Obama avoids the 'g' word on his Turkey tour
Before Barack Obama swept into town, I spent an evening in an Istanbul hospital, visiting the bedside of an old friend.
My friend is a true Levantine, perhaps one of the last; his forebears built railways for the Ottoman Sultans in the 19th Century, coming to what was then Constantinople from what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And as the sun set beyond his hospital window, he remembered the Istanbul of his youth, a paradise lost, and not just to him.
It is this city’s ethnic and cultural confluences and cross-currents which made Istanbul what it once was, a crossroads of the world; and its spires and minarets are what drew me to this once teeming seat of empire, more than 15 years ago.
Back then I lived in a flat in Galata, the city’s old European quarter. Every morning I would look across the Bosphorus, from Europe to Asia, and try to think great thoughts about Islam, Christianity and the collision between the two.
A few years later I found myself next to the smouldering ruins of the Twin Towers in New York, and my time in Turkey felt like an apprenticeship, a dress rehearsal for the world in which we now live.
Two years later, the British Consulate in Istanbul – where my wife and I danced on our wedding night – was attacked by al-Qaida, killing the Consul-General, and my old world had shockingly merged with the new.
Journalists sometimes seek out seismic fault-lines, lines of conflict between nations and peoples and beliefs; from Palestine to Bosnia to pre-apartheid South Africa, we feel the tectonic plates, straining and groaning beneath.
But the conflict I chose early in my career happened long before my time, as the Ottoman Empire crumbled almost a hundred years ago in an orgy of butchery and what we would now call ethnic cleansing.
It was in 1915 that Ottoman Turkey is accused of perpetrating genocide against its Armenian population. A controversial subject, and one I have blogged on before. The Turkish press refers to the alleged genocide as the “g” word, though the taboo on using it is beginning to fade, as historians and intellectuals debate what happened, and what you can call it.
I asked a Turk about the killings on Monday afternoon. We were sitting in a working man’s cafe discussing the issue, after President Barack Obama had urged the Turkish parliament – live on television – to re-examine the past. “Yes, we should look at it” the Turk agreed, “but it should be left to the historians to decide what happened, not the politicians.”
Barack Obama avoided using the “g” word in Turkey this week, thereby avoiding a major falling out, though he made it clear that his views on the killings of over a million Armenians had not changed: “My views are on the record, and I have not changed those views.”
In other words, he thinks it was genocide, but was too polite to say it to his Turkish hosts who entertained him to dinner in an Ottoman palace, the Dolmabahce, on Monday night. And at a guess Obama may well not say the “g” word as the annual Armenian “holocaust” memorial day approaches in America on April 24th, as to do so would surely negate almost 48 hours of diplomacy on this, the President’s first stop in the Muslim world.
That will disappoint many in the Armenian diaspora around the world. The good news is that the Armenian Foreign Minister travelled to Istanbul this week, and it seems we may be on the brink of something historic – diplomatic relations for the first time since 1993 and the opening of the border between Turkey and Armenia.
Much could delay that even further. Azerbaijan is furious at Turkey’s overtures, so much so that its President, Ilham Aliyev, refused to come to Istanbul himself, despite a call from Hillary Clinton. Aliyev sent his daughter instead. More than a million Azeris fled from a war with Armenia in the mid-1990s, a war which was so brutal that I remember an Azeri gravedigger showing me the headless corpses of Azeri soldiers.
But the potential prize is great; a new start between Turks and Armenians. And maybe the cross-currents will begin to flow again here in old Istanbul, a city which was made great by the ebb and flow of peoples, and not by the spilling of blood.
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