At first sight it may seem a bit childish, but that is how the most serious and even incendiary political issues are handled in today’s Turkish diplomacy. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, comparing the attendance in terms of arithmetic between the centennial of the Armenian genocide in Yerevan and the centennial ceremonies of the Gallipoli campaign in the city of Canakkale (Dardanelles), said, “Thank God 20 heads of state came to ours, while two went to theirs.”
The calculation needs a slight correction: The number of heads of states at Yerevan was four, with President Vladimir Putin of Russia, President Francois Hollande of France and the presidents of Serbia and Cyprus, while the number who attended the Canakkale-Gallipoli event hosted by Erdogan was around 17.
The participants, in Erdogan's words, at “our event,” apart from Prince Charles of the United Kingdom and the Australian and New Zealand prime ministers whose countries see Dardanelles-Gallipoli 1915 as the foundation stone of their nation-building, were the heads of state of Ireland, Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Albania, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Iraq, Qatar, Djibouti, Somalia, Mali, Niger, South Sudan and Senegal.
If any outcome of politics and successful diplomacy can be measured by such numbers, Turkey — even if it is not 20 against 2 but 17 against 4 — has won a stunning political victory in terms of the competition of the centennials. One could say that in the contest of the “G-words,” Gallipoli won over the Genocide.
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