Mick Hartley

Interesting, from the NYT:

For more than a century, Turkey has denied any role in organizing the killing of Armenians in what historians have long accepted as a genocide that started in 1915, as World War I spread across continents. The Turkish narrative of denial has hinged on the argument that the original documents from postwar military tribunals that convicted the genocide’s planners were nowhere to be found.

Now, Taner Akcam, a Turkish historian at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., who has studied the genocide for decades by piecing together documents from around the world to establish state complicity in the killings, says he has unearthed an original telegram from the trials, in an archive held by the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem.

“Until recently, the smoking gun was missing,” Mr. Akcam said. “This is the smoking gun.” He called his find “an earthquake in our field,” and said he hoped it would remove “the last brick in the denialist wall.”…

Mr. Akcam’s life’s work has been to puncture, fact by fact, document by document, the denials of Turkey.

“My firm belief as a Turk is that democracy and human rights in Turkey can only be established by facing history and acknowledging historic wrongdoings,” he said.

He broadened his point to argue that much of the chaos gripping the Middle East today was a result of mistrust between communities over historical wrongdoings that no one is willing to confront.

“The past is not the past in the Middle East,” he said. “This is the biggest obstacle to peace and stability in the Middle East.”

With Erdogan tightening his grip on power, and Ataturk's secularist legacy swiftly disappearing down the pan in favour of a renewed Islamist-based nationalism, there's little chance of this having any effect in Turkey itself. It's not just the stain on Turkish pride (insulting Turkishness), though. There's also the unpalatable notion that the first genocide of the modern era (excepting the Hereros in Namibia) was perpetrated by Muslims, against Christians – thus shattering the victim fantasy that Muslim lands since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire have seen only persecution at the hands of the Christian West, and of course the Jews.