A CLEAR STATEMENT REGARDING THE FATE OF THE ARMENIANS IN TURKEY WOULD BRING GERMANY TO FACE ITS OWN HISTORY By Mihran Dabag On the 24th April the Armenians remember the genocide that was committed in the Ottoman Empire under the government of the "Young Turks" in 1915/1916 and which marked the end of the life of the Armenians in their historical native home. This mass murder signified a new type of political violence: the state-organized extermination of a whole section of the population defined as an internal enemy. The Young Turkish politics of violence were part of the radical reorganization of the Ottoman multi-racial state into a homogenous Turkish nation-state. Central to this national "awakening" was the declaration of a strong Turkish identity founded on ancestry and culture and its realization within a newly defined territorial area, which reached from Thracia as far as Central Asia - and, in the centre of which, the settlement areas of the Armenians lay. When, on the 24th April 1915, Armenian public figures were arrested and murdered in Istanbul, the deportations from Anatolia, which were explained as resettlement measures necessary to the war, had already begun. Village by village families were set in motion on foot. The deportation processions were described by Franz Werfel in his novel "The forty days of Musa Dagh" as "wandering concentration camps". For the deportation itself was a method of extermination: approximately 1.5 million Armenians, among them the Aramaic Christians, were murdered by the Gendarmerie, by special units and with the participation of Kurdish and Turkish civilians. TURKISH STRATEGY OF DENIAL The remembrance day of the 24th April is even today overshadowed by the question of acknowledgement of the crime. For Turkey consistently pursues a strategy of denial: through a complex system of negations, in which the recollection of the genocide can even be made a punishable offence, a Turkish society emerged whose conception of history is shaped by models of Turkish "Opfertum" [denoting injury, victimhood and sacrifice] and Turkish honesty, a society in which the denial of the one-time Armenian present is driven forward by political and scientific elites. However, the persistently taught counter-history not only enables the silence regarding the memory of the genocide to be passed down to subsequent generations, it also renders any often necessary dialogue impossible: How can a "rapprochement" between victims and culprits take place without an acceptance of the remembrance of the victims? When the culprit cannot even been named as such? But the concealment also fosters an easing of political conscience on an international level. In contrast to the French National Assembly or the Swiss National Council among others, the German Bundestag has so far refused to contribute to freeing the memory of this genocide from its framework of denial and justification with the help of a symbolic act or a solemn declaration. This refusal is justified with the comment that it is not the task of parliament to sanction an interpretation of history. But is the concern here really with an interpretation? Is the issue not with the position that Germany takes regarding a crime with which it is undoubtedly strongly intertwined? Germany's stance in the First World War is characterised above all by two perspectives. "We should alleviate but not prevent" (Ambassador Hans Frhr. von Wangenheim) was one line, along with: "It is an impossible state of affairs to be allied with the Turks and to stand up for the Armenians. Any consideration shown, Christian, sentimental and political, should be eclipsed by a hard but clear necessity for war" (General Hans von Seeckt). Bernhard Schlink, philosopher of law and constitutional lawyer in North Rhine-Westphalia has recently explained from a philosophy of law perspective that anyone who finds himself in community of solidarity with the culprits and maintains this even after the event is also embroiled in blame. As an ally of Turkey during the First World War, Germany - to put it cautiously - tolerated the extermination of the Armenians. The question that Germany must ask itself today is whether it also wants to tolerate the denial of this crime by successive societies. Perhaps the Bundestag should use the forthcoming 90th anniversary of the 24th April in 2005 as an opportunity to break the continuation of tolerance. A statement from Germany in particular could mean a considerable impetus for Turkey to self-critically reflect upon its historically false depiction. Not least it could open up an opportunity for the Turkish people living in Germany which has been denied them by the official conception of history: to look critically at their own models of history and identity. But above all it would be a sign that the consensus reached after the Holocaust that even the denial of genocide should be condemned was not the result of a political calculation: In his speech this year on the remembrance day for the victims of National Socialism, Wolfgang Thierse pointed out that "the horror about the Holocaust has brought the Europeans back together" and the political future of Europe depends upon achieving an understanding of the "European Union as a peace programme and a community of values". The project of a "European identity", based on a shared memory of war and genocide, is also frequently found in political frameworks. GERMAN INTROSPECTION How can such a declaration of mutuality be viewed if it allows the singularity and truth of the memory of the victims to be negated? If it allows the acknowledgement of the genocide of the Armenians to be self-assuredly evaluated in terms of not "destabilizing" Turkey, as "far-sighted politics" should be favoured over "decisions about the interpretation of history" regarding the "genocide-type crime" (Gernot Erler, Deputy Chairman of the SPD fraction in the Bundestag)? A clear position regarding the genocide of the Armenians requires no diplomatic weighing up of interests - it would examine the position of Germany with regard to its own history.

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