Friday, April 24 marks the 100th anniversary of the Ottoman arrest of 250 Armenian community leaders in Istanbul, an event which Armenians and others commemorate as the start of a genocide which killed upwards of one million Armenians.
Controversy surrounding the events—and whether they constitute genocide, ethnic cleansing, mass murder, or simply a tragedy born in the fog of war—continues among historians, although politicians and diplomats appear to be reaching a consensus that the events of a century ago should be recognized as the first genocide of the 20th century. Here, President Barack Obama is an outlier, as he will again in his official statement refuse to label as genocide the deaths of Armenians. He has also omitted Samantha Power, who built her career castigating the US government for moral compromise in the face of genocide, from the official delegation to Armenia to attend commemorations in Yerevan.
I have written before that historians—and not politicians—should be arbiters of history, and that applies not only to the events of Armenia, but also the Holocaust, Saddam’s Anfal campaign against the Kurds, the rape of Nanking, and other atrocities throughout history. How ironic it is that if there is one politician responsible for the groundswell of support in favor of recognizing the Armenian genocide, it is President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s mercurial and bombastic leader. Erdoğan seems unable to conceive that precedent matters. He did not understand that his embrace of Hamas, a group which unabashedly embraces both terrorism as a tactic and a charter endorsing genocide, legitimized an international embrace of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a group which has waged, at times, a violent insurgency if not terrorist campaign inside Turkey in the name of ethnic rights and liberation. Erdoğan’s embrace of Hamas has had other ramifications as well.
As Shalem College President Martin Kramer pointed out, “Erdoğan described Israel as guilty of ‘systematic genocide every day and every month’ against the Palestinians,” that, because Israel responded with extreme precision to indiscriminate Hamas rocket fire at civilian centers. Therefore, by Erdoğan’s standard, there can be no question: the Armenians suffered genocide several orders of magnitude higher than anything that ever occurred in Gaza or Palestine more broadly. And if Israel should compensate the Palestinians in Erdoğan’s fevered mind, then there is no question that the Turk—whose state was built upon the ashes of genocide as Erdoğan understands it—should compensate Armenians and Armenia.
Perhaps if the question of what to call the Armenian genocide dominated the last few decades, then the question for a new century is how to compensate its victims and their descendants. And, when Turkey faces partition in order to right what, according to the precedent set by Erdoğan, are historical wrongs, let us hope that both Turks and Armenians recognize that it could not have happened without one Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
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