The explosion of vitriol towards Germany shows how sensitive this issue remains more than 100 years after the Ottomans began arresting their Armenian citizens, writes Jasper Mortimer.
A day after the German parliament declared the Ottoman Empire’s killing of Armenians to be genocide, a group of right-wing Turks demonstrated outside the German Embassy in Ankara.
“The name of genocide is Germany,” they chanted. Two men held a poster of German Chancellor Angela Merkel while fanatics came up and spat on her face.
Two national newspapers ran front-page photographs of Merkel doctored to make her resemble Hitler.
One paper, Sözcü, ran the banner headline: “Hitler’s grandchildren accuse Turkey of genocide.”
The explosion of vitriol showed how sensitive the genocide issue remains in Turkey more than 100 years after the Ottomans began arresting their Armenian citizens. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had publicly warned Germany that the use of the term “genocide” would “harm our future ties - diplomatic, economic, political, commercial and military ties”.
After the Bundestag voted, Erdogan recalled Turkey’s ambassador to Berlin, accused circles in Germany of “pursuing operations against Turkey”, and said the resolution itself had “no importance”.
Significantly, Erdogan refrained from saying what else Turkey would do. When journalists pressed him on this, the president, who was in Kenya, replied: “First we should make the necessary evaluations. It does not suit us to cut off our nose to spite our face.”
This was unusual language for Erdogan, who is fond of taking swipes at world powers to make himself look strong among his voters.
Turkey’s relations with Germany are “more complicated” than its ties with other countries, Faruk Logoglu, a retired Turkish ambassador, said.
Germany is Turkey’s top market for exports. It bought $13.4 billion (R199bn) worth of Turkish goods last year. Germany is by far the biggest source of tourists in Turkey. More than 5.5 million Germans came to Turkey last year.
A Nato ally, Germany has warplanes at Incirlik base in southern Turkey.
They take part in the US-led coalition airstrikes against the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq.
In addition, more than 3 million people in Germany are of Turkish origin. One of them, Cem Ozdemir, the co-leader of the Greens Party, helped write the Bundestag resolution and was pilloried in the Turkish press for doing so.
“The withdrawal of the ambassador is not important,” said Logoglu. Turkey “routinely” recalled its envoy after parliament passed a pro-genocide resolution.
“What is important is what are the concrete steps - economic, political - that Turkey plans to take vis-a-vis Germany? My hunch is there will not be much.”
Logoglu expects more harsh words, “but scaling down economic relations, reducing military-strategic ties, I don’t think these steps will be taken”.
However, Logoglu does fear for the Turkish community in Germany, which is often targeted by violent racists.
“The accusation of committing genocide will make all Germans look at Turks in the street negatively,” he said.
The point was shared by Chancellor Merkel who told reporters after the vote: “I want to say to people with Turkish roots: you’re not only welcome here but you are part of this country.”
The chancellor’s spokesman said the government was confident the bonds between Germany and Turkey could “weather any differences in opinion”.
“The relationship between Germany and Turkey is very broad and very deep,” Steffen Seibert said. He referred to the EU-Turkey deal on migrants which was largely the work of Merkel and the then-Turkish prime minister.
The current prime minister, Binali Yildirim, has said the Bundestag vote will not endanger the migrant deal, which suggests Turkey is seeking to constrain the fallout.
Armenia, Turkey’s eastern neighbour, welcomed the German resolution.
Armenians hold that as many as 1.5 million perished in the Ottoman crackdown of 1915-18.
Turkey’s official line is that 300 000 to 500 000 Armenians died, and they were killed in “civil unrest” that erupted when some Armenians sided with the invading Russian army.
Turkey has repeatedly called for the creation of a committee of historians to examine the question of whether the Armenians were killed systematically (ie genocide) or not.
“Historians should deal with the matter. Turkey has opened all of its archives,” the leader of Turkey’s opposition, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, told EU ambassadors on the eve of the German vote.
What makes the Bundestag resolution different from the genocide motions passed by 23 other parliaments around the world is that Germany has no need to delve into the Ottoman archives. It has its own archives on what happened to the Armenians.
As Germany and Turkey were allies in World War I, German diplomats and missionaries were free to travel around central and eastern Turkey, where the bulk of the Armenians lived.
These diplomats and missionaries reported what they witnessed to the German Embassy in Constantinople, as Istanbul was then called.
Further, German generals and officers were seconded to the Ottoman army, which oversaw the forced marches of Armenians to the Syrian desert. And Imperial Germany was a principal source of howitzers, rifles and ammunition for the Ottomans.
With impressive candour, the Bundestag resolution contained the line: “The German Empire bears partial responsibility for the events.”
A fact that is under-reported in the genocide debate is that opinion in Turkey is changing.
Of the four parties in Turkey’s parliament, three condemned the German resolution. But a fourth party, the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP), which represents 10 percent of the electorate, welcomed it. “We hope this decision in the German parliament would facilitate a similar debate in Turkey,” the head of the HDP foreign affairs committee, Hishyar Ozsoy, said.
“Turkey needs to find the courage to come to terms with its past,” said Ozsoy, an MP for the eastern province of Bingol.
Many Turkish intellectuals think the same way.
They appear on TV talk shows, hold conferences on the Armenian genocide and write books.
One of the best-known books is A Shameful Act by Taner Akcam. A former student activist who was imprisoned in the 1970s, Akcam left Turkey and became a historian on the genocide.
His book makes the point that the Ottoman archives, in which modern Turkey has so much faith, are woefully incomplete.
Britain and France had warned that the killers of the Armenians would face justice. So, as World War I drew to a close, the chief culprits of the genocide destroyed thousands of documents.
An example of changing opinion was noticed last week by this reporter on a stroll through central Istanbul. The Salt Galata Museum was exhibiting the work of the Armenian Turkish botanist, Johannes Manissadjian.
Manissadjian conducted extensive field work in central Anatolia until he was arrested in June 1915 during the crackdown. His colleagues at the Anatolian College in Merzifon came together and bribed the authorities to release him. A local German citizen got official permission to look after Manissadjian as his mother was German.
The exhibition says: “The remaining Armenian college staff and (their) families were deported on August 10. None survived.”
This makes nonsense of the official line that Armenians were killed in unrest. And the exhibition testifies to how much Turkey has evolved on the Armenian issue in that such documents are now appearing, for all to read, in a museum next to the Central Bank.
Independent Foreign Service