Turkey is a country in denial about its genocide of the Armenians

March 9, 6:08 PMForeign Policy ExaminerAimee Kligman

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U. S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, left, and Turkish President Abdullah Gul look toward cameras during a meeting in Ankara, Turkey, Saturday, March 7, 2009. President Barack Obama will visit Turkey within the next month, Clinton said Saturday, in a sign of improving ties between two NATO allies. (AP Photo/Kerim Okten, Pool)

By all accounts, one would say that Hillary Clinton's visit to Turkey was successful in that it ended with a check mark in Obama's calendar to be there some time in April. Things continue to move at warp speed in the foreign policy rehaul of the disastrous previous administration.

In a stunning report in today's IHT, it indicated that on Sunday, the Turkish foreign minister, Ali Babacan, warned that President Barack Obama might set back relations if he recognized the massacre of Armenians as genocide ahead of his visit to Turkey next month.

First, it would be foolish and inappropriate for President Obama to talk about genocide on his first official trip to Ankara. It would be tantamount to having the President visit Berlin and grill Angela Merkel about the Nazi genocide. This is not the best diplomatic course, regardless of the circumstances. Turkey was always considered an ally of the US by virtue of their mutual membership to NATO, and it was the recipient of 'special military and economic' aid from the US in a move to prevent the former USSR from expanding its reach to the area.

Lately, Turkey had been was fully engaged in talks with Syria in trying to broker a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. This endeavor came to an abrupt halt after the 2009 Davos meeting in Geneva, where President Shimon Peres and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an had a vocal disagreement on the war in Gaza, during which Erdo?an stormed off the stage. In the interim, both the Israeli and Turkish foreign ministers met secretly last week during the NATO conference in order to revive the peacemaking discussion.

Relations with Turkey and the U.S. soured greatly as a result of the Iraq invasion. As a country with a common border with Iraq, Turkey has half the population of Kurds in the world (circa 15 million) , and a group of them also inhabit the northern part of Iraq. The Kurds have wanted autonomy and formed a military separatist group called the PKK which Turkey considers to be a terrorists. They have been trying to gain independence from Turkey, and the country feared that destabiizing Iraq would encourage the Kurds to move forward with their agenda.

Back to the Armenian question and the disappearance of one million Armenians. How do you explain such a steep reduction in the Armenian population of Turkey without referring to the genocide that no Turk wants to remember or even talk about?  Well someone has finally found the courage to talk about the Armenian question, but without attributing a 'just cause' for their diminishing numbers.

Turkish author, Murat Bardakci, published a book in January 2009 titled 'The Remaining Documents of Talat Pasha,' which is essentially a collection of documents and records which were the property of Mehmed Talat, known as Talat Pasha, the primary architect of the Armenian deportations.  According to the documentation, nearly one million Ottoman Armenians disappeared from the population records between 1915 and 1916. 

The book has received no attention whatsoever in Turkish media, and the author has rationalized that Turkey is not ready to talk about this yet. It's as if the book had never been written. Like so many other states which are seen as revisionists of their own history, there is no mention of the Armenian genocide in any Turkish historical records or books.  Bardakci obtained the documents from Talat's widow in 1983 before she died.

for more information:

The Armenian Genocide