by Natalie de Vallieres and Biodun Iginla, BBC News, The Economist, and Reuters, Rome
All latest updatesAnger over Armenia
After Francis calls genocide by its name, Turkey recalls its ambassador
AS THIS weekend's rupture between the Vatican and the
Turkish government demonstrated, upsetting people has become an
integral part of being pope these days. On April 12th Pope
Francis delivered an address in which he came down more publicly than
ever before in favour of the Armenian interpretation of the
state-sanctioned persecution in Anatolia a hundred years ago that killed
as many as 1.5m Armenians. At a mass attended by Armenia's president,
Serzh Sargsyan, Francis called it “the first genocide of the
20th century”. Turkey hit back by recalling its ambassador to the Holy
See for consultations and declaring that the pope’s remarks were based
on “prejudice”.
Roman pontiffs are in a better position than most
chief executives to speak undiplomatic truths. They have no career
prospects to worry about, and since they (along with most of the world’s
1.2 billion baptised Catholics) believe they are God’s chief
representatives on earth, they feel they have a moral duty to tell it
like it is—or, at least, how they believe it to be. The
deceptively mild-mannered Benedict XVI succeeded at different times in
offending Muslims, Jews and large numbers of Latin Americans, in some
cases unnecessarily.
His successor Francis has carried on the tradition. But
until this week, his barbs were directed mostly at people who had few
means of retaliation, such as worldly Vatican bigwigs and capitalists lacking in social conscience. The Turkish government, on the other hand, is making the Vatican pay a diplomatic price.
Why the fuss? This is not the first time that Francis has called the Armenian genocide by its name. He did the same on June 3rd,
when he met a delegation of Armenians led by a patriarch of the Middle
Eastern diaspora. Then, the Turkish authorities limited themselves to
expressing “disappointment” and calling in the Vatican’s envoy for a
telling-off. But there is a big difference between making such a remark
at a small event that went nearly unreported in the international media,
and doing so in a much-awaited speech 12 days ahead of the Armenian
genocide's official centenary commemoration.
Turkish diplomats are understood to have lobbied hard to
prevent Francis from referring to the Armenian massacres as genocide.
Turkey has fought for decades to prevent widespread acceptance of a term
that places the Ottoman authorities of the early 20th century on the
same plane with the Nazis, Stalin, Pol Pot or the perpetrators of
atrocities in Rwanda and Bosnia. The effort seems quixotic, given that
Raphael Lemkin, the inventor of the term "genocide", used the Armenian
case as his model.
In deciding to ignore Turkish entreaties, the pope
and his diplomatic advisers in the Secretariat of State will have
weighed two factors. On the one hand, there is no Muslim state with
which the Holy See has built warmer relations than Turkey. Both Francis
and Benedict have visited the country, and Vatican
officials recognise that under its current president, Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, Turkey has gone further than ever in acknowledging what
happened to the Armenians.
But such goodwill apparently counted for less than
the Vatican’s growing desperation over Islamist persecution of
Christians, and what officials see as the failure of Muslim clerics and
politicians to effectively oppose it. Recent months have seen mass
killings of Christians by Muslims in Nigeria, Libya and Kenya. Top
of the Vatican’s list of concerns are Iraq and Syria, where the pope
and his advisers believe they are witnessing a decisive phase in the
eradication of Christianity from countries where it has been present for
millennia. Turkey’s equivocal response to the activities of Islamic
State has not helped.
For more than a decade, the Vatican has been the scene of a tug-of-war
between proponents of careful dialogue with Islam and advocates of
bluntness. The latter group feel that tact has got Christians nowhere,
and that plain speaking is required even if it proves offensive. This
group clearly had the upper hand under Benedict. Francis’s latest
comment suggests they are back in the ascendancy.
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