Al-Monitor
dec 15 2013
Will Turks, Armenians ever reconcile?
Author: Mustafa AkyolPosted December 15, 2013
When Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu visited Yerevan on Dec.
12, in the first high-level visit from Turkey to Armenia in five
years, he was greeted not only by his Armenian counterpart, Eduard
Nalbandyan, but also by political activists. The latter’s welcome,
however, was not a warm one. A group of protesters gathered in front
of Davutoglu’s hotel to protest Turkey’s `denial of the Armenian
genocide.’ They wanted `recognition, condemnation and reparations,’
and opposed the Turkish foreign minister for not taking those steps.
Perhaps this was a bit unfair to Davutoglu, though, who said on this
trip something that no other Turkish statesman has openly said before:
that the `deportation’ of Armenians from Anatolia in 1915 was
`inhumane.’ (In Turkey, `deportation’ is the official and the common
term for what others call `Armenian genocide.’) No wonder Turkey’s
nationalists criticized Davutoglu for taking such an `unpatriotic’
step. Writing in Yeni ÇaÄ?, a hardcore nationalist daily, columnist
Ahmet Atakan argued that Davutoglu acted `as if he is not as the
Turkish foreign minister, but a negotiator between the two sides
[Turks and Armenians].’ More important, the deputy chair of the main
opposition CHP (People’s Republican Party), Faruk Logoglu, criticized
Davutoglu on Twitter and wrote (with my translation from Turkish):
`FM Davutoglu said to the Armenian FM, `The deportation of 1915 was
inhumane.’ What was inhumane? What would he rather have been done?’
Logoglu’s reaction is significant because it represents the mainstream
view in Turkey about the tragic fate of Ottoman Armenians. Most people
here simply believe that it was a defensible act to protect the
Turkish homeland.
Here is why. A considerable portion of the people who call themselves
Turks today are in fact rooted not in modern-day Turkey, but in two
neighboring regions: the Balkans and the Caucasus. During the
century-long shrinking of the Ottoman Empire, millions of Muslims in
these two regions faced persecution and had to flee to Turkey proper.
My own great-grandfather, for example, was a Circassian (Çerkes) who
first resisted the Russian occupation of the Northwest Caucasus around
the 1860s and then had to migrate to Yozgat, Anatolia, during the
ethnic cleansing of Circassians. It is estimated that, during that
long process of Russian onslaught in the Caucasus, some 1.5 million
Circassian men, women and children were killed, and more than 1
million others were expelled to Turkey. Hence comes the saying, “If
you scratch a Turk, you find a Circassian persecuted by Russians
underneath.’
A similar story took place in the Balkans as well. As the Ottoman
Empire shrank and new nation-states emerged in former Ottoman
territories ‘ such as Serbia, Greece or Bulgaria ‘ Turks and other
Muslims in these countries faced various waves of persecution and mass
murder, resulting in millions of refugees. That is why there are
millions of Balkan immigrants in modern-day Turkey ‘ people whose
origin is Bosniak, Albanian, Pomak or Balkan Turk. In his book, Death
and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821-1922,
American historian Justin McCarthy calculates that some 5 million
Ottoman Muslims perished in a century due to ethnic cleansing by their
enemies, most of whom were either Russians or the Eastern Orthodox
allies of the Russians.
This is the background that most Turks have in mind when they think of
what happened to Ottoman Armenians. Of course, Armenians, who lived in
Anatolia side by side with Turks for centuries, were not responsible
for the tragic fate of the Muslims in the Balkans or the Caucasus. But
in the early 20th century, Armenian nationalists in alliance with
imperialist Russia aimed at carving out an independent Armenia from
the collapsing Ottoman Empire. Had they succeeded, they could have
initiated an ethnic cleansing against the Muslims similar to what
happened in the Balkans and the Caucasus. This was the logic of the
Ottoman Young Turk wartime government which, in the spring of 1915,
made the tragic decision to deport all Armenians from Anatolia to
Syria in response to the Armenian Uprising that began earlier that
year. In was, in the minds of the Young Turks, a pre-emptive ethnic
cleansing.
To be sure, none of this justifies the death of even one of the
approximately 1 million Armenians who perished in that fateful year of
1915. This was, as Davutoglu put it, an `inhumane’ act. And it remains
a stain on Turkish history that I, as a fellow Turk, believe that we
Turks should apologize for. However, it did not take place in a
vacuum. Nor it did come out of a hateful ideology like that of the
Nazis against the Jews. It rather came out of a horrible historical
context which pitted the peoples of a crumbling empire against each
other and in which Turks suffered at least as much pain as they
caused.
Therefore, reconciliation between Turks and Armenians will be possible
only when this painful episode in history is understood in a way which
takes the perspectives of both sides into account. Armenians, most
naturally, recall only the suffering of their grandfathers and demand
respect for it. Turks, on the other hand, recall the sufferings of
their own grandfathers and question why the ethnic cleansing of the
Armenians is singled out among many other tragedies in which they were
the victims. Both sides need to understand the perspectives, and the
feelings, of the other side. Both sides, in other words, need to know
each other.
Read More:
Mustafa Akyol
Columnist
Mustafa Akyol is a columnist for Al-Monitor’s Turkey Pulse and a
columnist for Turkish Hurriyet Daily News and Star. His articles have
also appeared in Foreign Affairs, Newsweek, The New York Times, The
Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian. He is the
author of Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty.
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/12/turks-armenians-reconciliation-davutoglu-yerevan-visit.html
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