Turkey’s Armenian Ghosts
July 19, 2013
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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.
This old lady in Ergen (Dersim/Tunceli, Turkey) is an Armenian who
converted to Alevism, the heteredox faith influenced by Islamic Shia
thinking that predominates in that province. Photo by Antoine
Agoudjian
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 label 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 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.
Now a new book by the Turkey reporters of France’s Figaro andLe 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 Çankaya 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 Atatürk in 1921).
It seems apposite that the authors quote Çankaya’s current incumbent,
the open-minded President Abdullah Gül, 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 Akçam, 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
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 Gül 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, Hüseyin 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 Çetin’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 Tarafnewspaper
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 ErdoÄ?an 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 ErdoÄ?an 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/