Freedom of Speech and European Hypocrisy
Published September 28th, 2006 in Turkey, Politics Tags: armenia, eu, europe, turkey, turkish.
The two largest Dutch political parties have expelled Turkish parliamentary candidates who refuse to acknowledge death of Armenians during World War I amounted to genocide, after strong lobbying by the Armenian diaspora. The candidates include Ayhan Tonca of the governing Christian Democrat Party. Tonca is one of the country’s most prominent Muslim politicians and is chairman of an umbrella organization of Islamic groups known as CMO. The Christian Democrats also retracted the candidacy of Osman Elmaci, and the opposition Labor Party ended the candidacy of Erdinc Sacan.
Recognition of the Armenian genocide is not among the Turkish membership criteria that have officially been set by the EU’s executive body and member governments. Whether the mass killings of a million or more Armenians in the last years of the Ottoman Empire nearly a century ago constituted a genocide has been the subject of academic and political debate. A number of EU nations, including France and the Netherlands, have separately termed the 1915-1918 events a genocide, ignoring strong protests from Turkey. Turkey and many Turkish scholars, and others, vehemently deny the deaths resulted from systematic slaughter, saying the death toll of 1.5 million is wildly inflated and that both Armenians and Turks were killed in fighting during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The U.S. government has shied away from using the word “genocide” to define the killings.
European hypocrisy at its best.
I don’t think there is much hipocricy involved: if a member of a party does not agree with its official guidelines for membership, then the party is entitled to expel them.
On the substantive issue: most scholars and historians are agreed about the extent of the Armenian genocide, and there is much evidence that the genocide was -at the very least- initiated by Turkish officials and officers.
I really do not understand why the Turkish people are so reluctant to recognize this well-established truth. It is not their fault that some of their ancestors caused so many deaths.