GUNAYSU: SILENCED BUT RESILIENT: A GROUNDBREAKING PANEL DISCUSSION IN ISTANBUL
Ayse Gunaysu
Tue, Aug 3 2010 | Published in Ayse Gunaysu,
It was an unusually hot and very exciting day, as it would be the first
time that the critics of Turkish intellectuals’ discourse about the
“Armenian issue” would voice their arguments at a public meeting in
Turkey where a face to face open discussion would take place around
topics hitherto hotly debated mainly in e-mail groups and other social
media channels.
L to R: Kentel, Adanir, Ayata, Erbal, and Bayraktar. (Photo by
Silvina Der Meguerditchian) As part of the two-day Hrant Dink
Memorial Workshop “Silenced but Resilient: Language and Memory in
Anatolia and Neighboring Regions,” organized jointly by the Sabanci
University in collaboration with Anadolu Kultur on May 27-28, a panel
discussion was held on the apology campaign. The panel was moderated
by historian Fikret Adanir, with the participation of Ferhat Kentel
and three resolute critics of the mainstream Turkish intelligentsia
on the Armenian “issue”: Ayda Erbal from the New York University,
Seyhan Bayraktar from the University of Zurich, and Bilgin Ayata from
John Hopkins University.
In recent years I have found myself developing a mental picture of
certain high-profile Turkish critics of the official Turkish thesis on
the Armenian issue as a community communicating and interacting within
a closed micro-cosmos. The main characteristics of this micro-cosmos
appear to be self-complacency-naturally resulting in a lack of
receptiveness to the signals coming from the outer world-intolerance
to criticism, and when faced with any criticism, a strong reaction of
indignation. Their reaction has reminded me, time and again, of the
outrage of those who feel themselves victimized by the ungratefulness
of those for whom they put themselves at risk “in a country like
Turkey”-referring to the backwardness of the Turksih society and the
risks in the face of the overwhelming ultra-nationalism. (No need to
say that these Turkish intellectuals who criticize the official Turkish
thesis on 1915 do face risks: some of them are being prosecuted,
some are continuously receiving death threats. But, no need also to
say that this should not grant anybody immunity from criticism.)
So, this was the first time that critics of certain Turkish
intellectuals would speak in a public gathering in Turkey. Word was
circulating that there had been an attempt by Prof. Baskin Oran to
prevent the participation of the above-mentioned three academics in
the workshop. Then came the news that the organizers had rebuffed
the attempt. Therefore the mere fact that the panel would take place
anyhow was in itself a declaration of commitment by the organizers
to a sound academic stance.
Bayraktar: ‘Reproduction of the nationalist discourse’ When the time
came for the panel discussion in question, the room had already been
packed with an audience eager to listen to what the three voices had
to say.
First spoke Seyhan Bayraktar. Her presentation, titled “Politics,
Memory, Language: Changes, Continuties and Breaks in the Discourse
about the Armenian Genocide in Turkey,” was a critical review of how
the Turkish political and public discourse about the annihilation of
Armenians developed from the 1970s until 2005. Her main argument was
that despite the increased visibility of the Armenian issue in Turkey,
which indicated a liberalization of the public sphere, a critical
discourse about the nation’s past had not replaced the denial of the
systematic extermination of the Anatolian Armenians. “In contrast,”
she said, ” I argue that the former denial discourse has turned much
more sophisticated today. The state has adopted new strategies to
block genocide acknowledgements while discourse patterns that served
denial purposes have turned out particularly pervasive and resistant
even under different political and social contexts.”
Based on an empirical analysis of media texts, Bayraktar stated that
despite relative liberalization, dominant nationalistic discourse
frames have survived over time and were carried by a broader range
of social and political actors than they were in the 1970s and 1980s.
“This robustness of discourse frames under different political contexts
has lead to the paradoxical outcome that even critics of the Turkish
state’s politics of the past use discourse frames that have originally
been invented by state actors as argumentative tools to relativize and
deny the genocidal character of 1915 in Turkey’s foreign relations.”
Bayraktar gave as an example the alternative Armenian conference
organized in 2005 at the Bilgi University, which was “the first
attempt in its kind to critically address the Armenian issue within
Turkey,” she underlined. The conference, reminded Bayraktar, coincided
with a change in the Turkish government’s Armenian policy. While the
traditional approach was reactive, developing a strategy in reaction
to international genocide resolutions or other events, starting from
the 2000’s the official policy became proactive, mainly due to the
pressure from Europe. In anticipation of the 90th anniversary of the
Armenian Genocide, the Turkish government started to take steps to
counter the outside pressure. The Turkish government’s direct contact
with Armenia to set up a joint history committee and the Turkish
National Assembly’s letter to the British Parliament to denounce the
Blue Book as collection of fake documents were the two milestones in
this process.
Giving a brief account of the heated debate over the conference,
Bayraktar referred to the most common accusation used by the right-wing
conservative front, namely “backstabbing” and “treason”-accusations
which were most vehemently rejected by the accused party, the left
and liberals. However, while strongly reacting against the accusations
as a manifestation of excluding everyone who questioned the dominant
discourse about the Armenian Genocide, the accused used the same
“national interest” discourse to defend themselves. They mainly
argued that in fact they were the ones who upheld the interests of
the nation. Bayraktar said: “Although the counter-discourse blamed
the nationalist and exclusivist approach of traditional elites using
‘traitorship,’ it was itself very much built on a deeply nationalist
logic and rhetoric. The attempt was to turn the table round and claim
that it was the sympathizers of the conference who were seeking for
the ‘real’ good of the nation. Thus the alternative and liberals
voices did not challenge the nationalist approach to the history of
1915 in essence and its fundaments. Instead, liberals, who criticized
the state and state actors for not confronting the Armenian issue as
open as necessary, reproduced and legitimized themselves the central
logics of the nationalist discourse.”
Although Bayraktar explicitly acknowledged the significant progress in
Turkey as regards public discussion of the topic, her presentation was
in fact an impressive warning to Turkish intellectuals against the use
of the same discursive patterns while objecting the dominant official
ideology about what happened in 1915. “Despite the immense dynamics of
the Armenian issue in the public arena of Turkey the examples above
have tentatively shown the deficits of the developments: Turkish
public intellectuals have not been able to set up a counter-discourse
stressing the need for coming to terms with the past and reconciliation
as such. Instead, by giving-in and using the same rhetoric strategies
they have reproduced and legitimized nationalist discourse frames,”
she concluded.
Erbal: An apology? Ayda Erbal started her presentation by acknowledging
that the intellectuals’ attempt at an apology was a remarkable but at
the same time problematic process. Reminding the current meaning of
apology (“an encounter between two parties offender/offended” where the
offender acknowledges responsibility for an offense or grievance and
express regret or remorse to the aggrieved party) she then gave a brief
account of how the “apology” concept had been dealt with by scholars,
making references to various writers such as Nicholas Tavuchis, Aaron
Lazare and Nick Smith. She said the general tendency in the literature
in this field was to make a binary distinction based on certain
established criteria between apologies and non-apologies. In case
of the Turkish apology campaign, following Nick Smith’s work, Erbal
said, she is also interested in meanings transferred notwithstanding
whether Turkish intellectuals’ apology satisfies the requirements of
a categorical apology. Referring to the criteria suggested by Aaron
Lazarre, which are (i) explanation of the offense; (ii) expression
of shame/guilt/humility/sincerity; (iii) intention not to commit the
offense again; and (iv)-reparations to the offended party, she said of
the Turkish apology campaign: “This one would not be an apology even if
it were formulated to solve a personal problem between two individuals,
as it meets none of the criteria of a categorical apology, even failing
short in correctly identifying the offense itself and the offender,”
explaining that in order for it to be a categorical apology it had
to satisfy all requirements plus what was also needed/asked by the
aggrieved party. Moreover, she noted that due to a lack of clarity
in language and lack of agency (the drafters had not mentioned who
perpetrated the crime were, nor its deniers) and finally the usage
of the passive voice reminded her what Haaretz journalist Amira Haas
called “language laundromat” where language becomes a laundromat to
white wash institutional crimes and responsibilities. She also added
the usage of the G-word did not matter in this case, even if they did
use the actual word, the text would still not satisfy a categorical
apology. However she did emphasize that the choice of Mezd Yeghern
was altogether significant regardless of whether the text could be
regarded as an apology or not, because among many Armenian words
describing the 1915 events, its Turkish equivalent, buyuk feleket,
was a term which was the most vague and most ambiguous one. A term that
conveniently left the agency-the entity who committed the crime-out.
Another important point she made was that the campaign was Jacobinist
in nature. She said it was Jacobinist in its approach to both the
offended and the offender party. In case of Turks, the Jacobinism
lied in the fact that it was dictated from above without any attempt
to broaden the base of participants in drafting or pre-apology
deliberation, it didn’t care for inclusiveness and involvement of
as many people as possible-unlike the very horizontal experience of
“Sorry Books” in Australia where many took part in an apology campaign
personally by writing their own apologies in empty notebooks. These
were ordinary Australians who wanted to do something in response
to the Federal Government’s refusal to formally apologize to the
Stolen Generations. Regarding Jacobinism towards Armenians, which
Erbal said was worse, the organizers didn’t make any effort to get in
touch with representative bodies of the Armenians, to gain an insight
into what they really want or need from an apology, or whether they
need an apology from individual Turkish citizens altogether. Instead,
by mandating the term, hence normalizing the discourse, freezing it
around the term Medz Yeghern, they left no space for any input from the
offended party. By preempting an apology on whose terms the offended
and the “offender” did not agree, the campaign organizers created
a de facto setting where if the offended party (Armenians) rejects
the “apology,” they would look bad and end up being portrayed as the
hostile and aggressive party despite the fact that the preemption of
this kind of unasked for apology on whose terms the offended and the
“offender” did not agree upon, is a symbolically violent endeavor to
begin with.
Erbal also discussed the organizers’ justification of the choice of
the word. One argument was that the word Genocide had been overly
politicized and the other was that the Turkish public felt threatened
by the term. She said the first was in fact a “non-argument” in that
the politicization of the term was irrelevant, as the Genocide was
itself a political phenomenon and over politicization or over-usage
would not necessarily mean it would lose meaning and certainly
instrumentalizing a very dear, very private term people use to express
their pain also means politicizing it, so in that sense, it’s not
politics or politicization that’s the problem here, the problem is
rather a particular politics of genocide recognition. The second,
she commented, was what they call “non-sequitur” in logic-which means
lack of any connection between the assumption and the conclusion,
she said “even if the assumption that the G-word frightens Turkish
citizens were correct this cannot be used to explain as the reason to
chose the term Mezd Yeghern amongst numerous words used by Armenians
to describe what happened in 1915.
Erbal made one passing comment that I value and attach great importance
to. She said that that sincerity, good intentions, emotions (which,
many believed, was an important reason to support the campaign) were
all irrelevant for her work as a political scientist. She said that
despite the fact that she understood people’s sincere attachment to
the issue and their feelings and that she did not feel herself in a
position to question thirty thousand people’s sincerity; friendship
and brotherhood/sisterhood discourse did not mean much in terms of
citizens’ demand for institutional commitments. She added that she
had been hearing these since her childhood and nothing has changed in
the institutional mindset of the state in terms of its perceptions of
its minorities. She still doesn’t feel herself equal and her actual
condition as a non-equal citizen is the reason why we should talk
about truth and justice in equal terms, preferably not adding insult
to injury by dictating the terms of an apology from above. Hence
without justice on whose terms parties should agree upon no-one can
be equal since the Armenian is still ingrained as the fifth column in
the state’s institutional mindset because of the exact same painful
history.
Ayata: ‘Absolute denial replaced by a policy of regulation’ Ayata
started with his argument that the discourses on reconciliation
occur as separate and isolated themes for the Armenian, Kurdish,
Alevi, Dersim issues, arguing that this compartmentalization is
a central weakness of the reconciliation process. According to
Ayata, this compartmentalization was not accidental but reflected
a continuation of a divide and rule mentality, which effectively
contributed to an existing power asymmetry by consolidating Turkish
intellectuals and interlocutors as the main reference point while
the marginalized/excluded groups’ position remained precarious
single cases.
Looking into the case of “compartmentalization” closer by giving
examples to how the Kurdish, Alevi and Dersim issues were dealt with,
Ayata drew attention to the fact that the politics of total/absolute
denial in Turkey was “crumbling.” She continued by saying: “Because
the costs of crude denial have become too much for the state in the
course of the increased internationalization of politics. However,
this shift away from crude denial has not lead to a politics of
acknowledgement. Instead there is a shift from a politics of denial
to a policy of regulation.”
As for some intellectuals in Turkey, Ayata argued that they had chosen
a role to navigate the state out of the mess that denial had caused.
Instead of problematizing the solutions and the regulatory approach of
the state, she commented, their actions were in compliance with the
regulatory approach that were often justified with the argument that
“Turkey was not ready for more”. “Their concern with nation’s least
collateral damage prevails over the quest for justice, acknowledgement
and truth seeking,” she said.
Ayata acknowledged that now it was more possible to talk about not
only the Armenian genocide, but also on the displacement of Kurds
than 10 years ago, and this was without doubt an important improvement.
“Yet at the same time,” she continued, “there are strict limits to
the discourse: for instance, it is possible to talk about the Kurdish
issue, but the term Kurdistan can hardly be used, except it relates to
the Kurdish regional government in Iraq. Similarly the term genocide
continues to be a highly controversial term, that can be used without
restriction when talking about Palestine, but is to be circumvented
at all costs when talking about 1915, or 1938.”
Criticizing the apology campaign, Ayata said the choice of the term
“Great Catastrophe” was a “great ignorance” towards those to whom the
apology is extended to. “After all, what was the one political claim
that united Armenians around the world if it was not the recognition
of the Genocide?” she asked and continued: “The reason often given by
progressive intellectuals for this discursive limitation when talking
about the events of 1915, is that the Turkish society and politics
are apparently not ready for more at this point. This marginalizes
and delegitimizes those who already have been using this term.”
Ayata questioned the reason for the mainstream Turkish intellectuals
to systematically refuse the use of the term Genocide. “It is
worthwhile to remember that since the Jewish genocide, the entire
development of German and European philosophy more or less evolved
around questions how and why the Holocaust was possible, and what
its responsibility entails for mankind,” she went on. “On a political
level, it entailed for German intellectuals and politicians almost an
unconditional commitment and feeling of responsibility for the Jewish
Diaspora. In Turkey, instead, some intellectuals have even actively
participated in Diaspora bashing, in which the Armenian community in
Turkey are portrayed as ‘good Armenians, our Armenians’ as they are
perceived harmless, while the Diaspora Armenians with their claims
for justice and recognition of the genocide are ousted as hawks and
ultra-nationalists. This is not too different when targeting some
Kurdish politicians also as hawks. One should not forget that the line
between sahin [Turkish word for “hawk”] and hain [Turkish word for
“traitor”] is highly thin.”
An explosion of indignation in the face of criticism While listening
to them I was also observing the audience, how they listened to
these criticisms and how they took it, as nearly half of them were
the ones who either initiated, or actively supported the apology
campaign and some took part in the organization of the alternative
Armenian conference at Bilgi University. I could see only half of
the room applauded the three women academics. When it was time for
the question and answer session, the first to speak was Prof. Selim
Deringil, a prominent Turkish historian highly appreciated by many
because of his questioning the official theses, one of the organisers
of the alternative Armenian conference in the Bilgi University and also
one of the first supporters of the apology campaign. He sounded deeply
offended and agitated, spoke indignantly, and said Seyhan Bayraktar
had insulted them, the intellectuals who were criticized in her talk,
by portraying them as the “state intellectuals.” He said she was
unfair and offensive towards them, completing his intervention with
an incredible comment: You were writing your papers abroad while we
did everything here by taking all the risks!
But, for me, one of the most striking moments of the whole event was
when a high-volume exclamation of reproach rose from the audience
across the room. That moment was a consolation for me after the
embarrassing statement by Deringil. My consolation was consolidated
by Prof. Fikret Adanir’s reproach to Deringil. Adanir said that this
was a scholarly meeting where such subjective comments should not be
tolerated. Deringil’s words were a very good example of what I said
above about the connection between the indignation and ungratefulness.
Others asking questions and expressing their own views on the topic
during the question and answer session were by no means as aggressive,
but many expressed disappointment at what they viewed as a lack of
appreciation of their efforts.
It was a significant experience not only for me and for those who
agree with Bayraktar, Ayata and Erbal, but, I believe, also for many
others who disagree with them. I know-based on my post-conference
encounters-that even many of those who felt offended by their criticism
were impressed, or at least felt themselves in a position to take
into account a very different perspective. Mine was a fulfillment of
hearing in a public discussion arguments which until then had been
suppressed because of various concerns-concerns such as seeing it a
duty to support every attempt, even the slightest ones, that would
hopefully undermine the official ideology.
There is a lot to discuss as the matter needs a much greater mental
freedom on the part of us, those who live and work here in Turkey to
elaborate in greater depth on how to fight back the powerful denial
mechanism in Turkey. Furthermore, truth is not monolithic, on the
contrary, it is very fragmented, many times, paradoxical. There may be
truth in opposing arguments and more than one opposing argument can
carry truth in itself. For example I believe the mainstream Turkish
intelligentsia whom we criticize most do play a part in the sluggish
change that Turkey has been undergoing (in fact the part they play
is much greater than that of the marginal elements such as myself
and our Human Rights Association). When we think of the terrible
ignorance and deeply rooted commonplace nationalism of millions of
people in Turkey, we can better see the dialectics of life, I mean,
how even the most inadequate and poorly formulated attempts contribute
to the change we long for.
My confused thoughts in a very confused environment of Turkey often
come to a conclusion that the laws of life will have their own say
in the historical process of change. On the one hand, there will
be the timid and conciliatory criticisms aiming to trigger question
marks in the minds of onlookers and bystanders, but at the same time
reproducing the official discourses, hence slowing down the process.
On the other hand, quite simultaneously-and thankfully-there will be
Bayraktars, Erbals, and Ayatas who will ask for more, and pave the
way for an uncompromising fight against lies and denial. I feel that
it will be these contesting forces that will turn the wheels of change.
From: A. Papazian
http://www.armenianweekly.com/2010/08/03/gunaysu-silenced-but-resilient-a-groundbreaking-panel-discussion-in-istanbul/