thoughts on turkey

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide

Following up on the Armenian-Turkey problem posed now by probable passage of a resolution declaring this as what it is. The brutal and stark facts speak of themselves, although I submit Wiki is not always the end point of serious deliberation. In this case, it effectively summarizes the situation. The sticking point is not whether Armenians were massacred, but whether this was done in a systematic manner authorized or even controlled by the government of the Ottoman Empire at the time. All the evidence seems to suggest that it does, and that even an argument of military necessity carries no moral weight. Deportation perhaps was an arguable military circumstance. But the manner of this deportation was guaranteed death sentences, exacerbated by the detailing of particularly cruel guards for these tragic convoys.

To examine this idea more fully, I decided to look up the definition of genocide, which seems to be the sticky point at which opposition rises.
Under the UN adoption of a convention to ban genocide and establish it as an international crime, here's the definition.
Following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, any ethnic, national, or religious group (it actually says racial in there, but to me that's ethnicity, note also the absence of socio-political or socio-economic status) such as
1) Killing members of a group. Check
2) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of a group. (although I'm not sure what mental harm is defined as here). Check
3) Deliberately inflicting on a group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. Check
4) Imposing measures designed to prevent births. Sort of. Births are prevented in theory by indiscriminate slaughter of civilians.
5) Transfer of children of a group to another group. Not necessary if children are killed too.
Additionally. Genocide is a crime whether committed in time of war or peace. So the military necessity cop-out doesn't provide an escape clause. In any case, it only has to meet one of the above 5 conditions and it meets 3.
Curiously the US did not ratify this convention until 1988.
The next evasion is designed to state that the Armenians represented a political entity, owing to their resistance to Ottoman policies and directives. That is in fact a true claim, but it is substantively clear that no other political minority was brutally suppressed and murdered during the periods surrounding WWI (unlike the Stalinist purges where just about anybody got it. Why the Ukrainian famines in the early 30s haven't been likewise declared is a mystery.). And this does not escape the fact that the Armenian population represented an ethnic or national group as defined by the convention. Irrespective of their political and even (limited) military resistance, they were in fact an ethnic minority in Eastern Turkey at the time and were persecuted for this reason. Substantial propaganda was used to stir up public support for a campaign of violence and abuse of the Armenians within Turkish borders (this is similar to Hitler's opening salvos against Jews within German borders, though he took this to another level).
The last line of defense is the claim that these activities were never sanctioned by the Ottoman authorities at the time. While this is a dubious claim owing to substantial German and American observations made at the time, it also fails to offer up a proper defense. In point of fact, doing nothing to stop or prevent the slaughters or to ease the transitional period of relocation offers up the idea of condonation. While this is not the same as government sanctioned and authorized killing, condonation over a prolonged period, say the period between 1896 and 1916, it becomes a much more slippery slope to provide distinction with any difference. During the German Third Reich, there were any number of killings or other abuses against Poles, Russian POWs, and Jews which were never authorized by the Nazi high command, but were nonetheless accepted and encouraged. Ottoman propaganda against Armenians during WWI and even prior to the war was authorized by the government and created conditions for massive acts of carnage and death even without government intervention to accelerate the process.

As far as why we haven't declared this before? There was no law, internationally or otherwise, which depicted what had happened during the 1920s. The law didn't even exist formally in the United States until 1988. By that time, Turkey was an allied partner in NATO, and a 'model' of democracy in an otherwise harshly dictatorial region of the world. It did no good to declare that we were allied with a former murderer while we acknowledged the brutal methods employed in Afghanistan by Soviets. This conception of history is lacking in it's understanding of human events over time. It is not necessary to brandish upon each current country the crimes of it's forefathers and heritage. What is instead paramount in the study of history is the acknowledgment of those shortcomings, embarrassments, and otherwise deviations into madness, right along side the precocious nature of the expansions of human rights and other innovations of culture and so forth. These flaws, while often criminally potent, offer the idea that human beings can learn from them, and intend not to repeat them. While Turkey can be enraged at yet another country declaring that it has a dark and unworthy blotch on it's past, it cannot argue with the facts of what that past is. Calling it as such condemns no living Turk that I'm aware of with crimes against humanity. In as far as the administration offers the idea that Turkish anger will extend to no further support of military transit, supply and other elements of foreign policy essential to the current war, I say two things. One, their anger will pass. Turkey needs the US as a bastion of support for elements such as their eventual inclusion in the EU, especially in light of Turkey continuing to assail Kurds in the SE portion of the country (yet another reason to let Iraq split up). And two, too bad. Americans will find ways to get our supplies to Iraq and continue to prosecute the war there. If we could supply a city with food and energy supplies from the air for months at a time, I'm sure we can supply a few hundred thousand troops and civilians in the same manner if we were forced to.