Towards the 90th anniversary

Levent Yilmaz, in his article, assumes that Sabiha Gokcen (Ataturk’s adopted daughter) was an Armenian and employs a provision in the second article of the Genocide Convention that identifies the transfer of children from one group to another as genocide to imply that Ataturk participated in genocide.

If the European Union gives us a date to start membership negotiations in December 2004, the European Parliament needs to approve this decision before the start of negotiations. Commentators estimate that the portion of euro-skeptics in the European Parliament will increase after the elections. These could use the 1987 decision that calls us to recognize the "genocide" in order to prevent our membership. European Parliament cannot impose the acceptance of this political decision to Turkey in order to start the negotiations. However, it is not obligated to cite a reason for its objection anyway.

Recently, during a debate on French TV5 channel, those who were against our membership argued that we had yet to reach the maturity to recognize the "Armenian Genocide."

It appears that we will face an intense psychological operation, just like we did on the issue of Cyprus. Lately, many books supporting the genocide thesis have been published. It seems many more will be in the future. As usual, there is no doubt that those who call themselves liberal intellectuals and accept every defamation directed at Turkey in the name of "intellectual honesty," who are actually a nihilist group, will support this thesis.

Halil Berktay has already started to use the term "proto-genocide" for the Armenian incidents. According to him genocide is a legal term and would become an analytic tool for historians if you attach the term "proto" in front of it. However, there is no deviation from law on the issue of genocide. Genocide is used as a legal category to describe the worst crime against humanity. Turks are one of the communities that faced the most number of genocides in the recent past. According to the 1948 Genocide Convention and that International criminal Court Statute of Rome, the authority to define which crimes can be considered genocide belongs solely to authorized legal bodies. In the preambular section of the convention it is noted that the crime of genocide was perpetrated in the past. There is no such thing as a "proto-genocide." Such a term cannot be used to describe the Armenian incidents.

Historians need not know the legal aspect of genocide. As noted in Armenians: Relocation and Emigration, written by Professor Yusuf Halacoglu and his team, published by the Turkish Institute of History, they can conduct demographic studies. Figures don’t provide an ultimate verdict on whether an acceptance of a rejection of genocide. However, if the number of Armenians who faced relocation were around 500,000 and the much less than 1.5 million Armenians that died during the relocation, contrary to Armenian allegations, their claims become much weaker. This book deals a death blow to Armenian allegations.

We see that those authors who try to classify the Holocaust as an ordinary event are using the statements made in the media and in the courts after the end of World War I in occupied Istanbul with the support of the anti-Union and Progress Party government as evidence. They seem to ignore the fact that this "evidence" was not enough to file charges in British courts.

Another thesis is that the genocide cannot be proved, because of the cleansing of the state archives and the lack of freedom of expression in Turkey. In the past, they used to argue that they were not able to examine the documents, because the archives were closed. Their real problem lies in the fact that none of their allegations are supported by figures, statistics of documents. Actually, there is a way out. They can call for both countries to go to the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague, just like I do. Then the truth will come out.