TURKEY:The decision by the US House of Representatives to discuss the Armenian genocide of 1915 has cast a shadow over Turkish-US relations, writes Lara Marlowe
The US House of Representatives will today debate resolution 106, which would recognise as genocide the killing of hundreds of thousands of Armenians by Turkish forces 92 years ago.
Other countries have already recognised the massacres as genocide, but the likelihood that the US Congress will pass the resolution has created panic among Turkish authorities.
Though they recognise that a "tragedy" occurred in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire, they refuse to be singled out as a country that committed genocide. And they fear the resolution will be used to justify Armenian demands for financial and territorial reparations.
Prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan telephoned President George Bush, former president Bill Clinton (who has influence over Democratic congressmen) and the Israeli president Shimon Peres at the weekend to express his dismay.
An aura of menace permeates the issue. Turkish-US relations will be seriously damaged if the Bill passes, Erdogan threatened.
"If approved, it would be difficult to control the dynamics that would be triggered by the reaction of the Turkish public opinion," Koksal Toptan, the speaker of parliament wrote to his US counterpart, Nancy Pelosi. The 70,000-strong Armenian-Turkish community are traumatised by the murder last January 19th of the brilliant and charismatic newspaper editor Hrant Dink.
Agos, the paper Dink co-founded, began receiving telephone and e-mail threats a week ago.
"We killed one of you. We'll kill a lot more if you speak out," one caller said. "Tell the [ Armenian] diaspora to stop it."
Turkish Jews are also at risk, since the US Jewish Anti-Defamation League sided with the Armenians on the grounds that as a people who suffered, they can no longer ignore what happened to the Armenians.
"The Jewish population will inevitably be the target of public anger in Turkey," foreign minister Ali Babacan warned.
With 225 of 435 US representatives supporting the resolution, it is likely to pass. Before he left for Washington as part of a high-level delegation that is lobbying US congressmen, Egemen Bagis, the vice-chairman of the ruling AK Party in charge of foreign relations, told The Irish Times about his negotiating strategy: "we'll remind them that 75 per cent of the goods used by US forces in Iraq go through Turkey. 3,000 lorries cross our border into northern Iraq every day. US troops overnight in Turkey when they're going to or from Iraq."
Though Turkey refused to allow US ground troops to cross its border in the 2003 invasion, Ankara let the US use Nato bases and airspace in Turkey.
Another argument used by Turkish officials is that when the US eventually withdraws from Iraq, it will need Turkey as an escape route.
"Turkey and the US fought together in Korea, Kosovo, Somalia, Bosnia and Afghanistan," Bagis continued.
"150 Turkish lorry drivers and construction workers have lost their lives trying to rebuild Iraq." The US needs Turkey, Bagis said, because it is the only country on good terms with everyone in the Middle East, and because it is a unique example of democracy in the region.
Meanwhile, anxiety also grows in Turkey's Armenian community. Though the border has been shut since 1993, tens of thousands of illegal immigrants from impoverished Armenia work illegally in Turkey as maids, nannies and care-givers for the elderly.
Turks say their willingness to hire Armenians is a sign of friendship. Armenians see it as humiliation.
On Saturday, police rounded up about 100 illegal Armenian immigrants. Their expulsion is seen as retaliation for the US genocide resolution.
"The community is against any resolution or decision or law that would impede dialogue between Turks and Armenians," said Luiz Bakar, the spokeswoman for the Armenian Patriarch Mesrob II. "We're not on the same wavelength as the diaspora," she explained. "Recognition of the genocide is their raison d'être; we're more concerned about preserving our language, culture and religion." When he was Ireland's foreign minister, Brian Cowen said, in another context, "you will never get people to agree what happened in the past; just try to get it right in the future." That is the philosophy of Turks and Armenians alike here.
The bitterness surfaces as soon as one starts delving into the events of 1915-1916.
"My grandparents were deported and died on the road," said an ageing Armenian woman who did not want to be quoted by name.
"My mother returned. Saying it was a genocide will not bring back our dead."
The same woman told how 2,400 Armenian intellectuals were rounded up in Istanbul on April 24th, 1915, never to be seen again. That date is commemorated by Armenians as genocide day.
The weekly newspaper Agos ("The Furrow") was founded by Dink in 1996 as a gesture of opening towards other Turks.
By making it a bilingual, Armenian and Turkish publication, he hoped to prove to Turks that Armenians are not a secretive "fifth column".
In 2001 Dink wrote an eight-part series on Turkish-Armenian relations. One sentence, in which he referred to "poisonous" Turkish blood, was taken out of context, reprinted by Turkish newspapers, used as a pretext for trying him under article 301 of the penal code, and as justification by the teenage gunman who murdered him.
Dink's colleagues at Agos explain that he actually said that hostility to Turkey in the Armenian diaspora was poisonous.
Nine months after his murder, Dink's portrait hangs in every room at Agos.
Aris Nalci was hired by Dink 11 years ago, when he was 17. Today he edits the Armenian community pages.
"Hrant was like a brother or father to me. He encouraged me to go to university," Nalci recalled.
For more than a decade following the 1980 military coup, Dink was not allowed to travel outside Turkey.
After his passport was restored at the insistence of the European Union, he travelled much of the time, giving lectures. "He's still travelling, somewhere in the world, while we are working here," Nalci said sadly.
"He used to phone every Wednesday to ask, 'what are our headlines?' and he'd say, 'okay, that's great'. He's still there; he just doesn't phone anymore."