There are some interesting things a-happenin' with our friendly neighbour (or "neighbor", if you will) to the south this week. Most interestingly, Al Gore won a Nobel Prize, and the US House of Representatives has finally acknowledged the mass killings of Armenians in Turkey, which took place from 1915-1923, as genocide.
I was intrigued by the genocide acknowledgement mostly because of the response it provoked from Turkey. Apparently, the ethnic killing of hundreds of thousands (maybe even up to 1.5 million, depending on who you talk to) of Armenians is a bit of a sore spot, and they'd kindly ask that you not bring it up, thank you very much. They're so enraged, there's talk of them backing out of their currently friendly agreement that allows US forces to pass through Turkey on their way to Iraq.
This all seems a little ridiculous to me, especically given how long ago the genocide took place. Does the Turkish government think it can eventually convince the rest of the world that it wasn't genocide? It's not like they're denying the killings; there's too much documentation to get away with that. Rather, what they're arguing against is the specific use of the term "genocide". I guess there's some other term they'd rather use for the systematic elimination of a race of people.
For a country jockeying for a position within the EU, Turkey doesn't seem very committed to getting its human rights record cleaned up. In fact, as recently as 2005, they were enacting laws like the infamous Article 301, which states: "A person who, being a Turk, explicitly insults the Republic or Turkish Grand National Assembly, shall be punishable by imprisonment of between six months to three years."
Because, as we all know, the best way to solve a nation's problems is to pretend they don't exist, thus solving the problem forever.
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