As we are on the eve of the centenary of the Armenian deportations that took place in 1915, all eyes are on the U.S. and European capitals, as they are ahead of April 24 every year. After Pope Francis called the 1915 incidents genocide, the European Parliament also passed a resolution recognizing the events as genocide. It is a matter of curiosity what U.S. President Barack Obama will say this April 24, considering his previous remark where he described the 1915 incidents as the "Meds Yeghern," Armenian for "great calamity."Although I used the word curiosity above, Turks no longer pay attention to April 24, which has turned into a ceremony, since there is a prevailing opinion that the descriptions used for the 1915 incidents have nothing to do with history. For almost all people of Turkey, the matter does not go beyond judging the day based on history. Moreover, this conviction also prevails among Armenian citizens, who are aware that their sorrow has been made an instrument of the current politics. They are not wrong at all in this belief, as all of us know that whenever Turkey begins improving its economy and taking independent steps in foreign policy, discussions about genocide escalate. Figuratively speaking, the U.S. and Europe are using the genocide card as a whip.

What I have said thus far might seem like subjective comments to readers, but I think no one can assert that Western politicians who describe the incident as genocide have objective reference points. Moreover, today they strive to discipline the modern Turkish state with threats of recognizing Turkey as responsible for genocide, rather than the Ottoman Empire, which witnessed the 1915 incidents. Over the course of time, Turkey has become a country where tens of thousands of Armenians live in safety in politics, economy and the arts. Furthermore, for the upcoming general elections, three parties in Parliament, including the ruling party, have Armenian deputy candidates, and Etyen Mahçupyan, a senior political advisor to Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, is also an Armenian. Above all, the Turkish state has considerably abandoned its previous rejectionist reflexes about 1915. Last year while he was still prime minister, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan overtly commemorated the "sorrows experienced in 1915" on April 24. In his message published earlier in the week, Davutoğlu used the phrase "common sorrows experienced in WWI conditions." The Davutoğlu government is expected to be represented at the highest level at the commemoration ceremony that will be held at the Armenian Patriarchate in Istanbul on April 24.

In brief, neither the Turkish state nor the people of Turkey deny the common sorrows of 1915. What annoys them is that this tragic incident, which was experienced during WWI in the Ottoman Empire, is being attached to the new Turkey as a legal taint. This is done by countries that should not say a word on the matter due to their own histories, which are full of slaughter.

The U.S. and Europe's recordsAs is known, genocide is a legal term, which was used for the first time by the U.N. to describe the systematic eradication campaign that Nazis waged against Jews before and after WWII. Therefore, it cannot legally be used to describe controversial incidents that took place before this date. Furthermore, since the U.N. made the definition, there have been many incidents that completely meet the requirements of genocide and that still have living witnesses.

Article Two of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide adopted by the U.N. in 1948 is as follows:

"[G]enocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

l Killing members of the group;

Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

This definition is cut out for the U.S.'s operations that claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Vietnam, Cambodia, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan and many other countries. The same applies to other European countries such as the U.K., France, Italy and Spain. One recent example of the double standards of the West, whose record is riddled with crimes, is that it remains silent while Syrian President Bashar Assad slaughtered some 150,000 civilians, and used chemical weapons in concentration camps before the eyes of the world. The tragedy of hundreds of Middle Easterners who are left for dead by ignoring refugee laws and rights in European territorial waters day in and day out, are going down in history as the genocide stories of today.

The U.S. and Europe should realize they are incapable of seeing their own crimes and should give up trying to shape Middle Eastern policies by exploiting century-old sorrows, because in each period of history, it has been very costly to use the common values of humanity for one's own purposes.