For Turkey, while the importance of the territorial question remained constant, the significance of the moral stigma of 1915 was on the increase, not least because of these comparisons of the Armenian genocide with the Holocaust. The morality factor would increase yet further as the 1960s passed and, on the international scene, the social protest and civil rights movements of the second half of the decade promoted a new culture of awareness of state criminality and accountability. All of this accounts forthe single-minded determination of Turkey’s politicians up to the present to combat the application of the label ‘genocide’ to the Armenian experience, and their preparedness to tolerate even American presidents talking of atrocities and massacres in 1915 as long as the magic word is avoided. ‘Genocide’, after all, implies a level of intent, extent, and direction that ‘massacres’ and ‘atrocities’ do not. A strand of the strategy of rejection has been to focus on differences real and imagined between the Armenian tragedy and the supposedly more ‘authentic’ Jewish genocide. Turkish diplomats have long been at pains to stress their condemnation of the Holocaust, and its ‘unique’ nature, while reiterating the ‘controversial’, ‘civil war’ circumstances of the Armenian deportations. For good measure, if utterly irrelevantly, except in so far as it is calculated to drive a wedge between pro-Israeli and pro-Armenian lobbies, Turkish diplomats and historians have also emphasized Turkey’s relatively good historical relationship with its Jews. One of the more bizarre manoeuvres in this direction was penned in 1993 by Stanford Shaw, who devoted a volume to ‘proving’ Turkey’s role in rescuing Jews during the Holocaust. Not only did Shaw play down uncomfortable evidence undermining his supposed main thesis, but, in the most obvious subtext of the book, he sought to portray Armenians and Greeks as pro-Nazi, in stark contrast to the humanitarianism of the Turkish Republic. The most effective weapon at Turkey’s disposal nevertheless remained its political leverage. This enabled it to quash the Armenian appeals of the late 1960s to the UN and the US government for the recognition of the genocide and the punishment of its perpetrators. In March 1974 the UN Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities agreed, on the objection of the Turkish representative, effectively seconded by his US counterpart, to remove mention of the Armenian case from its report on genocide. The State Department itself helped to scupper a congressional proposal to make 24 April 1975 a ‘National Day of Remembrance of Man’s Inhumanity to Man’ with particular reference to the events of 1915–16.
Donald Bloxham, "The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians"
