The announcement of Pope Francis' next trip to Armenia e news from Nagorno Karabakh bring the Caucasus to the fore after many months of silence.
Although the Holy See's program in diplomatic terms is balanced by the September stage in Azerbaijan, it is indisputable that the Armenian visit is a strong choice, to be read not only as part of a spirit of inter-confessional mercy, but also as a reflection in itself. on the atrocious persecutions suffered by Christians.
In the light of the creeping war between Erevan and Baku, the journey in the Caucasus shifts the hands of the polemic in particular towards Turkey, which has long been the spotlight of international politics.
The political protagonism of Ankara in the Eurasian quadrant is a fact of all evidence: mired in Syria, involved in Libya, actress of a renewed strategic battle with Russia, keystone of migratory flows to Europe ... Turkey is unquestionably at the center global geopolitical agenda.
We discussed a lot on this column of Turkish translations towards radical Islam in Turkey, with all due respect to secularism, the fulcrum of the nation wanted by Ataturk. There is also much discussion of Erdogan's authoritarian drifts, as worrying in law as they are easy to forget in NATO programs and on the road to rapprochement with the European Union.
To understand the displacement of the engine with which Turkey moves, in reality you have to cross it. It is by definition a monolithic country and more equal to itself than the rigid form already suggests. Its very centralized and pyramidal state structure offers an image of a big and slow elephant but for this very reason obliged to be stable. In spite of the tendencies according to which federalisms are an automatic source of freedom, Turkey presents itself as a single block physically anchored to the Aegean and Asia, but ideologically immobile on its founding principles.
Few countries in the world are linked to the concept of identity such as Turkey. But if the identity of a people is as clear as the values around them are stronger, it can not be excluded that even a denial can be a value.
It would suffice to mention the Turkish vocabulary, according to which the Kurds are "Turks of the mountains" or walk through the alleys of Kyrenia in North Cyprus, where the rejection of the Greek South is an irremovable axiom that lasts for 40 years; however, nothing helps us to understand the ontological meaning of "feeling Turkish", more than the Armenian question.
Removed from the Turkish collective consciousness without too many frills, it has also remained buried in the attic of universal respectability, to the point of being ignored by everyone until yesterday.
A little larger than Sicily, Armenia made talk about herself with the words of Pope Francis on the occasion of the centenary of the 1915 genocide, the refinement of a massacre begun twenty years earlier. Despite more than 1 million deaths from starvation, hardships and summary executions, the world has continued to turn heads for a century. The event is commemorated every April 24 but only the Armenians know it. In a few days the newspapers will talk again, just the time to schedule the tissue behind other urgencies.
We do not enter the historical chronicle. Although the idea is still current, the Ottoman Empire and the goal of ethnically pure Anatolia are concepts for now collateral. What matters is that one of the pillars of Turkish identity, to the point of cementing it and resisting the pressure of the whole world, is the absolute negation of the facts.
In itself the thing is curious, especially in times when admissions of faults, outing ideological and excusatio not petita they are on the agenda.
For the Kurdish Question from an academic profile there would be at the limit the mitigating factor of the multiplicity of faults (the problem is shared with Iran, Syria and Iraq) but continuing to beat the bush about the massacre of Armenians today seems more than anything else clumsy. Especially for a country that intersects important geopolitical parables and that sits in the salons of jet set international with a role that is anything but secondary. Even more so if we think that concrete strategic implications related to a revision of this corner of history, there probably would not be any.
It is a purely identitary fact that bypasses the common feeling and the elementary principles of the interaction between peoples. What is granted to Turkey under a historical-political view suggests that also for the genocides there exists the series A and the series B and that the Armenian slaughter, sacrificed on the altar of bigger strategic balances, is obliged to remain in the cadet series .
Armenia, the first country in the world to introduce state Christianity and claims to have always defended it, is a wonderful place, gateway to the East that oozes history. A story that pours blood and leaves no room for other interpretations. Known or not, his drama is a real scar that for interests and selfishness continues to harden among the injustices of humanity.
The Turks, a great people, could do a lot in this sense, at least until Europe and America stop looking elsewhere.
If the irritation of the Turkish ally has so far been a more dangerous bugbear than the insult of a small Caucasian people, it is not certain that things will not change. April 24 will pass with all certainty without clamor: the return of a Pope 15 years after the homage of Pope John Paul II, certainly not.
(Photo: author / web)
