The Turkish ambassadors in Washington and Stockholm were recalled to Ankara for consultations, and it was decided this week that the ambassador to Sweden would be sent back thanks to the fact that Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt spoke to the Turkish prime minister and said that he regretted the decision of the Riksdag, the Swedish parliament, advising the government to recognize the atrocities perpetrated against the Armenians, Assyrians and other non-Muslim subjects of the Ottoman state in 1915 as genocide.Regret is an ambiguous word. It is not an apology; it is not a declaration of an opposition to the decision; it has no hint of an intention to undo the harm. But it worked.
Last year US President Barack Obama had applied a similar constructive ambiguity in his April 24 speech by using the Armenian term “Meds Yeghern” instead of the G-word. Meds Yeghern provided the Turks with the face-saving relief that the US president didn’t use “the term” and the Armenians with the explanation that Meds Yeghern is Armenian for genocide.
Constructive ambiguity is a common tool used by diplomats “to say something without saying so.”
The Turkish-Armenian protocols prepared under the hosting of the Swiss government had similar loopholes of “constructive ambiguity” that could be filled with convenient, politically correct interpretations back at home. The protocols referred to a “joint history commission,” and yet Armenian President Serzh Sarksyan was able to say, back in Yerevan, that the commission was not meant to speak of the events of 1915 at all, as if there was anything else to speak about.
The decision of the Armenian Constitutional Court, though, damaged this constructive ambiguity by driving the limits of the results this joint commission can reach. The decision suggested that the findings of the joint history commission mentioned in the protocols could not be interpreted as evidence against the Armenian genocide claims.
This one is destructive obscurity.
Such a decision mocks plain logic. It is like the Turkish song where the singer asks for “muftis and wise men of religion to come together” and find a way to legitimize his apparently illegitimate love affair. Don’t ask the mufti for a fatwa if you are not ready to abide by the answer. Whatever the findings of the commission will be, both sides should be prepared to accept those findings. Hopefully, the commission won’t also come out with a kind of destructive obscurity…
Another constructive ambiguity utilized during the preparation of the protocols was omission of any kind of reference to the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The Turkish side made it clear during and after the negotiations that they regarded the protocols and the normalization of Turkish-Armenian relations a positive input to the ongoing Armenian-Azerbaijani negotiations. This ambiguity let the Turkish prime minister say in Baku that the protocols won’t come to the Turkish Parliament as long as sound developments do not take place toward ending the Armenian occupation of Azerbaijani territory. Understandably, the Armenian side didn’t like this formerly unpronounced precondition. In response, they made opening of the borders and implementation of the protocols a prerequisite to Armenian-Azerbaijani normalization. This is destructive obscurity. In fact the future of both the processes is obscured by tying the two to each other.
The Turkish ambassador to Washington is still in Ankara. Turkey has maintained its ambiguous rhetoric on the conditions and timing of his return. But one thing is clear: Ankara believes that recalling Ambassador Namık Tan to Ankara was a move made to secure and not destroy the good relations between Turkey and the United States.
