What has this ‘genocide’ to do with Congress?

Istanbul

Two elderly shoe-shiners were shouting with rage outside my local in Istanbul. The subject was America, and they ranted on and on — first about the disaster in Iraq, then about the stirring up of the Kurds, and then about the latest effort in Congress to ‘recognise the Armenian genocide’. What is so very strange about all of this is that American relations with Turkey have generally been very good. In a sense, modern Turkey belongs with Germany and Japan as the most successful creation of the United States after the second world war. In any year, there are 25,000 Turks at American universities, some of them sprigs of the Istanbul rich, many on scholarships, with which the Americans have been generous. Co-operation has gone far in other ways: for instance, the great air base at Incirlik has been vital all along for America’s defence interests, and now, given the Iraq problem, the port of Iskenderun, the old Alexandretta, is also important. Turkey has a good defence industry, especially good when it comes to making aircraft (the F-16s win prizes). She might have developed into an Egypt, but instead she is closer to Spain — industrial, in many places quite prosperous, literate. By most measurements she is now better off than Russia, let alone most countries of the Middle East.

But something has gone badly wrong, and opinion polls now show that the Turks are even more anti-American than the Palestinians. The latest row concerns the adoption of a resolution by the House of Representatives branding the Armenian massacres of 1915 as genocide. What on earth causes Congress to bring up this subject now, almost a century down the line, and relating to an Ottoman empire that has long ceased to exist? And why on earth should these public bodies lecture historians as to what they should be saying? One basic cause seems to be simple enough: money.