genocide Today!!!!!!

Turkey is the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, and its official policy on the Armenian Genocide is the denial of its occurrence. Whereas the convening of courts-martial to try the Young Turks for war crimes by the post-World War I Ottoman government amounted to an admission of guilt on the part of the state, the Nationalist government based in Ankara rejected Turkish responsibility for the acts committed against the Armenian population. After gaining military mastery over Turkey, the Nationalists, led by Mustafa Kemal, obtained a series of concessions from France and England which absolved Turkey of any further political or material responsibilities the surviving Armenians. These concessions were formalized in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne which extended international recognition to the Turkish Republic. Turkey immediately turned its attention to the suppression of the kurds, whose language was banned in 1924 and whose ethnic identity was officially denied by the Turkish state until the 1980s.

 By forcefully promoting Turkism, the Ankara government sought to create an ethnically homogeneous state. In the course of the following decades its treatment of the remnant minorities oscillated from neglect to repression. As it remained neutral during World War II and continued trading with Nazi Germany until nearly the end of the war, Turkey used the occasion of the world crisis to impose extraordinary taxes upon Greeks, Jews and Armenians. The discriminatory exactions economically ruined these small minority communities already confined mostly to Istanbul by the 1940s.