IF TURKEY WANTS TO BE RECOGNISED AS WESTERN COUNTRY...

PanARMENIAN.Net - Everyone (at least in Germany) is arguing about whether Turkey may or should or even must become a member of the exclusive club of European states. Does Turkey belong to Europe culturally? Does not Asia begin just beyond the Bosporus?
What does "cultural" really mean? And what is Europe anyway? I propose replacing the question "Does Turkey belong to Europe?" with a different question, namely: "Does Turkey belong to the West?" The West does not thereby mean a geographic position or a specific culture or constitutional form. Rather the West is characterized by the fact that it continually questions itself fundamentally.

Certainly liberal democracy is based primarily on parliamentary elections, separation of powers and freedom of assembly. But all of these nice things are a mathematical function of the capability of illuminating the dark, horrible, painful and tormenting events in one's own history. That is particularly important for Turkey because it is hiding a mountain of bodies in its historical cellar. In 1915, the Turks committed the first modern genocide, to which 1.5m men, women, and children fell victim.

This genocide is well documented. There are the eyewitness reports from the German writer Armin T. Wegener, from the American ambassador Henry J. Morgenthau Sen., and from the Austrian military envoy Pomiankowski. There are countless telegrams that show the crime from the point of view of the perpetrators. For a time after World War I, Turkey itself sought to punish the members of the regime who coldly planned and executed the murder. It soon resorted to denial, however. Basically this is absurd because legally the Turkish Republic bears no responsibility at all for what its predecessors did.

Nevertheless, to this day the official version in Turkey insists that the genocide against the Armenians did not occur. The government's version is that during World War I the Armenians undertook a rebellion with Russian help and it was quashed. Massacres? Yes, certainly there were massacres - the Armenians massacred the Turks. Thus, the victims are killed again through lies.
Regardless of whether one speaks in an orthodox Freudian way of a compulsion to repeat or in an old-fashioned way of the curse of the evil deed: Turkey will not find inner peace as long as it denies the genocide. Certainly this country has gained an impressive degree of freedom - religion and state are separate and there is an elected parliament and even a halfway free press. But because the genocide against the Armenians remains a taboo, there will always be a temptation to resolve minority problems with the methods of the past. The Kurds can sing a sad song about this. If liberal democracy is a fruit of the effort to look at one's own shame, then it will be a while before it is harvest time in Turkey.

The article is translated from the "Azg" daily.