[ALBSA-Info] The Independent, 12.02.2001

[Agron Alibali]

The Independent (London) 

February 13, 2001, Tuesday 

First Edition; FOREIGN NEWS; Pg. 14 

ATHENS AND ANKARA AT ODDS OVER GENOCIDE 

Robert Fisk Middle East Correspondent 


A HOLOCAUST memorial "war" is sweeping the eastern
Mediterranean. No sooner has Turkey begun to take its
economic revenge upon France for acknowledging the
Armenian Holocaust of 1915 - in which up to 1.5
million Christian Armenians were massacred by Ottoman
Turks - than Greece has decreed a "Genocide Day" to
commemorate the bloody destruction of the Greek
community in eastern Turkey by the forces of Mustafa
Kemal Ataturk in 1922. 

Not to be outdone, Ankara's city council is itself now
taking political action against the French government
by announcing plans to erect a "genocide" monument to
the one and a half million Algerians killed in the
1954-62 war of independence against France. 

What started as a Franco-Turkish dispute over a
slaughter during the First World War - the Armenian
demands partly inspired by Jewish Holocaust memorials
commemorating the killing of 6 million Jews during the
Second World War - thus now embraces long-buried Greek
anger over the mass killing of Greek civilians in
Smyrna and the brutal anti-colonial conflict that
almost tore France apart only four decades ago. 

Earlier this month, Turkey announced the cancellation
of offers to build a motorway across the bay of Izmit
by the French companies Bouygues et Campenon Bernard
SGE in retaliation for the promulgation by President
Jacques Chirac of the law on the Armenian genocide.
Both companies operate with Turkish consortiums and
were bidding for a tunnel or bridge over the bay
costing $ 1bn (pounds 700m). Referring to the Armenian
genocide as "a fraud", Ankara had already cancelled a
$ 200m contract with the French electronics defence
company Thales to modernise the navigation system on
80 F-16 fighter jets - a contract that may now go to
the one country that has always condemned those who
deny the Jewish Holocaust: Israel. 

The Armenian president, Robert Kocharyan, who met
President Chirac in Paris yesterday, called for the
world to recognise the Armenian genocide, in an
interview with Le Figaro. Greece's own demand for a
Genocide Day is certain further to infuriate the
Turks. The Ministry of Culture in Athens has decided
that 14 September will be set aside to commemorate the
killing of tens of thousands of Greeks on the Turkish
mainland; the date marks the day on which Turkish
forces under Ataturk, the founder of the modern-day
Turkish state, finally captured the Greek city of
Smyrna (now Izmir). In 1994, the Greek parliament had
named 19 May as its "Pontios Day of Genocide" to mark
the flight of Greek citizens from the shores of the
Black Sea between 1916 and 1924. 

The eminent Greek historian Angelos Elefantis has
expressed his shock at the use of the word "genocide"
in relation to the Smyrna massacres, hitherto referred
to in Greek history books as "the great catastrophe".
In fact, it was Greece that provoked the disaster when
its army, encouraged by the British, attacked central
Turkey after the 1914-18 war. In a brilliant
counter-offensive, Ataturk broke the Greek supply
lines and swept the Greeks back to Smyrna. 

British, French and American ships rescued thousands
of Greeks and Armenians as the Turks raped and
pillaged Smyrna, although many Allied naval officers
refused to help. At least a million Greeks were driven
back to their homeland - an equal number of Turks were
evicted from their homes in Greece and sent back to
Turkey - in one of the first acts of mass "ethnic
cleansing" of the 20th century. Mr Elefantis says the
Greek parliament is acting "like an idiot". 

No Turkish writer has dared to say the same of his own
government. Having never previously expressed its
horror at the Algerian death toll - and without any
apparent demarche to the present-day Algerian
government - the Islamist mayor of Ankara, Melih
Gokcek, has announced a memorial will be put up close
to the French embassy recalling "the atrocities
committed by France in Algeria". An exhibition of
photographs of massacres committed by French troops
will be opened in council offices. Mr Gokcek also
plans to rename the Avenue Charles de Gaulle in
Ankara, as well as roads named after Strasbourg and
Paris. The daily newspaper Hurriyet said: "Chirac's
signature has destroyed our friendship." 

One of the few journalists to urge restraint, writing
in the daily Sabah, insisted that Turkey must find
"more constructive ways of breaking the circle of
hostility which is overwhelming the country". But
Turkey still maintains - against all the evidence of
witnesses and historians - that the Armenian Holocaust
was "a pretence". 

A recent statement by the Turkish Community in
Britain, acknowledges that Armenians - with other
Ottoman citizens - "endured great suffering", but says
only that an uprising by Ottoman Armenians who joined
Tsarist forces "led to the relocation sic of the
Armenians ... to other provinces away from the zone of
conflict". During this "relocation", tens of thousands
of civilian men were slaughtered and their families
sent into the Syrian desert to be raped and starved to
death. 

GRAPHIC: Greek soldiers in Smyna (Izmir) before its
destruction, top right, by Turkish forces in 1922.
Greece is planning a Genocide Day to commemorate the
fall of the city, a move that Turkey is likely to find
as offensive as; French recognition of the Armenian
Holocaust, prompting Ankara to condemn atrocities by
the French in Algeria, right 



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