Turkey blames everybody but itself

I don’t believe Obama can make the genocide issue disappear as Turkey requests. In fact, the genocide issue is not going to go away in the US or anywhere else, with the Swedish parliament narrowly approving a resolution last Thursday recognizing the 1915 mass killing of Armenians in Turkey as genocide and prompting the Turkish government to recall its ambassador there, too, in protest. While Foreign Minister Carl Bildt said he regretted the decision because it would serve as another blow to Turkey’s reconciliation with Armenia, the fact is that Turkey could have moved the process forward months ago but preferred not to. So now they blame the US, the Swedes and the Armenians. In fact, anybody but themselves. If Turkey believed reconciliation with Armenia would make the genocide issue go away, then they were and are fooling themselves. As long as there is an Armenian diaspora on this planet, they will continue to push everywhere they can for recognition of the genocide, no matter how many historic commissions or rapprochements there are. The genocide issue is their life’s cause.

In addition, the Jan. 12 ruling by the Armenian Constitutional Court resulted in Turkey questioning whether Armenia remains committed to their promise to ratify the two protocols for the normalization of relations with Turkey. Perhaps Ankara would do well to take a good look in the mirror. It is Turkey more than any other entity that is responsible for the difficulty in the current reconciliation. Turkey has crippled the process by insisting on a parallel process on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, which is clearly not going to happen any time soon. And here again Turkey blames Armenia for the lack of progress when in fact Armenia is no more to blame than Azerbaijan.

Turkey is well aware that the process is in danger of failing and is looking everywhere it can to find others to blame. Probably it would please Ankara no end if Armenia were to announce that it was fed up with Turkey’s imposed Karabakh preconditions and withdraw its signature from the protocols -- as they have threatened to do. This would give Turkey the perfect scapegoat for the failure of the process. If I were sitting in Yerevan, I would do precisely the opposite. I would not withdraw the signature; rather, I would take the initiative and have the protocols ratified in the Armenian parliament as soon as possible.

And of course the blame game is not simply limited to this issue; it is alive and kicking on many others, too. On Cyprus Turkey always claims to be driving forward a solution and continues to deny any wrongdoing in the past rather continuing to state that its role in the Cyprus conflict was to bring peace to the island and placing the blame elsewhere for the continued division. It is the same when it comes to the membership negotiations with the EU. Blame for the stagnation of the talks always lies at the feet of the EU. But this approach should come as no big surprise given the fact that many Turks are simply unable to accept or acknowledged that their country, and the Ottoman Empire before it, has ever behaved in a way that was less than perfect. They are unable to deal with the past and have trouble acknowledging that sometimes Turkey does make mistakes. Rather they prefer to point the finger at others.