Page 1 of 2 Turkey fears Kurds, not Armenians
By Spengler
Turkey’s integration into the global economy was sealed last week by a
billion-dollar offer by the American private-equity firm KKR for a local
shipping company. Days later, Turkish troops shelled Kurdish villages in
northern Iraq and prepared an incursion against Kurdish rebels, a measure that
would undermine Turkey’s economic standing. Whether Turkey will fling away its
new-found prosperity in a fit of national pique is hard to forecast, but that
has been the way of all flesh. Europe plunged into World War I in 1914
at the peak of its prosperity for similar reasons.
News accounts link Turkey’s threat to invade northern Iraq with outrage over a
resolution before the US Congress recognizing that Turkey committed genocide
against its Armenian population in 1915. American diplomats are in Ankara
seeking to persuade the Turks to stay on their side of the border. Why the
Turks should take out their rancour at the US on the Kurds might seem anomalous
until we consider that the issue of Armenian genocide has become a proxy for
Turkey’s future disposition towards the Kurds. “We did not exterminate the
Armenians,” Ankara says in effect, “and, by the way, we’re going to not
exterminate the Kurds, too.”
Nations have tragic flaws, just as do individuals. The task of the tragedian is
to show how catastrophic occurrences arise from hidden faults rather than from
random error. Turkish history is tragic: a fatal flaw in the national character
set loose the 1915 genocide against the Armenians, as much as Macbeth’s
ambition forced him to murder Banquo. Because the same flaw still torments the
Turkish nation, and the tragedy has a sequel in the person of the Kurds, Turkey
cannot face up to its century-old crime against the Armenians.
Shakespeare included the drunken Porter in Macbeth for comic relief; in
the present version, the cognate role is played by US President George W Bush,
who has begged Congress not to offend an important ally by stating the truth
about what happened 100 years ago. The sorry spectacle of an American president
begging Congress not to affirm what the whole civilized world knows to be true
underlines the overall stupidity of US policy towards the Middle East. It is
particularly despicable for a Western nation to avert its eyes from a Muslim
genocide against a Christian population.
It offends reason to claim that the Turkish government’s 1915 campaign to
exterminate the Armenians was not a genocide. Documentary evidence of a central
plan is exhaustive, and available to anyone with access to Wikipedia. It was
not quite the same as Hitler’s genocide against the Jews, that is, the Turks
did not propose to kill every ethnic Armenian everywhere in the world, but only
those in Anatolia. But it was genocide, or the word has no meaning. To teach
Turkish schoolchildren that more Turks than Armenians died in a “conflict” is a
symptom of national hysteria. Hysteria, however, does not occur spontaneously
in countries with Turkey’s record of national success. One must dig for the
root cause.
Turkey’s tragedy is that the 11th Seljuk conquerors of the Anatolian peninsula
became masters of a majority Christian population, a cradle of Greek culture
for two millennia, in which the oldest and hardiest ethnicity, the Armenians,
held fast to the Christian religion they adopted in 301 AD. Even after the
forced conversion of Anatolia to Islam, the Ottoman Turks comprised a minority.
Turkey, so to speak, was ill-born to begin with, and the Armenian genocide
touches upon a profound and well-justified insecurity in the Turkish national
character.
After the loss of the European part of its empire in the Balkans, in the midst
of World War I, the Ottoman Empire feared for its hold upon Anatolia itself,
and decided to settle the long-unfinished business of conquest with a conscious
act of genocide. But the Turks lacked the resources to do so in the midst of
war, and Turkey’s military leaders enlisted Kurdish tribes to do most of the
actual killing in return for Armenian land. That is why Kurds dominate eastern
Turkey, which used to be called, “Western Armenia”. The Armenian genocide, in
short, gave rise to what today is Turkey’s Kurdish problem.
Commentators close to the Bush administration allege that Democrats in Congress
are exploiting the Armenian issue in order to sabotage America’s war effort in
Iraq. Ralph Peters writes in the October 14 New York Post, for example, “The
Dems calculate that, without those [US] flights and convoys [through Turkey],
we won't be able to keep our troops adequately supplied. Key intelligence and
strike missions would disappear. It's a brilliant ploy - the Dems get to stab
our troops in the back, but lay the blame off on the Turks.”
I am shocked, shocked to learn that the Democratic Party is engaged in
politics. Col Peters, though, misses the big picture. With or without the
Armenian resolution, conflict had to erupt with Turkey. Far more threatening to
Turkey than the resolution on Armenian genocide was the 75-23 vote in the US
Senate last month in favor of dividing Iraq into Sunni, Shi’ite, and Kurdish
zones. Republicans as well as Democrats supported this resolution, and with
good reason. I have advocated the breakup of the Mesopotamian monster named
“Iraq” for years, and do not think this step can long be withheld.
Kurdish nationhood will be the likely outcome of Iraq’s breakup. Ethnic Kurds
comprise a full fifth of Turkey’s population, and the existence of a Kurdish
nation will exercise a gravitational pull upon Kurds in Turkey. Turkey fears
with good reason for its
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