By Ken Marotte
Although hardly without blemish, Japan has been remarkably forthcoming about its wartime past.
As the world prepares to commemorate the 70th anniversary of World War II’s conclusion, countries victimized by Japan are renewing their demands for an honest reckoning of history. Such pleas, though understandable, are misplaced; for although Japan stands as one of the twentieth century’s most egregious offenders, it has also become one of the most persistently remorseful countries in recent history. This stands particularly true in light of other atrocities whose anniversaries we recognize in 2015.
Almost exactly 100 years ago, the Ottoman Empire began a systematic effort to deport and destroy the Armenian minority in its eastern provinces. The setting was World War I, and the German-allied Ottomans had grown deeply worried that its Armenian community might prove susceptible to Russian influence. To preempt such an alliance, more than 1.5 million Armenians were uprooted and deported to Syria and Mesopotamia. “We will not have Armenians anywhere in Anatolia,” the Ottoman minister of the interior remarked to a U.S. ambassador. “They can live in the desert, but nowhere else.”
For most of these individuals, however, relocation was only the beginning. En route to their place of exile, starvation, abduction, rape, and murder ensued on a massive scale. A U.S. diplomat in northern Syria wired Washington with news of massive burial grounds containing tens of thousands of Armenian bodies, while the U.S. ambassador to Turkey reported an “attempt to exterminate a race.” Between 600,000 and 1.5 million are believed to have perished as a result.
Read the full story at The Diplomat