Turkish Forum

Tag: Angela Merkel

  • Despite an Encouraging Visit to Armenia, Chancellor Merkel Didn’t Say Genocide

    Despite an Encouraging Visit to Armenia, Chancellor Merkel Didn’t Say Genocide

     

    Last week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Media reports indicated that her visit to Armenia and meetings with its leadership were very constructive. Armenian-German political, cultural and trade relations are expected to expand. Merkel’s visit resulted in a much needed boost for Armenia’s new democratic government.

    One of the sensitive issues that both Armenians and the international community were carefully following was Chancellor Merkel’s comments on the Armenian Genocide. The German Parliament (Bundestag) almost unanimously adopted a resolution in 2016 recognizing the Armenian Genocide and declared that “the German Empire bears partial complicity in the events.”

    Immediately after the adoption of the Genocide resolution, Turkey withdrew its ambassador from Berlin and threatened to cut off ties with Germany. Relations between Germany and Turkey remain tense for a variety of reasons, but are expected to improve after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s forthcoming visit to Germany in late September.

    While in Yerevan, Chancellor Merkel paid a visit to the Armenian Genocide Memorial. She laid a wreath in memory of the 1.5 million Armenian victims and planted a tree at an adjacent park. However, Merkel avoided the use of the term genocide in Yerevan, describing Turkey’s mass killings as “heinous crimes against Armenians” which “cannot and must not be forgotten.” She also stated that she had visited the Genocide Memorial “in the spirit of the Bundestag 2016 resolution.” She clarified that the language used was “a political, not a legal classification.”

    Despite Merkel’s goodwill toward Armenia and her very positive statements, I hope that Armenia’s leaders reminded her that the proper term to describe the planned extermination of 1.5 million Armenians is “Genocide,” not simply “heinous crimes.”

    Armenia’s leaders could have informed Chancellor Merkel of a recent report by Ben Knight of Germany’s Deutsche Welle (DW) about the weapons provided by the German Reich to the Ottoman Turkish forces to carry out the Armenian Genocide.

    According to DW, “Mauser, Germany’s main manufacturer of small arms in both world wars, supplied the Ottoman Empire with millions of rifles and handguns, which were used in the genocide with the active support of German officers.” Furthermore, quoting from a report by “Global Net — Stop the Arms Trade,” DW stated that “the Turkish army was also equipped with hundreds of cannons produced by the Essen-based company Krupp, which were used in Turkey’s assault on Armenian resistance fighters holding out on the Musa Dagh Mountain in 1915.”

    The author of the Global Net report, Wolfgang Landgraeber, wrote that “Mauser really had a rifle monopoly for the Ottoman Empire.”

    DW revealed that “many of the firsthand German accounts in the report come from letters by Major Graf Eberhard Wolffskehl, who was stationed in the southeastern Turkish city of Urfa in October 1915. Urfa was home to a substantial population of Armenians, who barricaded themselves inside houses against the Turkish infantry. Wolffskehl was serving as chief of staff to Fakhri Pasha, deputy commander of the Ottoman 4th Army, which had been called in as reinforcement.”

    In a letter to his wife, Major Wolffskehl shamelessly bragged about the killing of Armenians by German troops in Urfa: “They [the Armenians] had occupied the houses south of the church in numbers. When our artillery fire struck the houses and killed many people inside, the others tried to retreat into the church itself. But … they had to go around the church across the open church courtyard. Our infantry had already reached the houses to the left of the courtyard and shot down the people fleeing across the church courtyard in piles. All in all the infantry, which I used in the main attack … acquitted itself very well and advanced very dashingly.”

    Landgraeber also reported that “while German companies provided the guns, and German soldiers the expert advice on how to use them, German officers also laid the ideological foundations” for the Armenian Genocide.

    German Navy Attache Hans Humann, a member of the German-Turkish officer corps and close friend of the Ottoman Empire’s war minister, Enver Pasha, wrote: “The Armenians — because of their conspiracy with the Russians — will be more or less exterminated. That is hard, but useful.”

    Furthermore, Landgraeber wrote in his report about “the Prussian major general Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz, a key figure who became a vital military adviser to the Ottoman court in 1883 and saw himself as a lobbyist for the German arms industry and supported both Mauser and Krupp in their efforts to secure Turkish commissions. (He once boasted in his diary, ‘I can claim that without me the rearmament of the [Turkish] army with German models would not have happened.’)” Goltz “helped persuade the Sultan to try and end the Armenian question once and for all!”

    The above quotations support the admission by Bundestag’s 2016 resolution that Germany was complicit in the Armenian Genocide and German President Joachim Gauck’s acknowledgment in 2015 about Germany’s “co-responsibility” for the Armenian Genocide. Being well aware of these facts, Chancellor Merkel should have called the Armenian Genocide by its proper name: Genocide!

  • Germany’s Post-Merkel Power Fraus

    Germany’s Post-Merkel Power Fraus

    The German chancellor’s most likely successors are both women — but the similarities end there.

    By Paul Hockenos
    merkel
    Designated German Finance Minister and Vice-Chancellor Olaf Scholz of the SPD (3R), German Chancellor Angela Merkel of the CDU (C) and German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer of the CSU (5R) pose with the coalition treaty of the conservative CDU/CSU party and the Social Democrats to form a new government flanked by parliamentary group leader of the Social Democrats (SPD) Andrea Nahles, parliamentary group leaders of the Christian democrats (CDU) Volker Kauder and of the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) Alexander Dobrindt General, Secretary of the CDU, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer and Secretary General of the CSU Andreas Scheuer in Berlin, on March 12, 2018. / AFP PHOTO / John MACDOUGALL (Photo credit should read JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP/Getty Images)

    It shouldn’t surprise that Angela Merkel, as the leader of Germany’s biggest conservative party, has shied away from being called a “feminist.” But it’s indisputable that her three terms as chancellor (the fourth term began last week) have changed the lives of German women for good. Doors previously shut to them have been opened — nowhere more pronouncedly than in German politics itself.

    Even as a new four-year term gets underway, the outlines of the post-Merkel era have already come into view. Germany’s cabinet has been stocked with new female faces, including atop both Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), which means women are likely to lead the country for years to come. And nobody is better situated to compete to replace Merkel as chancellor four years from now than the SPD’s freshly installed leader, Andrea Nahles, and the CDU’s new general secretary, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer.

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    The two politicians — Nahles, 47, and Kramp-Karrenbauer, 55 — have been tasked by their respective parties to do what their male predecessors couldn’t: namely, stop the disintegration of Germany’s big-tent postwar establishment. In the September 2017 election, both parties chalked up record losses — the CDU with 33 percent of the vote (which includes its partner the Christian Social Union), the SPD with a lowly 21 percent — leaving them with few alternatives but to reluctantly join forces again in a “grand coalition,” for the third time since 2005. But this latest halfhearted, cobbled-together partnership will likely accelerate the trend. The SPD now stands at 19 percent in polls, just five points ahead of the far-right Alternative for Germany. Two weeks ago, they were even at 15 percent a piece.

    Both Nahles and Kramp-Karrenbauer clearly believe that they are equal to the generational task of pulling their parties out of their death spirals. Both are career politicos, practicing Catholics, and hail from small German towns along France’s borderlands just over a hundred miles from each other. Unlike Merkel, both are mothers: Kramp-Karrenbauer of three, Nahles of one. Like the present chancellor, both project an air of serious professionalism while also steering clear of the arrogant style common among the alpha males who still populate much of their respective parties’ ranks.

    But that’s where their similarities stop.

    Nahles is a known commodity on the German national stage, having nimbly climbed the party’s hierarchy since her entry into the SPD as an 18-year-old. Initially on the party’s anti-capitalist left, she has since mellowed without relinquishing her Attac membership. In the party’s executive since 1997, she has held half a dozen posts, though not one of them determined by popular vote. Most recently, from 2013 to 2017, she served as the federal minister for labor and social issues, where she muscled through the term’s most impressive socially minded legislation: a national minimum wage, pension reform, and safeguards for the temporarily employed. Today, her expertise and pragmatism are appreciated even in the CDU, which originally doubted that it could work with such a wild-haired rebel on anything.

    The German media have dubbed Nahles “the boxer” — and not only because of her tenacity, toughness, and broad shoulders. In the thunderous speeches that have become her trademark — whether at union halls or at the SPD’s headquarters in Berlin — Nahles can look like a prize fighter in the ring, stabbing the air with clenched fists, her face grimaced and scarlet, eyes blazing.

    Yet she also has a reputation for sometimes hitting too hard. Her diction can occasionally be churlish, almost adolescent. A few days after last year’s national vote, pledging vigorous opposition to a CDU-led government without the SPD, she said her party would deliver the CDU a “good smack in the kisser.” She had to apologize for that — and eat humble pie, too, when it became clear that another grand coalition was in the offing.

    But Nahles has come as far as she has because Germans have largely been willing to chalk up her excesses to her working-class authenticity. Indeed, her father was a master mason, her mother a financial clerk. Nahles is a social democrat through and through, a true believer in social justice and respect for the working classes. Nahles was largely responsible for shoring up SDP support for the new coalition government, which many in the party, especially on the left, resisted. They argued that after hemorrhaging so much support the party needed a term in opposition, outside of Merkel’s long shadow, to renew itself. On a whirlwind journey across the country, Nahles won over reluctant comrades one local branch at a time.

    In return, the SPD elected Nahles to the highest post in the historic party of August Bebel and Willy Brandt: the first chairwoman ever in the party’s 154-year history. “This is really something extraordinary,” explains Tina Hildebrandt, an editor at the weekly Die Zeit. “The SPD sees itself as the party of women’s rights, which historically it has been, but it’s always been a real men’s club. Men have always had the say. Nahles’s tenure is a kind of reality test for the SPD.”