean coast. And just at that point, Armenian revolutionaries (Dashnaks and Hnchaks) who had been plotting with the Russians and the British to carve out an Armenian state from the wreckage of the empire launched feeble, futile revolts to assist the invaders. The Turks responded by slaughtering many Armenians in what is now eastern Turkey and deporting the rest to Syria in long marching columns. Huge numbers were murdered along the way: At least 600,000 died, and perhaps as many as 1.5 million. It was certainly genocide, but it was not premeditated, nor was it systematic. Armenians living in other parts of the empire were largely left alone, and even in the war zone those with money to travel by rail mostly reached Syria safely. So why is the US Congress “recognizing” the Armenian genocide, but not the rather more recent genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda? Because there are not many voters of Tutsi descent in key Congressional districts. This is all about domestic politics: Alienating the Turks doesn’t cost much politically. Today’s Armenian activists aren’t looking for “justice”. They want to drive the Turks into extreme reactions that will isolate them and derail the domestic changes (including a gradual public acceptance of Turkey’s responsibility for the atrocities) that are turning that country into a modern, tolerant democracy. They do not want Turkey to succeed. And Western countries are falling for it."

10/16/2007 3:32:08 AM

I don't completely fall for the 'they don't want Turkey to become a good country' argument, it's not logically sound.

The armenians I've known ALWAYS bring the genocide up though, almost annoyingly so. If it were America I'd say they were harping for reparations, but I somehow doubt they'd get those in Turkey.

10/16/2007 7:30:15 AM