"History will remember..."

This week, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s Prime Minister, bashed Syrian dictator Bashar Assad: “Bashar Assad should see the tragic end that meets leaders who declare war on their people. Oppression does not create order and a future cannot be built on the blood of the innocent. History will remember such leaders as those who fed on blood. And you, Assad, are headed toward opening such a page.”

The violent tactics of Bashar Assad's regime against Syrian civilians -- in order to remain in power -- are indeed ugly. But anyone with an understanding of 20th century history has to find condemnation from the Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan awkward at best.

Yes, Turkey is a predominantly muslim-populated country neighboring Syria and has interest in how the Syrian government treats or mistreats the Syrian population. Still, Turkey's record of denying that a systematic slaughtering by the Turkish government of the Armenian people took place renders its condemnation of Bashar Assad hollow.

"The overwhelming opinion of scholars who study genocide — hundreds of independent scholars, who have no affiliations with governments, and whose work spans many countries and nationalities and the course of decades — is consistent," the International Association of Genocide Scholars stated in a 2005 letter to the Turkish government. "The scholarly evidence reveals the following: On April 24, 1915, under cover of World War I, the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic genocide of its Armenian citizens — an unarmed Christian minority population. More than a million Armenians were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture, and forced death marches. The rest of the Armenian population fled into permanent exile. Thus an ancient civilization was expunged from its homeland of 2,500 years."

"Denial is the final stage of genocide," says Gregory Stanton, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. "It is a continuing attempt to destroy the victim group psychologically and culturally, to deny its members even the memory of the murders of their relatives. That is what the Turkish government today is doing to Armenians around the world."

Stanton, a former U.S. State Department official who drafted the United Nations Security Council resolutions that created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, spoke in 2008 at a United States Capitol ceremony honoring victims of the Armenian genocide — a ceremony held four months after the bill to commemorate the slaughter was shot down. "The U.S. government should not be party to efforts to kill the memory of a historical fact as profound and important as the genocide of the Armenians, which Hitler used as an example in his plan for the Holocaust," Stanton said before an audience that included three survivors of the Armenian genocide and more than 100 representatives and senators.

The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity issued a letter condemning Armenian genocide denial that was signed by 53 Nobel laureates including Wiesel, the famous Holocaust survivor and political activist. Wiesel has repeatedly called Turkey's 90-year-old campaign to cover up the Armenian genocide a double killing, since it strives to kill the memory of the original atrocities.

The U.S. government has thus far put strategic military interests above its tradition of condemning state-sponsored violence against unarmed civilians -- tolerating the Turkish government's stance . The Southern Poverty Law Center in 2008 provides a cogent analysis of the conundrum: http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2008/summer/state-of-denial

The Republic of Turkey's formal stance is that the deaths of  Armenians during the "relocation" or "deporation" cannot aptly be deemed "genocide", a position that has been supported with a plethora of diverging justifications: that the killings were not deliberate or were not governmentally orchestrated, that the killings were justified because Armenians posed a Russian-sympathizing threat^[138] as a cultural group, that Armenians merely starved, or any of various characterizations recalling marauding "Armenian gangs."^{[139][140][141]} Some suggestions seek to invalidate the genocide on semantic or anachronistic grounds (the word "genocide" was not coined until 1943). Turkish World War I casualty figures are often cited to mitigate the effect of the number of Armenian dead.^[142]

According to the retired ambassador of Turkey to Germany and Spain; Volkan Vural, the Turkish state should apologize for what happened to the Armenians during the deportations of 1915 and what happened to the Greeks during Istanbul Pogrom^[143][144] He also states that, "I think that, the Armenian issue can be solved by politicans and not by historians. I don't believe that historical facts about this issue is not revealed. The historical facts are already known. The most important point here is that how this facts will be interpreted and will affect the future."^[143]