Ankara threatens Iraq campaign as Congress debates Armenian genocide, says robert fox |
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Few subjects set off explosions of national rage in Turkey like the fate of one and a half million Armenians in the darkest days of the First World War. Armenians say they were victims of the first mass genocide of the 20th century. Driven from their homes in eastern Anatolia, only a few hundred thousand made it to Syria and Mesopotamia, today's Iraq.
Turks, while acknowledging that many Armenians died in 1915-17, have always denied the genocide, despite widely reported evidence of massacres (right).
The issue has just burst into a major international row - and possibly worse - between Turkey and its Nato ally, the United States, because Congress has tabled a bill demanding that Turkey officially recognise the fact of the genocide.
Turkey's newly elected president, Abdullah Gul, is threatening 'serious consequences' - |
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Istanbul had accused the Armenian nationalists of forming guerrilla groups to aid the Russians in WWI |
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including cancelling arms deals and closing the air base at Incirlik, vital to US military manoeuvres in northern Iraq. This comes on top of Turkey's ongoing threat to invade Kurdish Iraq to sort out PKK terrorists.
Ankara has gone some way to admit that Armenians, once one of the two favoured Christian minorities, the milyets, under the Ottoman Empire, died as the Russians advanced. They perished of starvation and thirst. But the government in Istanbul had accused the Armenian nationalists of forming guerrilla groups to aid the Russians.
However, many eyewitnesses - including Gertrude Bell, the English Arabist who helped set up modern Iraq - reported Armenian prisoners and refugees being butchered.
Armenians are one of the most successful exile groups in the world today, with a powerful presence in California, Europe, Lebanon, Jerusalem and now with their own state of Armenia in the Caucasus.
An attempt to vandalise the Wikipedia entry on the Armenian massacres gives clear evidence of the institutionalised Turkish resentment. 
FIRST POSTED OCTOBER 11, 2007
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