Innocence Fled; Turks, Armenians, Killing and Lies; Americans, Ugly Again
Taki | [Scott McConnell](#mcconnell) | [Charles ](#glass)[Glass](#glass) | [Melik ](#kaylan) [Kaylan](#kaylan)
In his best Clintonian manner, lower lip protruding, hound dog eyes showing the pain, Jesse talked about being himself born out of wedlock, in a Camelot moment worthy of John Kennedy Jr. saluting his father's riderless horse... Or so he should have done. What he did was have John Scanlon flack for him, issuing a statement about blah, blah, blah.
Jesse is slipping. How much better if he had gone on national television, embraced his wife and children, blamed the KKK and had Barbra Streisand sing "Why Can't They Behave?" while he exited stage left. Oh well, at least now we know why Clinton awarded Jesse Jackson the Medal of Freedom last August, the country's highest civilian honor. It was for setting an example by fathering only one child out of wedlock.
And I do not believe there is a person of my or any generation who will not remember where they first were when Sean (Puffy) Combs was brought to trial on...gun possession and bribery charges.
In many ways, the trial of Puff Daddy means the age of innocence is over. Who among us would have imagined 10 years or so ago, when Tupac Shakur and other worthies were enriching our lives with their incomparable lyrics and melodies, that one day a rap impresario like Puffy would (allegedly) bring a gun into a nightclub and his bodyguards would shoot three people? Cole Porter is turning over in his grave; Louis Armstrong ditto.
Last but not least, Broadway shut down last week as a sign of respect, strong men stood tall and unashamedly cried, while women ululated nonstop in grief and desperation. Ex-President Clinton went into seclusion and refused interviews. The New York Times ran a black line across its logo ("All the humbug that's fit to print"), announcing the untimely death of President Kabila of Congo.
What a disaster! Congo has always been a peaceful place. Most of its leaders have died in bed, the prayers and singing of their faithful subjects ringing in their ears as they expired. Mind you, there have been accidents. Patrice Lumumba was accidentally murdered, as was Moise Tshombe, who was accidentally highjacked, kidnapped and killed. President for life Mobutu Sese Seko died in Morocco, but in a rare gesture where African politics is concerned, he managed to take billions with him.
Laurent Kabila was a hell of a man. First and foremost he was self-made. He ran a profitable business as a successful brothel-keeper in Tanzania, a rare qualification among statesmen. For any of you who may have flunked geography in school, Congo, or Zaire, as Mobutu renamed it, is among the areas richest in minerals in the world. Despite his capitalist credentials as a brothel-keeper, Kabila claimed to have been the leader of a Marxist-inspired rebel army against Mobutu for close to 30 years. Kabila was said to have also been a close friend and colleague of Che Guevara when the latter tried, unsuccessfully, to foment communist revolution in central Africa. A few "mauvaise langues" spread rumors that the Argentine revolutionary didn't think much of Kabila's skirt-chasing and hard drinking. But all great men have their detractors, and Kabila, the gold, ivory and coffee trafficker, was no exception.
After 30 years in the bush, Kabila emerged dressed in designer clothes, covered in gold watches and about 200 pounds overweight. He was nevertheless hailed as a savior of what he renamed the "Democratic Republic of Congo." Such were Kabila's talents that the Rwandans chose him to replace Mobutu, once the latter allowed Zairean territory to be used as a base for Hutu raids on Rwanda. That is when Laurent Kabila showed his real genius for statesmanship. He banned political parties, jailed his political opponents and refused to hold elections, the three sine qua nons for successful African leadership. In fact, he did more than any previous president, including Mobutu. He was responsible for more deaths in a few months than was his predecessor in 30 years. As a sign of respect and brotherly solidarity, Robert Mugabe, the Zimbabwe fuhrer, sent over 12,000 of his elite troops so his officers could get their hands on Congo's diamonds and gold. Unfortunately, the Rwandans fell out with Kabila once he declared he wanted to be an independent tyrant.
As I write, the future of Congo looks brighter than ever. Kabila's murder does not mean the end. Others of his ilk are eagerly waiting in the wings for the call of the wild. But the age of innocence is truly over.
In a few days, my eldest daughter will board a plane at Kennedy and fly off to a spring semester's study in Europe. Besides the normal parental fears, I have other worries as well.
Americans of each generation travel abroad in different contexts, the way they are viewed colored by their country's place and standing in the world. Despite America's dominant global role in popular culture, technology and business, the reception of them today may be the coldest ever.
When I spent months in France in my 20s, the Cold War was the backdrop to nearly everything. I read the French political press, liked to talk politics. But even had I not, the French would have taken me, for better or worse, as a representative of a country perceived as big and rich, simpleminded in its culture, unsophisticated in its diplomacy. But also as stalwart in the great political battle of the time?over whether the future would belong to capitalist democracy, or some form, more likely than not dictatorial, of Marxism. The outcome then seemed much in doubt, and most Frenchmen, beneath layers of reservation, were on the same side.
Well, the West, the capitalist West, has won. America has won. The Soviet Union, home base to the Marxist coalition, sworn enemy of freedom, collapsed and left the field. In Europe, the Communist parties have shrunk, changed their names and often outlooks. American military and financial power?guarantor of the international system the Beltway pundits hail as "benevolent global hegemony"?for the moment has no real match.
But that power now represents something ugly and threatening, at least so it seems to a growing number of the world's peoples.
Europe's press buzzes with stories about depleted uranium weapons, used heavily in Washington's air war against the Serbs. The projectiles, effective because uranium is heavy and able to penetrate tank armor, are officially deemed not radioactive?no more dangerous than the background radon often found in American homes, according to one apologist quoted in The Wall Street Journal. Such assurances are belied by the internal NATO "hazard awareness" document issued after the bombing, advising that soldiers patrolling where DU weapons have landed be given warnings; that those entering vehicles hit by DU shells should wear masks, cover exposed skin and receive follow-up monitoring for radiation exposure. Clusters of leukemia and lymphoma have sprung up among NATO troops stationed in areas of intense DU bombardment.
This sudden uproar over America's use of these semi-nonconventional weapons in the Balkans represents an awakening of Europe's guilty conscience?as if to say to Washington, "When you bombed Serbia, we kept silent, even went along as you smashed churches, destroyed bridges, bombed hospitals, poisoned the Danube, all the while reluctant to put at risk a single one of your own soldiers in the battlefield. You have left behind a toxic wasteland. It won't happen again."
Ten years ago, Iraq received an American DU bombardment far more intense than Yugoslavia. In Europe at least, recognition of the long-term cost of that bombardment is beginning to emerge. In London's The Independent, Robert Fisk describes the horrible toll of cancers and birth defects around Basra, subject to heavy U.S. shelling in the last days of the war. A decade of sanctions has created more misery. Four years ago, Madeleine Albright was asked on 60 Minutes whether she was troubled by the estimate that half a million Iraqi children had perished as a result of the sanctions. "We think the price is worth it," she cheerfully replied. That toll is growing still.
Against the backdrop of America as a superpower whose bomb-bay doors are always open, lesser questions fester. Trade disagreements turn into rancorous accusations of protectionism. Few in Europe admire the campaign of Sen. D'Amato and others to demonize and harass Switzerland for its wartime neutrality. The indictment against the Swiss (over policies the Allies much appreciated during the war itself) is masterfully dissected by Angelo Codevilla in his eye-opening Between the Alps and a Hard Place, an important work that portrays the levers of American diplomacy rented out to campaign contributors and groups pursuing private agendas. Polls in Europe now show 60 to 70 percent of the populace feels that America is unfriendly to their interests. What a turnabout since the Cold War. What a change since V-E Day!
Of course it's not just Europe. Harvard Prof. Samuel Huntington reports in Foreign Affairs that surveys of elite opinion in two thirds of the world's societies, including Chinese, Russians, Indians, Arabs, Muslims and Africans, show that the United States is now regarded as the greatest single external threat.
Bombardment with depleted uranium weapons; murderous economic sanctions; moralistic preachments about democracy and the historical failings of other countries; a military whose technological dominance is so complete it has no need for the soldier's valor: these now are constituent elements of a portrait of today's American. It is a portrait of an Ugly American, and it breaks my heart to imagine it hung around the neck of my beautiful daughter.
Who denies genocide? As a rule, the perpetrators and their apologists. The apologists do two things: first, deny the genocide took place; and, then, excuse it. Their strategy imitates that of defense lawyers, who assure the jury that while their client did not commit murder, he had a good excuse. In the Dec. 13 issue I wrote on this page that the British government was appeasing modern Turkey by refusing to acknowledge Ottoman Turkey's last great crime, the annihilation of half the empire's Armenian population. The Labor regime joins the ranks of Armenian-holocaust deniers this coming Jan. 27, when it honors all the other victims of the 20th century's genocides.
Representatives of Britain's tiny Armenian community, a mere 25,000 souls, complained that the BBC was following the government's lead by excluding their forebears from all television coverage of Holocaust Memorial Day. The BBC's response was, in its way, more shocking than the government's position that the only genocides worth commemorating were the Nazis' of Jews and Roma (Gypsies), the Hutus' of Tutsis in Rwanda and the Serbs' of Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The BBC admitted in a letter to General-Secretary Misak Ohanian of the Center for Armenian Information and Advice that it had surrendered editorial control to the Home Office. "The BBC," wrote producer Gaby Koppel, "have been invited to produce the official event on behalf of the Home Office, who have retained overall editorial control."
Overall editorial control? The BBC is a state-owned corporation in which, according to its charter, the government is not allowed to interfere. The government puts its placemen in charge: Margaret Thatcher installed as deputy director-general (thus ensuring he would succeed to the top job) the egregious John Birt to sell off many of the BBC's best assets and corporatize the place; and Tony Blair replaced him with Labor Party donor Greg Dyke to make Auntie, as the BBC is known here, more amenable to the New Labor's vision of whatever the party has a vision of (like winning the next election). After putting their favorites in charge, governments are not expected to take direct control of anything, especially news. Granting the Home Office editorial control over Holocaust remembrance is a bit like CNN turning over its coverage of the Gulf War and Kosovo to the Pentagon. (In a way, CNN did just that. Unlike the British government and BBC, however, it never admitted the fact.)
This is the first time Britain has sponsored a Holocaust Memorial Day, and it has chosen the odd date of Jan. 27, anniversary of the Red Army's conquest of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp, rather than the day in April 1945 when Britain's own army liberated Belsen. That the whole enterprise was confused is reflected in Tony Blair's explanation that it is intended to "celebrate our diversity and build a new patriotism that is open to all." What Nazi Germany's crimes against humanity?specifically against Jews, Roma, Poles, homosexuals and communists?have to do with British diversity is a question best left to New Labor's ideologues. The point is that, despite all the confusion surrounding this "celebration" (who celebrates mass murder?), the only victims of genocide during the 20th century who are excluded from the program are the Armenians. I suggested last December that the reason for their exclusion was Britain's unwillingness to offend Turkey, a major market for British arms and a staging area for Anglo-American bombing runs against sanctions-starved Iraqis. The suggestion appeared to annoy another columnist on these pages, Melik Kaylan, who wrote that I "should know better."
Kaylan writes that for me and Edward Said, although I'm not certain why America's greatest Palestinian intellectual was dragged into this, "the Turks remain unredeemable, a common sentiment in the West." I have never expressed animosity toward the Turks. While I decry their historic massacres of 1.5 million Armenians during the First World War and their filthy war against their Kurdish citizens for the past quarter century, I love Turkey, its people and its culture. In 1990, I published a book, Tribes with Flags (Atlantic Monthly Press?still in print, so please buy it), that was a long lament for the demise of the Ottoman Empire. To compare the architecture of the great Sinan in Istanbul and Damascus to the pathetic European structures that followed under British, French and independent rule is to see that the Middle East was far better under the Ottomans than subsequently. The borders that Britain and France drew across the landscape of the Middle East have scarred the region ever since. Turkey was a great power, whose greatest stain is the crime it has never admitted: genocide against the Armenians.
It sickens me that people still deny it took place. Their more or less successful denial helps us to understand why Israel and the Jewish Diaspora will not let us forget what happened to Jews during World War II. Since Oct. 29, 1923, when Turkey became a republic, the state has systematically denied the organized massacre of the Armenians. Where massacres are acknowledged, the official version was that rebellious Armenians provoked them. One of the more famous cases was the so-called revolt at Van in eastern Turkey in 1915, when the Russians intervened. What Kaylan does not mention is that American missionaries at Van (America was not at war with Turkey) observed that "The Russians cremated nearly 55,000 slain Armenian corpses they found." The missionary Grace Knapp, who lived through the massacre, wrote, "The fact cannot be too strongly emphasized that there was no [Armenian] rebellion." American missionary files record massacres at Akhisar and the long death marches to the desert, where Armenians were burned alive.
History can be denied. People forget. While a defeated Germany admitted its crimes against the Jews, Turkey did not really lose the war. It lost an empire, but the brilliant leadership of Mustafa Kemal Pasha (later called Ataturk, Father of the Turks) saved his country from colonization by the Allied Powers. Ataturk's struggle to keep the Turks free enabled him to deny crimes with which he, who had an honorable record during the World War at Gallipoli and in Syria, was not associated. It is time for Turkey to admit what happened and take its place among the free and open societies of the world. Britain and writers in Western newspapers, meanwhile, should stop conniving in the lie.
Remember Kafka's protagonist in Metamorphosis who woke up to find that he had morphed into a repulsive insect? He got off lightly. In my case, I woke up of a morning?if, in fact, I have woken up at all?to find that I had become a "holocaust denier." A full page and then some announcing it in this very paper that I write for. Red Turkish flag with a skull arcing into sharp pincers. Brutal boldface headline. Subhed asking why I "Hate Those Pesky Armenians."
So, the vile Turk is unmasked. The Terrible Turk, as my affectionate British boarding schoolmates dubbed me. The "malignant Turk," according to Shakespeare. You can be sure that try as I might to mix in civilized company, there will come a moment when you'll catch me unawares sloshily feasting on the flesh of my traditional victims while wielding a jeweled dagger dripping fresh viscera.
I am directly accused by Mr. Atamian of significant personal shortcomings, "as with most Turks brought up in or influenced by a repressive neo-fascist military regime," or "even if Kaylan has been educated in Turkey." Naturally, one couldn't disagree with Atamian's line or tone just on the merits of the argument. I am accused throughout of being a propagandist for the regime. I'd love to know what the regime would make of this, especially those who branded me a "British agent." Or the consul general who told me some years ago that I'd done more damage to Turkey than all the Armenians put together because of some errant article.
Now, it's true that I was born in Istanbul and lived in Turkey five years (at most). Perhaps that and the hard-wiring of Tatar ancestry is enough. But that won't work either, because I carry barely detectable amounts of Mongol DNA. Like much of the history Atamian sculpts into simplified shapes, my ancestry would be too complicated for his purposes. I do have Armenian ancestry, as well as Sephardic, Lebanese and Balkan-Muslim. And from age nine onward I grew up chiefly in the UK, attending Anglican church practically every day in the school year. Down the years, I've found that on any given day one part of me is likely to betray the national interests of another part. I am a serial self-hater. It's a complicated life.
For which reason, I'm often accused of being a spy or mouthpiece of the enemy. Hence my column title. My kind don't last long amid interethnic hatreds, because we can always see the other side a little. We're cosmopolitans, as it were. Intellectual mixed breeds. Had I lived as long in Turkey as Atamian likes to think, I'd have done my time for political insolence, no doubt. I hate to think what would have happened in Bosnia, Lebanon or Armenia for that matter.
Which was exactly my point in the original column that triggered his polemical napalm. As the brutish ethno-stridency of the Old World infects this country, nuanced and tolerant thinking gets bleached out. Atamian should turn down the volume. He should stop baiting stereotypes of Mongoloid killers. Mostly he attacks what I don't say, just what he thinks I really meant. Anyone who disputes his absolutism, by implication, supports the enemy, obfuscates and denies the holocaust.
Where, for goodness sake, did I deny what happened to the Armenians? I deplore the disappearance of eastern Christians from Turkey, its landscape and its cities?and the ethnic intolerance that caused it. When I was a boy in Istanbul I loved the ancient human and urban fabric of the place. I would like it all to go back to the way it was, as I would with Beirut where I also lived a while. I pray for the Greeks, Armenians and Assyrians to return and care for that ancient fabric they cultivated over millennia. When the Ottoman sultans took over Constantinople, they carefully left the minorities to live and prosper in situ. (Read The Ottomans by English historian Andrew Wheatcroft, or Constantinople: City of the World's Desire by Philip Mansel.) In the absence of those communities, Turkish cities in recent decades have turned into concrete horrors. Trees disappeared en masse. Many historical remains paved over. Replaced by 10 million peasant settlers, the delicate ancien regime manners swept away.
Still, Atamian should know that the demonized always become demonic sooner or later, and the depiction of Turks as irredeemably bestial simply intensifies enmity. He will not get a public acknowledgment of Armenian suffering from a perpetually combative and militarized Turkey without softening his tone, conceding some humanity to his enemy. The recent earthquakes did that for the Turco-Greek feud. It's preposterous for anyone to deny the wholesale massacre of Armenians in WWI by the bloody Young Turk regime. But he dismisses the prelude: a century of slaughtered Turks under czarist imperialism as "par for the course." The implication here is, "What? Turks as victims, ha ha ha!" You be the judge: who's doing the hating here, or the denying?
Finally, consider the probity of the editors' judgment in flatly gifting Atamian the tendentious headline, "Armenian Holocaust Denial" in giant type. That is simply untrue and not for them to prejudge anyway. We know what happens to anyone branded thus in public life. They are destroyed. Why on Earth would they collude in that?