This wintry Swedish morning the sun was shining as usual although the temperature had dropped to seven degrees below zero; in Stockholm the temperature has been going up and down like a yoyo and the thermometer has been dilating at just around it’s own winter centre of gravity : zero. Yet this morning I found myself humming this song written by the gentle son of a Swedish mother, now a great Islamic teacher – that I know because I attended some of his lectures about one and half decades ago, in London, not just for fun – although much earlier he had asked in one of the televised programmes, how come that the Almighty who knows everything, in the Torah had asked “Adam, where are you?” And that for Yusuf was evidence that ( heaven forbid) the Holy Scrip had been tampered with. Perhaps he has after all grown out of that kind of lack of insight – at least as clarified in this tract
Now, no one wants to be accused of being a racist, or of being a psychopath or an anti-Semite, or a fascist, an islamophobist or worse still to be accused of hating other people so much that you want to wipe them out: genocide – or of standing aside and looking the other way whilst other people are being wiped out – or worse still, more actively assisting the crime.
It’s said that some people but not all people, are capable of being proud of being labelled any of the above.
The dust of those battles has long settled since 1915 and the Swedish Parliamentary Resolution taken in the year 2010, proclaiming that Turkey is guilty of having committed unmitigated genocide in 1915, is a fresh one on which tears are still being shed but the ink has hardly dried yet.
Since it’s Sweden that’s the centre of the storm this time , I’ve followed the Swedish pundits’ post mortem judgements on that resolution in the Saturday edition of the following Swedish newspapers: Dagens Nyheter, Svenska Dagbladet, Göteborgs Posten, Uppsala Nya Tidning: they all emphasise Carl Bildt’s position – that he deeply regrets the Swedish Parliament making such a decision ( a motion initiated by the opposition) and that his government intends to continue supporting Turkey’s application for EU membership. The four aforementioned newspapers , in not so many words all ask the same question: since when did it become the function of the Swedish Parliament to determine the status of what happened in Armenia in 1915 – at a time when the term genocide had not yet been clearly defined? And what next?
What next ?
My question is a rather ridiculous one for that matter, considering the mountain of literature that is available in Holocaust Studies – and so the ridiculous question ( one of many that I can imagine) : Will the Swedish Parliament also feel called upon to take upon their shoulders another onerous duty, to ascertain whether or not it was the Holocaust that was committed by the Israeli Defence Forces during their most recent operation in Gaza last year ?
Do I hear Alan Dershowitz a probable defence attorney asking his first question:
“Where are the gas chambers?”
A must read:
Elisabeth Özdalga the director of the Swedish Resaerch Institute in Istanbul has expressed some misgivings about the Swedish Resolution coming “at a time when the Turkish State, since 2002 is now being led by a government which, more than any other earlier government in Turkey’s modern history, has contributed to a softening up policy both for the country’s own minorities, espcially with regard to the Kurdish question and in its ( Turkey’s) relationship to its neighbouring countries, not least of which is Armenia.”
She also thinks that the resolution will only streghthen the ultra nationalists in Turkey and that does not make Turkey- Armenia reconciliation any easier