Jim:
> If the Young Turks were already in power (or almost there),
> then my scheme doesn't work at all.
Why? Young Turks did not overthrow the Ottomans. Young Turks were Ottomans
themselves. It was the Kemalists, who also happened to be Ottomans too, who
overthrew the Sultanate. All the citizens of the Ottoman Empire were Ottomans
but for some reason when we talk about Ottomans we always think about the
palace.
This problem is easy to solve:
It was a section of the Young Turks, that is, a section of the Committee of
Union and Progress, under the leadership of Talat Pasha, who played the central
role in the massacres among Muslim-Ottomans and Armenian-Ottomans. It was an
assymmetric warfare, of course, where the Muslim-Ottomans took part in this
were much stronger than the Armenian-Ottomans involved in the warfare, and had
the backing of the above said section of the Committee of Union and Progress,
which was the governing party at the time. The majority of Armenian-Ottomans
did not do anything, just as the majority of Muslim-Ottomans did not do
anything. Except that it was those passsive Armenian-Ottomans who got killed,
not the passive Muslim-Ottomans.
The situation was quite similar to the situation in Iraq now: if a warfare
breaks out between Shiites and Sunnies, Sunnies do not stand a chance against
Shiites. Replace Shiites with Muslim-Ottomans and Sunnies with
Armenian-Ottomans. Further, the atrocities were not just beween
Armenian-Ottomans and Muslim-Ottomans. They were between Christian-Ottomans and
Muslim-Ottomans, so Sunnies versus Shiites analogy better fits to Christrians
versus Muslims.
The current government can easily get away with blaiming this on Talat Pasha
and his section of the Committee of Union and Progress without admitting any
guilt neither for the Ottoman Empire, nor for the Republic of Turkey. How can
an Empire or a Republic be responsible for such things? There is always an
agency who does such things and it is never a amorphous object such as an
empire or a republic.
By the way, whether what happened was a genocide or not is not even something I
am arguing for or against. Whatever it was, if there are any financial
liabilities, they belong to Talat Pasha and his section of the Committee of
Union and Progress: whatever they owe should be colected from them, who happen
to be in a grave somewhere. Why should I pay a dime for someone else's mistakes
that happened half a century before I was born? Do I go and ask for
compensation from the UK and other European countries for all the killing they
did in my country and the neigbourhood?
Of course, if my Armenian sisters and brothers are interested in returning to
their homeland, I welcome them with open arms. The thing is, the current
government or any other potential government will not do anything like what I
suggested above.
As I always say as a mathematician, the solution of a problem depends on how
the problem is defined. The governments of the Republic of Turkey, from the
first to the last, screwed up by accepting the problem defined by the Western
Imperialism, failing to see that the problem they had to solve was the question
of how to change the definition of the problem, rather than trying to solve the
problem, defined by the Western Imperialism.
Best,
Sabri
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