In the United States we have a way of making injured people whole again. It is called the personal injury lawsuit and a value is placed on your injury and awarded to you if you win your case or settle. Meanwhile in Japan an apology is how people are made whole again. Two methods to the same end. You decide which one you favor.
Now Armenians want Turkey to apologize for the genocide where 1.5 million Armenians were massacred by the Turks in 1915. My uncle, genocide scholar Gary Kulhanjian, refers to Turks as deniers because to this day they officially deny the genocide but for some Turkish authors like Orhan Pamuk the author of Snow who got into serious trouble because of this conviction. So the intellectuals there recognize it but not the government and so no apology is forthcoming. Not a good thing if you are in Japan.
But in the U.S.A. we have our personal injury course of action. Now I am not suggesting a class action lawsuit against Turkey but rather an abstract form of being made whole that has the same result. What I am talking about is a free trade agreement between Armenia and Turkey that will bring wealth to that landlocked nation. There should also be a porous border too all sort of like a mini European Union.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the major 1988 earthquake that hit Armenia the country has been stuck in a state of perpetual poverty when compared to Western standards. Now what this economic union will do is bring wealth and prosperity to both nations and though it may not be an apology it is a thaw, a step forward if you will and it will help to make Armenians whole again as they bask in their new found wealth.
A friend and I were arguing once about China. I declared that the Chinese were without freedom. Yes, my friend said, but they now have wealth and are happy. His response startled me but I thought yes that is true for the first time in its history its average people have a degree of wealth and are quite happy because of it. The same will be said of Armenia to some degree at least as far as modern history is concerned. They will not have an apology but they will be happy with their new found prosperity. Prosperity after all is what the Dalai Lama calls the key to happiness. And perhaps this wealth is a de facto apology from Turkey. Something that will suffice to the satisfaction of all until one day it leads to a Japanese style apology.
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