Friday, January 14, 2005
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Sticks and StonesVeronica, who seems to have completed a Istanbul-Kiev-St. Petersburg trek in the blink of an eye (and still seems to have managed to get off 400 shots in the Bosphorus), points to Mehmet Ali Birand's stillborn analogy between Armenian genocide claims and the Asian tsunami. Well, he probably thinks he's being very literary. Don't let the, er, daring rhetorics fool you though, Birand on the whole has good intentions (Well, you know what they say about good intentions). His suggestion is merely an echo that has grown from the EU parliamentary report:
...call for the establishment of a U.N. Genocide Allegations Investigation Commission just like Yalım Eralp and others suggest. Turkey is in the right. No one can talk of genocide. However, it has failed miserably to put its view across. The only way out is for the matter to be investigated by internationally acknowledged academics and researchers. This is the only way to find the truth.
Of course, what he means is for them to find the truth. You see, it simply hasn't been investigated internationally. We already know the truth ("Turkey is in the right. No one can talk of genocide. etc etc"). Yet, we are not going to accept it if genocide is confirmed. It would also be rather awkward if the claims were not confirmed for countries whose government already recognized the genocide, an outcome that is immensely unlikely. Hmm, when was the last time an ethnic group hoodwinked the entire world into believing in a genocide that did not exist? The official Turkish view is that the deported Armenians were ordered by the Ottoman Council to be protected, but that didn't happen because the Empire was in shortage of fuel, food, medicine and supplies in general. I suppose one of the questions that will come up is how ignorant one could be about the consequences of deportation under those conditions.
