WHY ERDOGAN IS ‘ARMENIAN-MINDED’
Hurriyet Daily News
Nov 29 2011
Turkey
Last week, Kemal Kılıcdaroglu, the leader of Turkey’s all-secularist
main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), gave a furious speech
at Parliament.
He particularly targeted Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, saying:
“The mental map of the prime minister of this country is the same
with that of the Armenian Diaspora. His job is to protect unity, but
he is trying to create divisions in society. He is so wild-eyed that
do not be surprised if he imposes the Armenian genocide allegations
onto this nation soon.”
What made Kılıcdaroglu so angry was the “apology on behalf of the
state” that Erdogan voiced for the massacres that the Turkish state
perpetrated against the Alevi Kurdish tribes of Dersim in the late
1930s. (The city is now known as Tunceli. It was renamed by law in
1935.) Most liberals have welcomed Erdogan’s apology, for this is
really a first in the Republic’s history: So far, statesmen had always
maintained the state makes no mistakes. Erdogan, however, acknowledged
not just a mistake but a “massacre,” and even apologized for it.
Of course, sensible people realize this might be the beginning of a
new era in which ugly truths in near history, including what really
happened to the Armenians in 1915, might be faced. As the cult of the
state unravels, the ghosts from the past will emerge from where they
are locked by the state.
The tragicomical thing is that Kılıcdaroglu should be more sensitive
about the Dersim issue than Erdogan, for he himself is from the city.
However, like many other Dersimians, his commitment to Kemalism
has blinded him to the crimes of Kemalism. For decades, the Alevis
of Tunceli were made to believe that “Ataturk did not know about
the massacres,” and the real culprit was the “Sunni prejudice”
against them. Consequently, they have become lovers of their own
killers. Some Turkish liberals have dubbed this as the Alevi version
of the Stockholm Syndrome.
What makes Erdogan more sensitive to Dersim, despite the “Sunni
prejudice” that really exists in his party to some extent, is that
he represents a segment of Turkish society that has felt oppressed by
the state for decades. That is why he has a strong sense of solidarity
with the oppressed, which can be seen globally in his support for the
Palestinians in Gaza, the Egyptians in Tahrir or the Syrians in Hama.
Within Turkey, too, Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party
(AKP) have clashed with the Kemalist state establishment, which they
see as the cause of many injustices Turkey has suffered in the past
century. The suffering of pious Muslims was the AKP’s main concern,
but the distance this concern put between them and the establishment
created a new space in which all past crimes of the state could be
discussed. That is the main reason why Turkey’s liberals, who have
very little popular support, have supported the AKP, albeit sometimes
half-heartedly. The Kemalists, on the other hand, have blamed the
AKP for being not only too Islamic but also too unpatriotic.
In other words, Kılıcdaroglu’s recent outburst on Erdogan’s
“Armenian-mindedness” is just one example of a common pattern. Last
year, one of the deputies of his party, Ensar Ogut, had blamed Foreign
Minister Ahmet Davutoglu for deserving to be called “Davutyan,”
clearly implying an Armenian origin. Canan Arıtman, another CHP
deputy, had made headlines in 2009 by claiming President Abdullah Gul,
a former AKP minister, was a “secret Armenian.”
The truth, however, is less conspiratorial. The AKP, out of its own
political values and interests, has challenged the cult of the state
that permeated Turkey since the 1920s. And the Kemalists, whose minds
are not open to think outside of that cult, cannot just get what is
really happening.