Turkey vs. Armenia 2 - 0

Van, site of the old Armenian settlement, destroyed after 1920

Ever since I read Franz Werfels Fourty Days of Musa Dag some 20 years ago I have been convinced that the cause of the Armenian people against the Turks is right. I read the 800 pages of the novel breathlessly, during a short sickness in bed and almost without a pause. I have later searched other books and more recently the internet for the full truth. What I found is that Werfel was right and the killings should be called a genocide.

Nevertheless I came to discover a new truth. It says that the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those who died in 1915 need a different form of reconciliation compared with what the Jews and my history-haunted Germans achieved after 1945. Three things are different.

First, not too important, but not to be overlooked: the time factor. Germany could begin to regret what it had done immediately after the war. Turkey did something similar in punishing people who were made responsible for the atrocities, even sentencing some of them to dead. But soon after those trials time began to run out for any kind of deeper insight in the nature of the crime. The result was a deep and painful unrest all over the world and also in Turkey, at least for those who were not deaf to morality and international complaints.

The second difference: a more complicated historic truth. Some of the Armenians were openly fighting for an independent state, a re-birth of the great Armenian Kingdom in East Anatolia around the year 900. Turks were killed by Armenians, whereas the Germans never shed a single drop of their own blood from Jewish hands.

The third difference came out only recently: the Turks can support the newly born post communist Armenian State in a very unique way and are obviously about to do so. Armenia is geographically locked in between an unloved post soviet Georgia, some even more unloved small Muslim neighbor states – and Turkey. Turkey could be a natural partner for all kinds of trade, it could even be again what it was before nationalism broke out: a second home for those poorer Armenians who seek work abroad.

The number of illegal Armenian workers in Turkey is estimated to be 70.000. Now a benevolent fate put Turkey and Armenia into one qualifying group for the next Soccer World Championships. Both did not qualify, but both were happy to send their Presidents Sarkissjan and Gül to the two matches in Yerevan and Bursa (that both ended with a Turkish 2 – 0 victory). They used their informal contacts to kick off a treaty that will open the borders and find new forms of cooperation.

In Werfel's novel there is a noble old Turk, the Agha Rifaat Bereket in Antiochia who is an old friend of Gabriel Bagradian, the Armenian hero, and his family. Bagradian turns to him for help and the Agha promises to travel to the "atheists in Istanbul", as he says, the Young Turks that have given up the idea of a government based on faith in favor of nationalism. The Agha knows: nationalism is hatred and thus against the Quran. He recites a Verse from Sura 16 saying that God has "created in different colors".

Maybe the return of faithful people into the Turkish government will help to reconcile two nations whose history has been narrowly connected over the centuries, most of the time peacefully.