TURKISH JOURNALIST: HOW I FACED THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE –
May 23, 2014
By Rasim Ozan Kutahyali –
Another April 24 is coming around. A landmark in Middle Eastern
history, the date this year will mark the 99th anniversary of the
catastrophe of 1915. Ninety-nine years ago, one of the region’s
Christian peoples, the Armenians, fell victim to a great tragedy
they call Metz Yeghern, or genocide. A deep, insurmountable enmity
has haunted Turks and Armenians ever since, with tensions bound to
reach a crescendo next year, the centenary of the genocide. This year,
like those that went before, the spokespeople of various countries
will repeat their cliches. The annoying nonsense will go on.
Today, I tell of my own mental journey and the transformation of
conscience I experienced on this issue as a Turk. I speak of how I
faced up to the massacres of Armenians and Christians and how the
truth scarred my inner being. The road to acceptance was definitely
hard, but I eventually came to terms with the truth. The Armenians
were uprooted from the lands where I lived. Hundreds of thousands of
them were slain brutally on the orders of Talaat Pasha’s Young Turk
government. In the ensuing Kemalist era, Turkey’s Christians and Jews
were again expelled from their homeland. It was an unmistakable act of
ethnic cleansing, which the state I belonged to denied. Such denial,
on top of everything else, is shameful.
I was in high school when I first became curious about the events
of 1915. Our Kemalist teachers spoke of “Armenian allegations” and
“Armenian lies.” The Kemalist education we had received in earlier
grades had already instilled in me and my classmates an anti-Armenian
sentiment. Then, we were shown a government-sponsored documentary
according to which Turks, in fact, were the victims of genocide at
the hands of the Armenians.
The documentary was a ridiculous production, devoid of quality and
intellectual insight. I wasn’t convinced. On the other hand, being
the child of a Turkish family, I did not want to believe that “we”
slaughtered the Armenians. Turkey’s current official position —
It was not a massacre, but mutual killings — was in its fledgling
stages in the 1990s. To allay my own conscience, I endorsed this
thesis as the most credible one.
I began to read studies that supported the government’s version of
the events. Whenever the issue popped up, I insisted that there had
been no massacre, only mutual killing. During my university years,
I continued to read up on the issue, as it occasionally became a topic
of discussion and whetted my appetite to read more. Frankly, however,
I didn’t bother to read material from both sides, try to be objective
or fully seek the truth. To me, the truth was already in my mind:
An Armenian genocide never took place. The two peoples slaughtered
each other. Thus, my only purpose in reading was to reinforce the
“truth” I had already come to accept.
As the late Armenian luminary Hrant Dink used to point out, as a Turk
I was simply incapable of coming to terms with anything like genocide.
I could not bring myself to say, “Yes, we Turks slaughtered the
Armenians.” Dink argued that the urge toward denial was in fact a
natural human reaction. While on other political issues my thinking
matured into libertarian and democratic outlooks, on the Armenian
question I remained conditioned to insist that “It was mutual,” that
“Apologies should be extended on both sides,” that “It was a time of
war and there was no massacre, but mutual killings.”
Although I never read a study affirming the genocide, I gradually began
to sense that something was wrong with the pro-Turkish arguments. The
Turkish literature on the subject varied from “Nothing happened” to
“The killings were mutual” and ultimately to “Yes, it did happen,
but it was necessary.” At this point, I had a change of heart.
As a Turk, I might have felt the urge to delude myself, but to
endorse an argument that was more or less saying, “Yes, we did it,
and we were right to do so” seemed to me cruel and simply immoral.
The American scholar Justin McCarthy, whose work I read extensively at
the time, was a leading foreign supporter of the Turkish version. He
had the strong backing of the Turkish state and often visited Turkey
at Ankara’s invitation to make speeches here and there.
McCarthy did not deny the huge number of atrocities that resulted
from deportations, but concluded that if the deportations had not
taken place, the Turks would have lost eastern Anatolia. Therefore,
their actions were justified. This argument offered easy vindication
for Turks, most of whom might have been relieved to think it was the
right thing to do, after all.
As Dink also said, denying what happened or not believing in it was,
in a sense, a noble reaction. Most Turks probably harbor this sentiment
today. Yet, a large number of people tend to embrace the theory that
the Turks were in the right. This is terrible and truly shameful,
because it points to a cruel and immoral mindset that legitimizes
murder and mass killings.
In my case, even the pro-Turkish writings I read to delude myself
and relieve my conscience led me to eventually conclude that what
happened was a crime against humanity. Yet, at the same time, I came
to realize that labeling an entire nation as the butcher of another
is no less intellectual nonsense than the perspective of seeing an
enemy in each and every member of another nation. This holds true not
only in the Turkish-Armenian context, but also in the German-Jewish
and Serbian-Bosnian cases.
The real murderer is the mindset, not a nation, that justifies the
extermination of ethnic or religious groups from an allegedly lofty
purpose. It is such a revolting, results-oriented mindset that has
made possible all massacres and genocides, deeming all means legitimate
in achieving a purported sacred end. In regard to the events of 1915,
this morality- and conscience-deprived mindset emerged in the avatar
of the Young Turks ideology, embodied in Talaat, a man who saw people
as mere objects in his population-engineering designs.
So, that’s my personal story. I no longer deceive myself. What
happened in these lands in 1915 was a great tragedy, a genocide against
Armenians, a crime against humanity. Every “but …” argument about
this crime makes me nauseous.
AL MONITOR
Rasim Ozan Kutahyali has been a columnist for Sabah since 2011
after writing for Taraf from 2008 to 2011. He is a popular political
commentator on various TV programs, having started at CNNTurk and
now appearing on Beyaz TV. Kutahyali is known for his anti-militarist
and liberal political views.
From: A. Papazian
http://www.horizonweekly.ca/news/details/39002