Today’s Zaman, Turkey
Aug 24 2007

A recent statement made by President of the Turkish Historical
Society (TTK) Professor Yusuf Halaçoðlu that 100,000 Armenians
changed their identities and became Alevi Kurds is still being
debated. While some accuse Professor Halaçoðlu of engaging in
fascist discrimination against people’s ethnic-religious backgrounds,
some support the voicing of this fact by a venerable figure at the
head of a scientific board. I want to take sides neither with the
first group nor with the second. However, I must state at the outset
that I find this debate beneficial so long as it is carried out on
grounds that will result in benefits for our country and democracy.
These lands are where massive social-historical traumas have been
suffered. It’s very obvious that the painful collapse of a great
empire like the Ottoman state has left behind deep scars that are
difficult to heal. While the Muslim Turks started suffering from a
`shrinking’ trauma toward the end of the 19th century with wars and
revolts, this trauma, as a result of World War I, turned into the
greatest obligatory withdrawal in their history. Confined to a piece
of land (Anatolia) that was very small compared to the imperial
geography they were used to for 600 years, Turks developed very
serious doubts about the non-Muslim peoples — their former subjects
— who played direct and indirect roles in the tragic events that
eventually caused this great withdrawal.

On the contrary, it has been a long-known fact that non-Muslims,
fearing the possibility of being called to account for the support
they gave to imperialist countries during the process of breaking up
the empire — and those of them who did not want to be the target of
this great doubt despite their innocence — disguised themselves by
hiding in new identities in this traumatic era. And on top of this
trauma, the poll tax applied only to minorities in the time of the
fascist National Chief (Ýsmet Ýnönü) in the 1940s. The labor camps
must have also catered to this lack of confidence. And to top it all,
we should mention the Minorities Commission, where the state’s
intelligence units and other institutions acted together and whose
activities turned the lives of the minorities into hell up until a
few years ago.

Turkey, with a past that feeds such mutual doubts and unable so far
to cover the distance required in the areas of democratic maturity,
human rights and transparency, is turning into the great hall of a
`masked ball,’ where the disguised identities dance. The trouble is
that people’s painstaking efforts to disguise their real identities,
which is not seen in any healthy society, are not without valid
grounds.

What’s more, disguised identities are not limited to non-Muslims. I’m
guessing there is nobody who doesn’t know that a great number of
practicing Muslims employed in public institutions have to hide their
piety for fear of being dismissed. This is a country where officers
whose only crime is to fulfill some of their religious duties are
expelled from the Turkish Armed Forces with no chance of appealing to
a court, although 99 percent of its population consists of Muslims.
Unfortunately, our level of democracy is at such a low that it forces
not only non-Muslim minorities but also a certain segment of Muslim
Turks to hide their identities. And it is for sure that those who are
forced into hiding their identities are not responsible for this.

Conversely, the disguised identities deprive society of the
confidence of transparency, as well as being a very grave problem in
itself. It also brings about deep doubts as to the risk that those
who have to hide their identities may enter into an alliance and
transform that alliance into action. And these doubts deepen further
whenever a party’s road is blocked through illegal and
anti-democratic methods despite the people’s choice, or whenever a
movement greatly bolstered by the people is subjected to efforts to
denigrate and cripple it. The classical reasoning puts the efforts to
keep the values adopted and supported by a big majority of people as
far away from the administration mechanisms as possible, down to the
secret agenda and efforts of these disguised identities. There is no
greater danger than this situation, which sows discord between the
people and the state and among segments of society.

However, we should leave behind the traumas caused by the painful
tragedies of the past. It is a must to establish a constitutional
citizenship whereby Turks, Kurds, Alevis, Armenians, Jews, Greeks,
religious people, atheists and all others will be treated as equal
citizens regardless of their identities and will claim roles in the
development of the country.

It’s high time that we became a transparent and tolerant society
where people will not need to disguise their identities in public
administration as well as in the civil sphere, and where all sorts of
discrimination and mutual doubts will be banished, thereby attaining
a real democracy and a real secularism.

24.08.2007