My recent trip to Turkey was an adventure in public diplomacy; I was in the country at the request of the State Department. US diplomats abroad invite a variety of Americans to appear before foreign audiences for anything from jazz concerts and poetry readings to scientific presentations and talks on current events. Wisely, the embassy had not asked me to give a jazz concert; I was there to talk about American foreign policy. An article in Zaman, an English-language newspaper in Turkey, gives a reasonably accurate picture of what, from a Turkish point of view, were the main points made.
The remarks about Armenia, Israel and the PKK were in response to questions from the audience. Most of my talk was actually about placing President Obama in the context of the history of American foreign policy, using the “four schools” framework in Special Providence as a way of comparing him to other American presidents.
These are non-partisan programs; I’d been to Turkey twice during the Bush administration (at a time when American foreign policy was much less popular in Turkey than it is now), and while I did not visit Turkey during the Clinton years I did speak in a number of other countries at the State Department’s request. After 9/11 I volunteered to do more; since that time I’ve given talks like this in much of the Islamic world as well as in Europe and Asia. Speaking in places like Peshawar, Beirut, Damascus and Baghdad hasn’t always been easy; my approach has been to try to explain American foreign policy rather than to criticize it. When asked, I will explain what I think of particular policies, but in general I think it’s more useful for foreign audiences to hear an analysis than a critique of American foreign policy. They can find plenty of criticisms on their own; I try to leave them with a sense of what the government is trying to do, how its policies fit into the historical sweep of American foreign policy, what kind of political support the policies enjoy at home, and what are the principal issues or events that might lead to a policy change.
I also work to clear up misconceptions. You can’t please everybody and even with the best of intentions we are going to have problems abroad. Especially during the Bush administration I felt that part of my job was to try to make sure that people only hated us for the ‘right’ reasons — that their objections to our policies were based on a clear understanding of what we were doing, not on conspiracy theories and rumors. I also think it’s important for people whose lives have been affected (sometimes catastrophically, sometimes helpfully) by American foreign policy to have the chance to talk directly with an American about what happened, to express their feelings, and to ask some questions about why we did what we did. That’s especially important in places like the Arab world where our footprint has been heavy and the results not always benign. Sometimes my temper gets a bit frayed; speaking on American foreign policy in some parts of the world requires a lot of patient listening, and much of what you hear isn’t pleasant.
Before giving a talk like this in public, I make sure I meet with the appropriate embassy staff to get an update on the situation in the country. I might try to find out, for example, whether the Turkish government is happy with our cooperation over Kurdish terrorists attempting to infiltrate Turkey from northern Iraq. (They are, as both Turkish and American diplomats told me.) I will also brush up on the details of important, complicated issues like the “frozen conflicts” that Americans don’t think about much but that are central issues in Turkish politics and diplomacy — relations between Greek and Turkish Cypriots and between Armenia and Azerbaijan. I also try to brush up on the latest ins and outs of Turkish politics to make sure that I don’t inadvertently and unnecessarily wound the sensibilities of either the supporters or the opponents of the current Turkish government. (When I offend people I like to do it on purpose.)
The most controversial question that came up at my speech in Ankara was the one on Armenia and the question of genocide. Turkey has laws on the books that make it illegal to refer to the World War I era events as genocide. One house of the French parliament has passed a law making it a crime to deny that such a genocide took place. And in the United States, there are perennial efforts to put Congress on record declaring that an Armenian genocide did indeed take place. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid are both supporters of the bill, with Reid announcing that he would support the bill while I was in Turkey. President Obama has played it both ways; as a candidate he strongly supported the idea of calling the massacres a genocide; as president he hasn’t done it.
This was one of those times when I thought it was useful to share my personal opinions. While I respect the concerns of Armenians around the world on this issue, I strongly believe that Congress should reject the temptation to pass any kind of resolution on this subject. I truly do not believe that it is the business of politicians to issue rulings on historical events. The United States Congress does not need to pass laws condemning Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents or the sacking of Byzantium by the Fourth Crusade. The Turks and the French should repeal their laws on the subject, and the United States should refrain from adding to the stupidity by passing one of our own.
Turkey and the West both have some work to do. Turks need to take a long, hard and objective look not only at the slaughter of the Armenians, but at a number of other events in Ottoman and Turkish history. Many Turkish scholars and intellectuals are engaged in this project today; there is a campaign among Turks to acknowledge the past openly and to apologize to Armenians and to try to build a new relationship based on this honesty. But the West must also deal with our selective memory. The breakup of the Ottoman Empire between 1800 and 1922 involved savage wars of religion and nationality. Muslims as well as Christians and Jews were often the victims of barbaric atrocities. Turks are right that the West’s position of demanding a full historical accounting for all crimes of Muslims and Turks against Christians like the Armenians while overlooking the bloodcurdling violence and ethnic cleansing that from time to time was unleashed against Muslims is hypocritical and self-serving.
I agree that the violence perpetrated against the Armenians was unique in its scale and duration even by the standards of those terrible times, but I also think that we need to work with contemporary Turkish historians and intellectuals, not against them, as we try to develop a framework for understanding the tragedies that accompanied the decline of Ottoman power. This is the job of civil society, not of politicians and handling issues like this one carefully, sensitively and fairly is a vital element in any strategy to avoid the kind of clash of civilizations that would unleash new waves of murder and atrocity through much of the world.
What angers many modern Turks about this issue today is not, I think, so much the question of whether the Ottoman government adopted a policy of systematically murdering its Christian Armenian subjects during World War One. It is the West’s smug sense of its own moral superiority — a sense that cannot be justified by the record of history. My own sense is that most Turks (and especially most Turkish intellectuals and scholars) are ready to participate in a common project of re-examining this tortured past to make a just reckoning. But anything that smacks of a western demand for Turkish abasement before a smugly moralistic Christian and post-Christian world will be met with not entirely unjustifiable resistance and rage.
There are other factors at work. Turkey is becoming a more democratic country today. New voices are heard with new ideas. Some I find disturbing — as when the Prime Minister said that there could be no genocide in Darfur because Muslims are incapable of genocide. Others, like columnist Mustafa Akyol, are more encouraging. Led by courageous Turkish writers like the Nobel-prize winning Orhan Pamuk and journalists like Akyol, Turks are going through a major reassessment of their own past. While I visited the country, headlines were made as both politicians and writers began to refer openly to the so-called “Dersim massacre” of more than 10,000 Kurds by Turkish troops in 1938. Akyol has drawn the connection; if Turks can now openly acknowledge the Dersim events as a massacre, what about the murder of many more than 10,000 Armenians?
Nobody knows how it will all shake out, but in my view passing a gratuitously insulting resolution on the tragic and horrible Armenian massacres of 1915 would be one of the stupidest moves our Congress could make. A rapidly changing Turkey is struggling to come to terms with its volcanic past even as it struggles to keep its feet in the turbulence sweeping the modern Middle East. Courageous Turkish intellectuals and politicians are taking unprecedented steps to give the country a democratic culture worthy of its people even as secular and religious Turks attempt to create a genuinely democratic and genuinely Islamic society that can bridge the gap between east and west, north and south.
We need to admire and support Turkey, not patronize and insult it. I was glad to have the chance to share some of my feelings with some Turks last week; I’m grateful to the State Department for giving me the chance to speak.