TURKEY’S ARMENIAN GHOSTS
Hugh Pope.com
July 19 2013
For many years in Turkey, conversations became awkward if they turned
to defining what used to be called the “events of 1915”. Basically,
I had read one set of history books, which discussed the genocidal
deaths of 1-1.5 million Armenians who died in the Ottoman Empire
during the First World War deportations. Most Turks had read a
completely different set of books. If there was a mention of the
Armenian question at all, it was suggested that some unfortunate
wartime accidents had been exaggerated by Turkey’s enemies as part
of great conspiracy to do the country down.
Discussion, therefore, would usually soon choke up, having revealed
a genuine absence of knowledge of what happened to the Armenians,
accompanied by a naturally offended sense of personal innocence;
a counter-assertion of the never-addressed trauma of the wrongs done
to millions of Muslims expelled from their homes in the Balkans and
elsewhere in the 19th and early 20th centuries; legalistic arguments
about how by the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of
the Crime of Genocide cannot be applied retrospectively; and among a
few who worried that something awful could have happened, fears that
any recognition of an Armenian “genocide” would result in expensive
reparations, awkward atonement, and, not least, odium or worse for
contradicting the official narrative of denial.
With such minefields to cross, therefore, I found I alienated less
people by discussing basic facts of the case rather than how to label
it. I agreed with the advice of Hrant Dink, the late Armenian newspaper
editor, who would say it was counterproductive for outsiders to insist
upon one formula or another until Turkey was ready to debate fully and
reach its own conclusion. He believed that processes like Turkey’s EU
accession would bring freer information, and with that, understanding
of what really happened. The trouble is, Dink was murdered in 2007,
perhaps precisely because he represented of what should have been a
joint Armenian-Turkish road to reconciliation.
Sadly, Turkey has yet to get far in undoing the official ideology of
denial and hostility to Armenians that formed the mind of the young
nationalist who pulled the trigger – let alone bring to justice acts
of official negligence and even official complicity with this killer.
CouvNow a new book by the Turkey reporters of France’s Figaro and
Le Monde newspapers has done an electrifying job of filling Turkey’s
information gap. Surprises lurk under every stone turned over by Laure
Marchand and Guillaume Perrier’s “Turkey and the Armenian Ghost: in
the steps of the genocide.” (La Turquie et le fantome Arménien: sur
les traces du génocide, Actes Sud, March 2013: Arles, France). It
will be published in Turkish by Ä°letiÅ~_im in January 2014, and
deserves to find an English publisher too.
The authors’ inventory of discoveries shows just how much that is
Armenian has carried through into modern Turkey. They then use these to
make a controversial yet compelling argument: that the Turkish Republic
founded in 1923 shares moral responsibility for whatever happened
to the Armenians. They contend that Turkey’s many decades of denying
that there was anything like an Armenian genocide is actually part of
the continuation of a pattern of actions by the Ottoman governments
responsible for the Armenian massacres and property confiscations
of the 1890-1923 period. For instance, the judicial “farce” of the
investigation and trial of Hrant Dink’s murderer is, to the authors,
proof positive that “since 1915, impunity has been the rule”.
There are other rude shocks. Some Turks now realize they were
being misled by the old official narrative of denial, thanks to
a new openness about and better understanding of the Armenian
question in Turkey over the past decade. But how many appreciate
that Istanbul’s best-loved Ottoman landmarks are often designed
by Armenian architects? How many know that the famed Congress of
Erzurum, corner stone of the republic’s war of liberation, was held
in a just-confiscated Armenian school? And how many have heard, as
Marchand and Perrier allege, that even the hilltop farmhouse that
became the Turkish republic’s Cankaya presidential palace was seized
from an Armenian family – and that descendants of the family, some
of whom were well-enough connected to escape with their lives — can
calmly be interviewed about this “original sin” of the republic? (The
official history of the palace simply says that Ankara municipality
“donated” it to republican founder Kemal Ataturk in 1921).
It seems apposite that the authors quote Cankaya’s current incumbent,
the open-minded President Abdullah Gul, as saying while he toured
the ruins of the ancient Armenian capital of Ani on Turkey’s closed
border with Armenia: “That’s Armenia there? So close!”
Amid such evidence that Turkish perceptions can be naïve, one
problem with the book is its unrelenting insistence that Turkey end
its “fierce” and “obsessive” denial that a genocide happened (unlike,
the authors point out, Germany, Serbia, Rwanda and others). This tight
argumentation leaves the impression of a Turkey that is deliberately
calculating and somehow evil, rather than the more likely case that
it is clumsy, embarrassed and a prisoner of its own contradictions. A
preface by U.S.-based Turkish academic Taner Akcam, a once-lonely
pioneer who calls for Turkish recognition of the Armenian genocide,
sets a trenchant tone and outlines the problem. “To recognize the
Armenian genocide would be the same as denying our [Turkish] national
identity, as we now define it”, Taner writes. “Our institutions result
from an invented ‘narrative of reality’… a coalition of silence
… that wraps like a warm blanket…if we are forced to confront
our own history, we would be obliged to question everything”.
Marchand and Perrier brush aside any need for a transitional commission
to study the history of the genocide, as suggested in the still-born
2009 protocols between Turkey and Armenia, because the genocide “is a
fact that that is barely debated in scientific circles”. Even though
the study of Russian archives on the matter is still in its infancy,
for instance, the authors dismiss valid elements of the Turkish
narrative as yet more ghosts whose abuse has made them an extension
of the earlier misdeeds. Parts of the Turkish story are therefore
mentioned in passing or only partially, like the massacres of Turks
and Muslims by Armenian militias operating behind Russian lines,
the 56 people were killed by Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation
of Armenia (ASALA) terrorists during their 1970s and 1980s terrorist
campaign against Turkey, or the fact that most of the one million
refugees from the fighting in Mountainous Karabagh are Azerbaijanis
who fled conquering Armenians. Also, there may be some ill-judged
memorial ceremonies, but Turkey does not have a “cult” of Talat Pasha,
a probable principal architect of the Armenian genocide.
As the authors themselves point out, the site of his grave in a small
official memorial park for the Committee of Union and Progress leaders
of late Ottoman times gets little official or popular attention.
Guillaume Perrier and Laure Marchand Guillaume Perrier and Laure
Marchand
Still, Marchand and Perrier state early on that their mission is not
to write history, but to “give visibility to what has been erased
… to gather together an antidote to the poison of denial … because
impunity is always an invitation to reoffend”. And here they succeed
to a remarkable extent, finding much that remains of Armenians,
even as Turkey nears the 2015 centenary of when they were effectively
erased from Anatolia: survivors, converts, crypto-Armenians, derelict
churches, descendants of ‘righteous’ Turks, artisans’ tools in second-
hand shops, flour mills, abandoned houses, songs and traditions.
“Turkey”, they say, “is still haunted by the ghost of an assassinated
people”.
Indefatigably, the authors travel to remote mountain villages and
with President Gul to the Armenian capital for a football match that
was part of the ill-fated late 2000s reconciliation process. They
listen to the Armenians of Marseilles, France’s second city where
10 per cent of the population are descended from Armenians who fled
Turkey, and explain why France and its parliament are so sensitive
to the Armenian question. (They also suggest that some in the
Armenian diaspora have constructed a counterproductive dream of a
“fantasy Armenia, a promised substitute land”.) They interview the
grand-children of a brave Turkish sub-prefect, Huseyin Nesimi, who
tried to stop the massacres in 1915, but was quickly assassinated near
Diyarbakir, presumably at the orders of an alleged local organizer
of the killings. They sit with the family of an Armenian citizen
of Turkey killed by a far-right nationalist fellow soldier while on
national service – on April 24, 2011. They slip into the mountains and
show in a feast of detail how the spirit of the Armenian ‘brigands’
of yore lives on with the left-wing TIKKO group (Turkey’ Workers’
and Peasants’ Liberation Army, founded, you guessed it, on April 24).
In Sivas, they visit the last few rat-infested ruins in the
once-thriving Armenian quarter. In Ordu, they find the old Armenian
quarter rebaptised “National Victory”, and the old main church
now turned into the mosque. In another town, an Armenian protestant
church survived as a cinema and now an auditorium, with no sign of its
provenance. Elsewhere, the dismantled stones of Armenian monasteries
and houses have become the building material for new houses, sometimes
with their religious symbols becoming decorative features. State
ideology, they think, “even wanted to assimilate the stones”.
They join an Armenian guide who arranges tours for diaspora visitors
to find the many souvenirs of Armenian-ness in eastern Turkey – and
inhabitants who are not as hung up about their Armenian connections
as might be expected. This picaresque explorer has tracked down
600 former Armenian villages, in some of which 1915’s survivors
occasionally lived on for decades (the authors even stumble upon
one during their travels). Other small Armenian communities “hidden,
forgotten or assimilated” still live in thirty small or medium-sized
towns. They show how village names have been changed and the memory
of Armenians has been expunged. Very few people in Turkey are aware
that the now iconic and ubiquitous signature of “K. Ataturk” was
one of five models of signature dreamed up for the new republican
leadership by a respected old Armenian teacher in Istanbul – whose
son tells the story to the authors.
The authors discuss the impact of Fethiye Cetin’s 2009 book ‘My
Grandmother’, which lifted the veil on Turkey’s many Armenian
grandmothers, saved from the death marches to become servants or
wives. In Turkey there are now, the authors believe, “millions of
grandchildren of the genocide” who, because of the way Armenian-ness
has been denigrated, have not wanted to be identified “more out of
shame than fear”. In a province like Tunceli/Dersim, “it’s rare to
find a family that doesn’t have an Armenian grandmother or aunt”.
Shared saints’ days, common dances and music have blended into a
new Armenian-Turkish-Kurdish mix in which it is hard to tell where
one ethnicity ends and another begins. The book recounts touching
scenes from Armenian churches as some of the descendants of Armenian
converts try to return to the Armenian church and community. Indeed,
the picture that emerges gives new meaning to the sign held up by
many in the massive funeral procession in Istanbul for Hrant Dink:
“We are all Armenians”.
Marchand and Perrier do not spare Turkey’s Kurds, who they say need
to accept not just that there was a genocide but also recognize their
part in plundering and kidnapping from the Armenian death marches.
Still, a mainly Kurdish-speaking city like Diyarbakir has played
a leading role in trying to make amends for what happened to the
Armenians, rebuilding a church that had fallen into ruins, and bringing
the language back into official use at a municipal level.
Much of Diyarbakir actually used to belong to Armenians – more than
one half, the authors suggest.
Indeed, the authors point out that many of Turkey’s grand companies
today got their start in places where Armenian businesses had been
forced out. Crucially for their argument of continued responsibility,
appropriation continued into the republic, with the wealth tax that
crushed the “minorities” in 1942 and the state-tolerated actions
that took successive tolls on minority properties in the decades
thereafter. (This continues: the front page headline of Taraf newspaper
today, 19 July 2013, is an angry denunciation of municipal plans to
appropriate, knock down and redevelop the last stone houses of the
abandoned old Armenian quarter in the eastern town of MuÅ~_).
It’s not all grand state policy: they meet the family of an Armenian
convert to Islam who came back from his years of military service to
find that his lands had been peremptorily seized by his neighbours.
There are harsh words about the energy that goes into the search for
gold and valuables thought to have been hidden by Armenians as they
were forced out of their homes: “pillaging is still today a national
sport … a prolongation of the plundering.”
At first the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government of Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan looked as though it would lead Turkey out
of this dead end. But it failed to see through normalization protocols
with Armenia in 2009, and later it was Erdogan himself who ordered the
demolition of a monument to friendship with Armenia in the border town
of Kars – on another 24 April. The authors give little credit to his
government’s restoration of some Armenian churches and reinstatement of
at least some Armenian property confiscated by the republic. Perhaps
this reticence is because of the bad grace sometimes on display. At
the reopening of the Armenian church of Akdamar on Lake Van, favorite
of Turkish tourism posters, the envoy from Ankara managed to make a
speech that mentioned neither the words “church” nor “Armenian”. Also,
there were more than 3,000 active Armenian churches and monasteries
in Anatolia before the First World War; now there are just six.
“Turkey and the Armenian Ghost” ends by conjuring up the changing
spirit of the Armenian history debate in Turkey. This is largely
thanks to the determination of Turkey’s academics since 2000-2005 to
end what they knew to be an unacceptable and professionally untenable
official policy and culture of denial. Clearly, it is real and trusted
information developed by such experts at home, not the grandiose and
sometimes hypocritical declarations by foreign legislatures, that
has the best chance of changing the Turkish public’s mind. Marchand
and Perrier’s stiletto-sharp impatience with the Turkish state’s slow
pace or lack of official change may alienate many of those who most
need convincing. But people can increasingly see more elements of what
happened, and the deeply researched, convincing reportage in this book
can help open up minds. “Of course it’s a genocide, but that’s a word
that doesn’t work,” academic Cengiz Aktar tells the authors. “The
only way to block the narrative of denial is to develop a policy of
remembering, and to start the process of informing the population.”
http://hughpope.com/2013/07/19/turkeys-armenian-ghosts/