TURKISH DIVISIONS AND THE ARMENIAN QUESTION
EDITORIAL | MARCH 24, 2014 11:24 AM
________________________________
By Raffi Bedrosyan
Like a cell dividing itself into two, then each new cell further
dividing itself into two, Turkey keeps being divided. Divisions always
existed but remained mostly suppressed, but now they are emerging. In
this article, I would like to outline the old and new divisions in
Turkey and the divided Turks’ perception of us the Armenians.
Ever since the founding of the republic in 1923, Turkey was
governed by a secular, Kemalist and nationalist ideology, with the
single-minded objective of creating and maintaining a single-nation
state. Regardless of which party was in power, leftist or rightist,
the deep state dominated by the armed forces, big business, big state
bureaucracy, media and academia, directed all the affairs behind
the scenes. The deep state leaders and their backers emerged as the
elite of the society, aptly named as the nationalist White Turks, who
basically inherited and further developed a state built on the economic
foundations of plundered and confiscated Armenian and Greek wealth and
assets. The masses in Anatolia were mainly utilized as free bodies
for the military elite, as cheap labor for the industrial elite, or
remembered only at election time to vote for the political elite. The
pious Sunni Moslem majority in Anatolia was condescended to by the
White Turks and defined by the term “takunyali” or clog wearers. The
disappearance of the Armenians and Greeks from these lands was fiercely
denied. The existence of other ethnic people in Turkey, such as Kurds,
was also continuously denied. “Turkey is only for Turks” was their
motto; accordingly, since Armenians and Greeks were already wiped out,
all the other ethnic groups were told that they are now Turks, or else.
The supremacy of the White Turks ended in 2003, with the election
of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his moderately Islamic party. Despite
all attempts of the deep state to topple him, he outmaneuvered the
White Turks, thanks to the religious Sunni Moslem masses of Anatolia
and the recent arrival of underprivileged masses from Anatolia to
the big cities. The provincial and religious Turks quickly secured
and strengthened their grip on power. Influential fundamentalist
religious leader Fethullah Gulen, who had had to leave Turkey during
the previous nationalist secular regimes, cooperated with Erdogan and
his followers, quickly filled the cadres of bureaucracy, including
key posts in the police, security, judiciary and academia. Based on
charges of attempted coup d’etat against the government, hundreds of
deep state leaders and elite White Turks in the military, media and
academia were arrested and jailed. Although less intolerant toward
minorities than the White Turks, the attitude of the new leaders
toward the minorities and the Kurds did not change much. Many White
Turks started leaving the country.
The alliance and cooperation of Erdogan and Gulen ended in late 2013,
when Erdogan felt secure enough to discard Gulen, and decided to shut
down the numerous supplementary educational facilities controlled
by Gulen. As the education system in the state high schools is not
sufficient to secure admission to state universities, most parents
in Turkey depended on these facilities for the advancement of their
children. These facilities were used as a power base by Gulen, a
major source of income as well as recruitment for new followers. Soon
after Erdogan announced the intention to close these facilities,
state prosecutors and police controlled by Gulen revealed uncovering
a major corruption scandal against four of Erdogan’s ministers,
involving hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes, with all the juicy
details of money counting machines and millions stashed in shoe boxes
in ministers’ homes. Erdogan counter attacked by swiftly removing,
replacing and firing thousands of state prosecutors, judges and police
officers deemed to be followers of the Gulen movement. In the last few
weeks, at least ten taped telephone conversations were leaked on the
internet involving Erdogan, where Erdogan directs his son to get rid
of hundreds of millions of cash in Euro and dollars from the family
homes, orders several businessmen to pay $100 million each toward
buying a media empire that he wants controlled, demands another
media owner to fire several journalists, decides how much certain
contractors must pay in bribes or properties in return for getting
large contracts involving construction of airports and bridges. In
the western world, even a hint of attempted bribery or corruption
may be sufficient to bring down governments, but in Turkey, Erdogan
carries on, dismissing the evidence as plots hatched by his one-time
ally and now-mortal-enemy Gulen, as well as other virtual enemies
such as “parallel states” within Turkey, and predictably, external
enemies such as Israel, US, EU and the “interest lobby” jealous of
the fast growth of Turkey. Erdogan’s latest move is to try to win
back the nationalists who were charged and jailed for attempting to
topple his own government; as a result, most of the jailed deep state
leaders are immediately released this week, including the former army
Chief of Staff and other commanders, the intelligence spy and one of
the masterminds of the Hrant Dink assassination, the racist lawyer
who hounded Dink for “insulting Turkishness,” the politician who was
charged for stating “the Armenian Genocide is a lie” in Switzerland but
the European Court of Human rights had recently sided with him in the
name of freedom of speech, the murderers of a German and two Turkish
Protestant missionaries in Malatya, several ultra nationalist/racist
journalists, and an organized crime leader who arranged contract
killings of anti-nationalists and Kurds. It seems that the stage is
set for a potential settling of accounts.
While these divisions took place among the Turks of Turkey, the Kurds
of Turkey made major advances toward their goals of greater autonomy,
language rights and self-determination, a struggle on going since
the 1980s first as a guerilla movement and from the 2000s on as an
emerging political movement. The imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan
imposed his will on Erdogan, who conceded to start peace talks with
him in exchange for a ceasefire.
Even though these four major divisions within Turkey keep fighting and
plotting against one another, they come together and close ranks when
it comes to the Armenian issue, past and present. The Turks themselves
categorize Armenians into three distinct groups, in a completely
misguided manner — the Good, the Bad and the Poor. The small Armenian
community remaining in Turkey is the “Good,” easily controllable, not
a threat anymore, with neighborly memories of shared dolma or topik.
But these Armenians in Turkey are “Good” as long as they don’t demand
much about the past or present, like Hrant Dink dared. The Diaspora
is the “Bad, the evil presence in every country poisoning the locals
against Turks and Turkey, spreading lies about the ‘alleged’ genocide
of 1915. Finally, the Armenians of Armenia are the “Poor,” who leave
their country and come to Turkey to find bread. The Kurds relatively
have more empathy toward the Armenians; however, it is more a case
of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Although Ocalan came close
to acknowledging the genocide, he has empathy only for the “Good”
Armenians in Turkey and he continues defining the Diaspora as part
of the external lobby threat against both Turks and Kurds. While the
Kurds acknowledge the sufferings of the Armenians in 1915, they see
themselves only as manipulated tools of the Turks and cannot bring
themselves to acknowledge their active role in the Genocide, nor open
the subject of returning the vast properties seized from the Armenians,
barring a few exceptions.
Armenians who believe in meaningful dialogue with the peoples of
Turkey, now face the additional challenge of choosing one or more of
these groups at the expense of alienating the others, and on the eve
of the centennial in 2015, the prospect of any productive results
becomes dimmer by the day. But dialogue does continue, with the
help of various civil society organizations, intellectuals, and more
significantly, through the facilitation of the new emerging force of
Islamized Armenians of Turkey. Dialogue must and will continue until
all four groups in Turkey start to see that all Armenians, whether
in Turkey, Diaspora or Armenia, whether good, bad or poor, are all
equally impacted by the genocide and equally demand acknowledgment
and restitution.
(Raffi Bedrosyan is a civil engineer and concert pianist, living
in Toronto, Canada. He has donated concert and CD proceedings to
infrastructure projects in Armenia and Karabagh, in which he has also
participated as an engineer. He helped organize the reconstruction of
the Surp Giragos Diyarbakir/Dikranagerd Church and the first Armenian
reclaim of church properties in Anatolia after 1915. He gave the
first piano concert in the Surp Giragos Church since 1915.)
– See more at:
http://www.mirrorspectator.com/2014/03/24/turkish-divisions-and-the-armenian-question/#sthash.qMNfdQto.dpuf