The German-Turkish Solution to Darfur

Last week week a group of Turkish academics was expected to gather at the Bo gaziçi (Bosphorus) University to hold a conference on "Ottoman Armenians in the Period of the Empire's Collapse."

The day before the conference was scheduled to convene, the Turkish Minister of Justice, Cemil Çiçek, rose in Parliament to denounce it, "This is a stab in the back to the Turkish nation... this is irresponsibility… We must put an end to this cycle of treason and insult, of spreading propaganda against the [Turkish] nation..."

With Turkish academics being accused of treason by the Minister of Justice, the Rector of the Bo gaziçi University felt compelled to cancel the meeting. The contrast with Germany’s encounter with its past could not be greater.

Earlier this month, when Jews around the world commemorated the Holocaust, German Consuls solemnly intoned the now ritual pledge, “never again.” In Berlin, a paltry gathering of angry Germans protested the “cult of guilt” which, they said, was imposed on Germany after the war.

Germans should be proud of themselves for feeling guilty. They have, after all, faced the truth of their great crime. Turks do not feel guilty over the Armenian genocide because, to their shame, they continue to deny that it happened. Almost a century has passed since the Armenian genocide, but it is still not possible for Turkey to deal honestly with its past. Or even to hold a small academic meeting with papers on such topics as “Archives and the Armenian Question,” and “The Armenian Question in the Ottoman Assembly, November-December 1918.”

The question of whether young people born decades after a great crime should feel guilt over the sins of their fathers is a serious one. Germans do feel guilty because they recognize that nations collectively bear the responsibility for the actions they take. And beyond guilt, there is self-doubt. There was something in the culture of the German nation, after all, that enabled the Holocaust to be conceived and carried out. The bearers of German culture therefore feel a kind of self-doubt unknown, for example, to Danish youth. This is because Denmark, unlike Austria - which joined the Reich and enthusiastically participated in the final solution - smuggled most of its Jews out of Nazi-controlled territory.

There is much to be proud of in Germany’s past, but many young Germans quite correctly feel that the sources of pride must be weighed against the magnitude of the Holocaust.

Neither Holocaust memorials nor Holocaust education have the power to wash the blood of millions of murdered Jews, Roma, and others from Germany’s conscience. Heeding the wisdom of Jewish theology just might.

Jews have an unusual set of rules about penitence. Acknowledging guilt is essential but, in Jewish tradition, it is not sufficient. Rabbinical wisdom teaches that apology to the victim is required, which Germany has done. The guilty party is required to make restitution for the harm inflicted, which Germany has attempted to do to the extent that such a thing is possible. But the final step only comes when the penitent faces the same situation a second time, and acts righteously.

Germany and Turkey now have that chance. These two nations can atone for the guilt of genocide by going to Sudan and ending the genocide that the Sudanese government is committing in Darfur.

At the end of the First World War the government of Turkey behaved very much as the government of Sudan is now behaving. The Turkish Army murdered tens of thousands of Greeks, a native population that predated the Turks in Anatolia by more than a millennium. In a calculated policy of ethnic cleansing, 1,400,000 Greeks were driven from their ancestral homes. The fate of the Armenians was far worse.

Two million Armenians lived on land that had once been the Kingdom of Armenia, the region that is now southeastern Turkey. Here, Turkey committed the first genocide of the modern era. Much as the government of Sudan is now doing, Turkey murdered over a million Armenians, ethnically cleansed the Greeks, and stole the homelands of its victims.

As Turkish historian Taner Ak çam has written, “The Turkish Republic was born out of the destruction of the Christian populations in Anatolia and the establishment of a homogenous Muslim state.”

Unlike Germans, Turks have hardly taken the first step towards repentance.

The Turkish government continues to deny that the events of 1915 to 1921 ever took place. Turkey has been trying to convince the EU that it deserves membership. Why not do something that would show the world not Turkish equality, but Turkish moral superiority to the European nations that have sat on their hands as genocide happened in Germany, in Cambodia, in the Balkans, in Rwanda, and now in Sudan?

For Turkey, it would be a first step toward the kind of national maturation that will enable an honest examination of the great crimes committed against the Armenians and the Greeks.

For Germany, going to Sudan would enable young Germans to emerge from the dark shadow of National Socialism by giving themselves and their children a grand historic episode in which they could take unmitigated and redemptive pride.

And for the world, there would finally be some substance given to the now-empty repetitions of “never again.”