He looked at the protesters with an ironic grin. As if it amused him that they protested his presence in Montevideo. She suddenly raised her hand bringing her ring and middle fingers together with her thumb while he raised his index and little fingers. Sitting inside the car protected by bodyguards, the turkish foreign minister He could not contain that cruel impulse and gave the group of Uruguayans from the Armenian community the sign of the Gray Wolves.
To make that sign is to identify oneself with the Turkish racist ultra-nationalism that emerged at the beginning of the 1960s, as the militarized arm of the party of extreme right Nationalist Action.
“Idealist Movement” was the official name of that shock force that attacked demonstrations of ethnic minorities and assassinated their leaders, in addition to killing members of the Turkish Communist Party, the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) and other leftist forces. . These “idealists” were violent criminals who defended the racist ideology that had promoted the armenian genocide: panturanism.
They were called the gray wolves, because the wolf is an ethnic and racial symbol. In the mythology of that Central Asian nation, the legend of Asena stands out, the she-wolf considered the mother of the Turks. And the world learned of the existence of this movement of violent action in 1981, when Karol Wojtila was shot at close range by a Gray Wolves associate.
Pope John Paul II survived the attack and later visited in prison and pardoned Mehmet Ali Agca, his victimizer. But he did not forgive the racist and ultranationalist fanaticism that put his finger on the trigger of the Browning 9 millimeter, when the pontiff was kissing the forehead of a girl as he passed in front of Bernini’s colonnade.
The camera of a cell phone caught that cruel mockery of the Armenians that the Turkish foreign minister did, also offending Uruguay, the country that he was visiting officially just in the days surrounding April 24, the date on which the Armenians of the world evoke the tragedy that decimated their ancestors in Anatolia and in the Syrian desert to which they had been pushed to die on the way of hunger, thirst and massacred by gangs of Kurdish assassins.
On April 24, 1915, the Union and Progress Committee government, better known as the Young Turk regime, perpetrated the disappearance of 250 intellectuals, artists, scientists and representatives of the Armenian community, starting the genocide.
It’s hard to believe it wasn’t intentional Turkey opened its embassy in Uruguay and sent its foreign minister just as the world’s Armenians commemorate the genocide and denounce the crime of denying it that the Turkish state is still committing.
Uruguay is not just another country on the stage of the Armenian struggle against denialism, because it was the first in the world to recognize genocide. He did it in 1965 and decades passed until the number of countries that assumed this historical responsibility began to increase, by a trickle, despite pressure from the Turkish governments.
Turkey has always used the influence that its strategic geographical location gives it to impose the denialism. When in 2007, the United States Congress approved resolution 106, recognizing the Armenian genocide, the then president, George W. Bush, came out with brutal sincerity, saying that Turkey was an ally of the highest strategic value for NATO, who should not be provoked with decisions like the one promoted by Congress.
Only in 2021, when Joe Biden settled in the Oval Office, Washington recognized the events that began in 1915 as genocide. But at this point in history, there are still many countries that, for reasons of their own history, internal politics or for not confronting Turkey, they still do not recognize the systematic extermination of more than one and a half million people behind the curtain of the First World War.
That large margin of impunity allowed Erdogan pushing Azeri despot Ilhan Aliyev to launch the Azerbaijani army against the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh, while the world grappled with the pandemic and both Brussels and Washington looked the other way.
Aliyev and Erdogan They would not have dared to launch the offensive against the factual state that the Armenians call the Republic of Artzaj, if they had not had the permission of Vladimir Putin. Due to the Collective Security Treaty signed by Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Armenia, the three Central Asian Muslim countries, in addition to the Russians and Belarusians, had to repel the offensive against one of their members or, at least, make every effort to stop the attack as soon as possible. But Putin only stopped the actions when the Armenians of Karabakh only had little more than twenty percent of the enclave they have inhabited since ancient times.
Erdogan is the president of Turkey who has played the most (and will continue to do so) on the international stage. He dared to put the Turkish army to fight the Syrian Kurds, within that Arab country. He has also carried out attacks against the Kurds of Iraq. And besides, he has been able to tangle hard with European leaders of great weight, such as Angela Merkel. That is why he should not be surprised to see the pressure of the Turkish leader in a South American country. Much less if it is Uruguay, the country that has the political and moral merit of having been the first in the world to denounce the crime against humanity that involved the extermination and mass deportation of Armenians, in the second decade of the 20th century.
By the way, he doesn’t just use the club. He also uses the carrot, like offering a TLC to a government that prioritizes free trade agreements with as many countries as possible. But if he sees that the South American government in question respects and supports the Armenian cause, then he imposes a high-ranking official visit on him just in the days when the genocide is commemorated.
That’s what Erdogan did with Uruguay. Chancellor Francisco Bustillo probably had to postpone his Turkish counterpart’s visit to a more appropriate time. But it is also likely that this aggressive pressure from Ankara would not have been so exposed if Mevlut Cavusoglu had not given in to the dark impulse generated by the Armenian protest in front of the embassy.
Instead of holding back, Cavusoglu smiled at the protesters and raised their hands by joining the middle and ring fingers with the thumb, leaving the little finger and the index finger upright. The brutal signal of the Gray Wolves that Turkish ultranationalism makes to show its criminal contempt for the left and ethnic minorities in Turkey.
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