ERBAL: A TALE OF TWO MONUMENTS
by Ayda Erbal
May 18, 2012
An Extremely Belated Anatomy of Two Radically Understudied Makings and
One Unmaking
The Armenian Weekly Magazine
April 2012
PREAMBLE
The annals of Turkish-Armenian “rapprochement,” “reconciliation,”
“initiative,” and “dialogue” marked Jan. 8, 2011 as the day when
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the Monument of
“Humanity” by Mehmet Aksoy in Kars a freak (ucube), overshadowing
a nearby Islamic shrine, and ordered its demolition. This position
would later be supported by Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on
aesthetic grounds: “Kars has an architectural tradition inherited
from the Ottomans and the Seljuks. This monument does not reflect
that architecture. It does not befit these architectural aesthetics.
The Monument of Humanity in Kars. (Photo by Khatchig Mouradian)
Works in compliance with the architectural heritage of the region
should be constructed,” he said.1 Sculptor Mehmet Aksoy, hailed by
Today’s Zaman columnist Yavuz Baydar as “a very well-known and deeply
respected artist in EU circles,”2 said his work “carries anti-war
and friendship messages” and added, “I depicted the situation of a
person that is divided in two. This person will be ‘himself ‘ again
when these two pieces are reunited. I want to express this. … You
cannot immediately label this a ‘monstrosity.’ It is shameful and
unjust. One should understand what it says first.” He was right in
that one should have understood what the monument itself meant, or
even how the history and construction of the monument evolved, in the
context of domestic Turkish politics or the larger Turkish-Armenian
relationship, before taking a pro/con position. Alas, this was hardly
the case for either the Turkish or, for that matter, Armenian press.
According to Kars Mayor Nevzat BozkuÅ~_, “a commission of the Ministry
of Culture and Tourism had earlier decided to demolish the monument
after it emerged that the statue was illegally constructed in a
protected area.”3 Strangely enough, the monument was commissioned
by no other than the former mayor of Kars, Naif Alibeyoglu, himself
then elected on an AKP (the ruling Justice and Development Party)
ticket during the 2004 municipal elections.
In the following week, Erdogan reacted strongly against accusations
that he was not qualified to appreciate the arts, or that he was an
enemy of the arts, like the Taliban who in 2001 dynamited the ancient
Buddhas of Bamyan in Afghanistan. Erdogan claimed he had “warned the
mayor when the construction of the monument began,” that the “Natural
and Cultural Heritage Preservation Agency also decided to destroy
the monument,” and that “it was mayor’s responsibility to implement
the decision.”4 He also said, “It is not necessary to graduate from
Fine Arts. We know what a monument is. I worked as a mayor for 4.5
years and as a prime minister for 7.5 years. I have never destroyed
a single statue or a work of art.”5
Echoing Davutoglu’s seemingly aesthetic concerns, Erdogan also argued
that “[t]he dome of the [Seyyit Hassan el Harkani] mosque and the
hilltop that hosts the statue are at an equal height. Then you have
a 48-meter-high statue on the hilltop. You can’t allow construction
to overshadow such a historic building.”6
As is typical with debates involving the Turkish political
spectrum–which now also unfortunately misinforms the Armenian public
sphere with its reductio ad absurdum binary nature devoid of any real
substance–the country immediately got divided among “conservative”
“nationalist hawks” (to whom Erdogan was supposedly catering to secure
AKP seats in Kars in the upcoming elections7) and “non-nationalist”
“progressive” “doves” (who wholeheartedly embraced both the statue’s
concept and implementation).
The debates also problematically legitimized a whole array of
politically national-socialist conservative artists, including the
sculptor himself and Bedri Baykam (the former, an avid defender of the
national-socialist Dogu Perincek line; the latter, an avid Kemalist
who fell out with Perincek and later penned an open letter in which
he dismissed Perincek of “leftism” and “Kemalism”)8. Five months into
the “freak/monstrosity” debates and during the electoral season, the
“peace-loving” sculptor baptized the Talat Pasha March organized by
Perincek–an Ergenekon suspect and genocide denier–in Switzerland as
a saga of heroism in a TV program aired by Ulusal Kanal, the channel
associated with Perincek’s national-socialist Labor Party. In an
interview with Funda Tosun of Agos, Aksoy claimed the Labor Party’s
Aydınlık newspaper had twisted his words from the program, even
though Tosun confronted him, saying she had watched the original TV
excerpt.9 Aksoy would also come to say that his monument was wanted by
Armenians in Armenia, implying it was legitimate. Pressed further,
he’d twist his own words into a typical “I’m for all freedoms”
line that can qualify for the most famous not-properly-challenged
empty-signifier in Turkey. As if the issue discussed on the TV program
was one of cherishing freedoms and not of glorifying mass murderers,
Aksoy said, “I fight for freedoms, I participate in Dink marches, and
I fight for Dogu Perincek.” Unfortunately what Armenians in Armenia
and the diaspora knew or didn’t know about the sculptor’s politics
or how the former mayor and the artist defended their project was
less important than scoring hackneyed political points against Turkey
(and, in the case of Turkish “progressives,” against the AKP).
In Responsibility and Judgment, Hannah Arendt recounts how the debates
about Eichmann in Jerusalem ended up being “a controversy about a book
that was never written”; then she refers to the words of an Austrian
wit: “There is nothing so entertaining as the discussion of a book
nobody read.” The non-substantial quarrel and campaigns surrounding
the Monument of “Humanity” were precisely that. As the proverbial
bookmark of the book-nobody-read-but-everybody-discussed, the cherry
on the cake, the co-chair of the EU-Turkey Joint Parliamentary
Committee Hélène Flautre, visited the sculptor and joked, “Kars
should be chosen as the European Capital of Culture in order to save
the sculptures.”10 We should all be thankful that her proposition–a
much funnier joke than Flautre then likely realized–indeed did
remain a joke. If it were not for Erdogan, who pushed forth the
execution of a former decision by the Erzurum Regional Directorate
of Pious Foundations, for a seemingly nationalist political agenda,
Armenians and others, with the ideological guidance of their Turkish
“progressive” friends, would have baptized the sculptor who applauded
the Talat Pasha demonstrations in Switzerland, as the poster child
for peace and Turkish-Armenian “re”conciliation.
Barring the pro-AKP director Sinan Cetin, who agreed with Erdogan on
his aesthetic choice11, and a few scholars12 hinting on the margins
about the aesthetic value or political meaning of the statue, a
well-rehearsed but one-dimensional “Art can’t be destroyed” drumbeat
started against the destruction of the “statue” of “humanity,” and
even led to a comparison of Erdogan’s move to “Entartate Kunst”
exhibition of the Third Reich,13 a periodical analogy that some
Turkish journalists throw in once in a while, nonchalantly, to spice
up their exaggerated arguments against the authoritarian policies of
the AKP.14,15
Before I move forward, I would like to end this preamble with an
observation of what I think became a circular regularity of things
Turkish-Armenian in the last decade. Ever since the 2005 Bilgi
University conference “Ottoman Armenians During the Decline of the
Empire,” whose date was modified several times, finally matching the
then-upcoming Turkey-EU round of talks,16 Turkish-Armenian civil
societal politics has operated on a dim-witted and dumbing–but
notwithstanding working–formula that was also at the basis of the
Monument of “Humanity” drama: Turkish “progressives” preempt/dictate an
action, a campaign, a commemoration, or erect a monument, all without
true deliberation.17 In doing so, let alone their complete disinterest
for deliberating with a broad base of representative Armenians18 they
fail to deliberate even among themselves or with the people they
think they are “educating” top-down. Then, very much expectedly,
the ultra-nationalists attack them either directly or via the AKP
(as in the case of Ucube).
And Armenians both in the diaspora and Armenia issue either call
to action or some political statement exhilarated by whatever
scandal-du-jour where the Turkish side looks bad. From a distance,
it looks like a win-win situation, where Turkish “progressives” win
the unchallengeability of their position because now they are not
only the victims of the Turkish state but also of the Turkish right,
and where the Armenian side wins showing for the n’th time that the
Turkish elite are notorious for throwing the ball out of the game. This
is how a complex web of problematic policies, arguments denialist at
core, ideological lines, and personal/political/national interests
are reduced to a meaningless and empty set of binaries where it’s
impossible to criticize any kind of form, text, content, action,
workshop, persona, or larger than life character because there’s
always a crisis, some half-baked “progress” to be defended against
the ultra-nationalists. Neither in the intellectual sphere–as in the
debates over the Monument of “Humanity”–nor in the political sphere
are the parameters of the discussion set or shared by Armenians
with representative power themselves; instead they are altogether
instrumentalized in a political quarrel between the right and the
left of a country not yet committed to a post-genocidal normative
institutional order. Imagine an institutionally non-committed
post-World War II Germany whose left will be framed and defined by a
relentless German right who has a track record of having used violence
in intra-ethnic conflict.
In this normatively non-committed state of affairs, the Armenian
Genocide is seen both in the domestic and foreign policy discourse
as an obstacle to be dealt away by sweetening hearts and minds with
the bait and switch policy-du-jour (anywhere from “we hear/share your
pain” to “we eat the same dolma” to “don’t talk about recognition,
let’s talk about our common ‘humanity'”), rather than by delving into
a genuine intellectual quest in understanding what the genocide means
for the Turkish state’s institutional framework and the grammar of
ethnic relations in Turkey. The circular win-win character of the game
distracts from the substance of the game, whose limits are determined,
depending on the day, either by the boundaries of the Turkish right
or by the “realities” of the situation on the ground.
We have been told several times that the political discourse
regarding the Armenian Genocide needs to be formulated first and
foremost by catering to the sensitivities of the Turkish people in
order to score progress. Incidentally the coup d’etatist generals
and their international supporters branded this as the “country’s
specific conditions”19 in the past in order to legitimize a top-down
institutional restructuring by the military, implying the country is
not yet “ready” for democracy. It’s interesting, to say the least,
how the discourse of the country’s so-called liberals mimic that of
the generals on two counts of Turkish “exceptionalism,” crystalized
in their willingness to speak in a language of “specific conditions”
on the one hand, and to shelter themselves in a Jacobinist top-down
non-readiness argument on the other–claiming the masses are not ready
to confront genocide as is, but instead are fed either symmetrical
responsibility tales or third-way non-solutions as in the case of
the Monument of “Humanity.”
The monument in Igdir As the attentive eye will remember, both the
former mayor Naif Alibeyoglu and the sculptor Mehmet Aksoy defended
the Monument of “Humanity” as “an alternative to both Armenia’s
Dzidzernagapert Genocide monument and the monument in Igdır–the
monument that “monuments can’t be destroyed” camp pretended did not
exist during the debates of non-destroyability of monuments, both of
which “promote a bad relationship and are designed to divide the two
people.”20 In an interview that was not translated by the Armenian
press, Alibeyoglu further claimed that they wanted “to have a monument
that showed that Turkish people did not commit genocide. There would
have been a 35-meter tear of conscience. Water was going to flow as
opposed to the fire [of Dzidzernagapert]. We were going to show that
we were for peace and humanity, that we did not commit genocide.”21
It is without the knowledge of this background that Armenian
parties, including the Armenian Foreign Ministry and several diaspora
organizations, reacted to what became the Monument of “Humanity.” We
will continue with several key turning points in the five-year
history of the monument while problematizing the monument itself and
the entire political process from an analytical perspective, taking
into account aesthetic, spatial, and political problems that marred
not only its destruction but also its conception and inception.
Editor’s note: The second part of this article will appear in the
Armenian Weekly in May 2012.
ENDNOTES
1. See
2. See
3. See link in Note 1.
4. See
5. See
6. See
7. Baskın Oran in see link in Note 4
8. See
9. See
10. See
11. See
12. See
13. See
berlin.aspx?pageID=438&n=a-tale-of-two-cities-freaks-of-karsand-
berlin-2011-02-16.
14. The analogy itself is a prime example that they know very little
about the Third Reich except perhaps having listened to a popular
Naomi Klein speech comparing the Third Reich to current American
domestic politics.
15. See
16. See
17. Hence highly problematic from conception to inception.
18. We can’t be more insistent on this aspect of lack of representation
and how it usually revolves around either a cherry picking, or
tribal formula of representation. In this context, cherry-picking
means choosing from non-representative Turkish-Armenians whom the
“progressives” think should represent Turkish-Armenian political
opinion. It would be unthinkable to pick the Taraf or Radikal
newspapers as the representative of all Turks, whereas since this is
a mostly reductionist orientalist setting when it comes to the little
brothers, there are no limits to instrumentalizing a party around our
own scheme of political convenience. It’s not what Armenians think of
their institutions that matters here; it’s more what their Turkish
“brothers” like to see/hear. There’s a similar but still slightly
different method of choosing from their friends (so to speak, the
tribal method) and baptizing them as the rational Armenians that
the world should listen to. Mind you, all these people should be
self-declared socialists; if by accident they are pro-AKP figures
such as Etyen Mahcupyan, they should be beaten even more than an
average Sunni pro-AKP columnist.
Yet the same protagonists think they are not being racist in their
apparent squared disgust towards Mahcupyan.
19. See a Harold Pinter anectode regarding the specific conditions
discourse at
20. See link in Note 4
21. See link in Note 11
From: A. Papazian
http://www.armenianweekly.com/2012/05/18/erbal-a-tale-of-two-monuments/
http://arsiv.agos.com.tr/index.php?module=news&news_id=16331&cat_id=1.
http://www.todayszaman.com/mobile_detailn.action?newsId=233449.
www.todayszaman.com/newsDetail_getNewsById.action?load=detay&newsId=232071&link=232071.
www.todayszaman.com/columnistDetail_getNewsById.action?newsId=232204.
www.armenianweekly.com/2011/01/27/not-even-a-handshake/.
www.todayszaman.com/news-232333-turkey-press-scan-on-january-13.html.
www.todayszaman.com/news-232393-the-people-will-write-newconstitution-says-prime-minister.html.
www.turksolu.org/89/baykam89.htm.
www.radikal.com.tr/Radikal.aspx?aType=RadikalDetayV3&ArticleID=1036353&CategoryID=77.
www.radikal.com.tr/Radikal.aspx?aType=RadikalEklerDetayV3&ArticleID=1035819&CategoryID=41.
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www.radikal.com.tr/Radikal.aspx?aType=RadikalDetayV3&ArticleID=1040964&CategoryID=82
www.armeniapedia.org/index.php?title=Conference:_Ottoman_Armenians_During_the_Decline_of_the_Empire
www.haroldpinter.org/politics/politics_torture.shtml.