November 25, 2011 6:00 pm
Taboos around Ataturk era begin to crumble
By Daniel Dombey in Istanbul and Funja Guler in Ankara
At five past nine on the morning of November 10, much of Turkey came to a
stop. People clambered out of their cars; pedestrians hung their heads.
Schools and offices fell silent.
The annual moment of remembrance was to mark the death in office in 1938 of
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey.
Some nine decades after Ataturk fought off foreign powers, unified Turkey
and established a secular republic in the wake of the Ottoman Empire, his
face still gazes down from photographs in just about every shop and office
in the land.
But despite such acts of near-universal reverence for its national hero,
Turkey has unleashed a fierce debate about the early years of the republic.
Taboos about the flaws – and crimes – of Ataturk’s era are beginning
to
crumble.
This week Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, made history by
apologising for the killing, in the province of Dersim in 1937 and 1938, of
thousands of people at the hands of the state.
For a country that has long valued strong leaders – and has proved
reluctant to say sorry – it was an unprecedented step.
Levent Koker of Turkey’s Gazi university says a more open-minded approach
to the country’s early history has allowed greater debate of other formerly
taboo topics – including Turkey’s resistance to describing *the Ottoman-era
massacres of Armenians as `genocide’.*
The deaths in Dersim – Mr Erdogan said 13,806 people were killed and more
than 11,000 put to flight – came during a campaign against what has long
been depicted as a revolt by Kurds and members of the Alawite sect. But the
action is increasingly seen as being part of the forced `Turkification’ of
the era.
*Ataturk’s adopted[, ethnic Armenian] daughter, Sabiha Gokcen *- a fighter
pilot after whom Istanbul’s second airport is named – carried out
low-altitude bombing raids during the campaign.
In the 1980s, the late Ihsan Sabri Caglayangil, a former foreign minister
and security official, said the military had sprayed poisoned gas into
caves in Dersim, killing people `like rats’.
But the recent debate flared into life when Huseyin Aygun, a member of
parliament from Tunceli province, as Dersim is known today, said the
country’s founder was aware of the massacre.
Mr Aygun is a member of Ataturk’s Republican People’s party (CHP), which is
now in opposition and which has been thrown on to the defensive by the
debate and, in particular, Mr Erdogan’s apology.
Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the party’s leader, is from Tunceli and had relatives
killed. But many CHP members and supporters resist attempts to bring the
party and Ataturk himself into the debate.
`We know from our parents that it wasn’t an easy thing to establish a new
republic,’ said an elderly lady walking by the Ataturk mausoleum in Ankara.
Declining to give her name, she added: `There were riots in different
places – you couldn’t take risks.’
Many other episodes in Turkey’s early history await greater debate, from
show trials in the republic’s first years to wartime expropriations from
Turkey’s Jewish population and riots in the 1950s that chased almost all
the remaining Greeks from Istanbul.
In a supermarket in Ankara, Pinar, a sales representative, expressed doubts
about Mr Erdogan’s motives, but also showed her discontent with the old way
of talking about Turkey’s early years. `We were told there was an uprising
and that it was quelled; we didn’t ask why or how many people [were
killed],’ she said. `They didn’t let us be curious. We knew as much as they
wanted us to.’
From: A. Papazian
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/ac5bad06-177c-11e1-b20e-00144feabdc0.html