‘BASTARDS OF THE INFIDELS’
By Eric Nazarian // November 14, 2013
Reflections on the Hrant Dink Foundation’s Conference on Islamized
Armenians
“Bastards,” “infidels,” “remains of the sword” were the derogatory
words directed at Armenian survivors of the genocide in Turkey as
well as their offspring. Under this same umbrella was another set of
“bastards” who were Christian Armenians forcibly or willingly converted
to Islam in the wake of the genocide.
Photo by Eric Nazarian
This was one of the many topics covered over the course of three
eye-opening days at the Hrant Dink Foundation’s Conference on
“Islamized Armenians” on the Bogazici University campus in Istanbul.
We heard lectures and panels comprised of international scholars
presenting a myriad of oral and academic histories about forcibly
Islamized Armenians, as well as the histories of the willingly
converted that bridge and divide these communities. The conference
was a platform for these unofficial minorities, a sort of “People’s
History of Islamized Armenians,” to borrow half of Howard Zinn’s
title. This percentage of the Turkish population is the resurfacing
“remains of the sword.”
The conference began with a remarkable and open-hearted speech by
Rakel Dink that echoed the humanist ideals of her late husband, Hrant.
The president of the university then enthusiastically welcomed the
attendees and made it clear she supported this conference. Hrant’s
spirit hovered everywhere. The energy, respect, and openness of his
legacy was palpable as we watched and listened to the mellifluous voice
of Fetiye Cetin tell the story of how her grandmother had survived the
genocide. And of a certain spot on a river where her grandmother had
seen her own mother drowning two of her siblings during the marches,
to prevent them from the terror that befell the Armenians of the
Ottoman Empire. When Fetiye was a child, her grandmother would take
her to this river and say nothing of what she remembered except,
“If only these mountains had eyes and could say what happened here.”
This was one of the countless stories that made it into the public
consciousness thanks to Fetiye’s 2008 book, My Grandmother, one of the
most important personal family histories of our time, as well as the
follow-up book Grandchildren, which she wrote with Ayse Gul Altinay.
We learned from the articulate opening panels how historians in the
past had neglected the lives of women and children, who were seen
as objects of a masculine nation and not subjects independent of
themselves. There was a freedom and a deep earnestness in most of
the presentations that was moving to experience. Nobody gave a damn
for the most part about mincing words or reiterating euphemisms, and
there were no gendarmes to stop or censor the free flow of ideas and
the innumerable times “genocide” was used in the panels and discourse.
The conference unspooled snippets and overviews of oral histories
and tales gathered from the field research of the scholars present,
including Laurence Ritter, Umit Kurt, Helin Anahit, Avedis Hadjian,
and Anoush Suni.
One of Suni’s stories was about an Armenian man who converted, was
given the name Mehmet, married an Arabic woman, and had a son named
Jemal who was taken in as a son by an “agha” after his father’s death.
Through this and other stories we learned how the process of renaming
the converted was a step in creating a new religious identity. There
was also the presence of Turks who, over time, found out they were
Kurds, who later found out they were Armenians.
The perception of Armenians in Kurdish novels; the 1915 Besni Armenian
orphans who were Islamized; the issue of Kurdish complicity in the
Armenian Genocide; as well as the current state of relations and
possible methods of reconciliation were discussed at a panel entitled,
“Memory, Ethnicity, Religion: Kurdish Identity.”
During the coffee breaks, there were occasional tears on the campus
lawn, a genial warmth among most of the attendees, and something
quite the sight for sore eyes, especially for a Diasporan–a stack of
loudspeakers and a live-feed set on campus overlooking the Bosphorus
echoing the word “Soykirim” (the Turkish word for “genocide”) openly
during Taner Akcam’s presentation.
In this aura of minorities telling their layered and Byzantine stories,
the familial taboos and ethnic histories braided and dovetailed into
a very complicated and illuminating fresco of what it means to be
an “Islamized Armenian.” This process of unveiling family secrets
through the act of storytelling became a source of healing for the
teller of these stories. As a filmmaker, this was a very touching and
inspiring moment to witness. Stories have the power to heal and educate
the public about the unsung and unheard experiences of uncharted
histories. The questions from the audience were prescient and spoke to
the resurfacing anger at a state that has shunned multi-ethnic identity
and diversity instead of celebrating it. This small minority of the
Dink generation took an intelligent and engaged stand by directly
examining the traumas of the past and nurturing an aura of empathy and
respect for the history of the oppressed wanting and deserving to be
heard. This is the clearest ray of light in an otherwise still darkness
in Turkey when it comes to the issue of acknowledging the far-reaching,
multi-faceted immediate and long-term effects of the genocide.
Victor Hugo once said, “An invasion of armies can be resisted; an
invasion of ideas cannot be resisted.” And at this conference, this
“invasion” of ideas was certainly welcome and critically articulated.
I felt torn between hope and possibility that ebbed into the gnawing,
perhaps unjustified, pessimism that all the analysis, research,
and incredible hard work done by countless scholars loyal to these
voices of history and the corroborate-able truth of the genocide still
would change nothing for the ocean of bones in the sands of Der-Zor,
which a hundred years ago were living, breathing families. We will
never know their names or stories. We will never know their voices
or what they might have been.
There will never be any panel capable of granting them justice for
what they endured. They will remain the nameless and abandoned dead.
“How can we Armenians heal from this trauma?” is the first note I
wrote in my notebook, inspired by the always warm and gracious Fetiye
Cetin. I still don’t have a convincing answer, but maybe a large
part of the healing lies in establishing ties with willing Turks and
Kurds ready to face and discuss the past openly and empathetically. I
remember the tale of the Turkish village “kasap” (butcher) who said
he knew that most of the Armenian men in the village were heavily
addicted to tobacco and nicotine, as their throats and esophagi were
tar-yellow after the wholesale village beheadings he took part in.
This, too, is part of the taboo history that affects the consciousness
of those who live on the lands where the atrocities took place. As
Cicero said, “The life of the dead is set in the memory of the living.”
Projected images, be they photographic or cinematographic, have the
power and capacity to trigger stories and ideas in the eye of the
beholder. These knee-jerk ideas can evoke a realization or an inner
epiphany that otherwise would not have been conjured. This unintended
interpretation churning within the mind’s eye of the moviegoer has
the capacity to hold up a mirror into our inner lives and show the
need for quiet self-reflection.
The stream-of-consciousness images triggered by the panelists cast
my memories back to Van and Bitlis in May of this year on my journey
to Historic Armenia. Since the conference centered on “Islamized
Armenians,” whose religious conversions can be broken down into a
garden variety of sub-sets of the forced and the willingly converted,
I couldn’t help but stray back to the churches and cemeteries we
witnessed in Van, Edremit, and Bitlis that had undergone their own
forced spatial conversions from places of ancient spiritual worship
to barns where donkeys and livestock bred in villages off the map.
These seemingly irrelevant memories lingered in the back of my mind as
I listened to tale after tale of survivalist horror, identity politics,
and skeletons surfacing after generations of denial, self-censorship,
and violent repression. I began to feel a very unpleasant certainty in
my gut that the next time we returned to Van, Bitlis, and the ancient
lands of our ancestors, we would still witness the neglect and plunder
of the remains of our culture and faith. This was triggered by the
projection of a black-and-white image of the Church of Surp Garabed in
Dersim before it was bombed in the late 1930â~@²s. And yet, the stones
remain. They have an uncanny, almost supernatural way to stay rooted
in some battered and ravaged form of quasi-existence. Perhaps its that
Armenian stubbornness refusing to go away, refusing to stop fighting,
refusing to be silenced, always wanting to be heard and acknowledged
in the dark waters of those in power quietly silencing truth.
The more brazen the indignities of chameleonic politics that recognized
the genocide over a generation ago during the time of Reagan,
then flips to the official position of banning the now controversial
“Armenian Orphan Rug” from public display to appease Ankara. Everything
is indirectly or directly part and parcel of history’s ironic and cruel
cycles. And all of the stories in this conference were in some shape
or form tied to the tapestry of this region’s history and future. If
everything is connected then nothing is irrelevant, especially in
human rights and the silencing of crimes against humanity, including
the discrimination today’s Islamized Armenians continue to face. This
must change, and it will take one person at a time looking into their
own conscience and respecting the right of the other to exist and be
heard in the name of true, sincere human diplomacy, not meaningless
photo-ops and fickle handshakes.
The common thematic denominators that I took away from the panels
included the unsettling realization that very little is accepted on
its own merits when it comes to a human being’s right to exist in
the state of nature they were born into. This is the troubling and
ugly truth. What I’ve gathered from people I’ve met over numerous
travels to make a film in Bolis is that if you are not born into the
ethnic and religious majority, then you will forever be subordinate
and an object of oppression. This comes from most of the people I
have spoken to that hail from Anatolia or from minority families
living in Turkey: Armenian, Greek, Assyrian, Kurd, or Chaldean, it
does not matter. With the exception of the Kurdish people and their
colorful ethnic and cultural traditions, the majority of these ancient
cultures are gone from their ancestral land. This is nothing new,
and the obvious sometimes needs to be reiterated in order not to be
forgotten or neglected. Their pasts, their schools and neighborhoods,
have been deleted the further east you go. But the cemeteries and
the churches remain in various conditions of decay or damage through
neglect. In the case of the Islamized Armenians, they are considered
subordinates in the eyes of the converters, and religious traitors in
the eyes of Christian Armenians. They are, in perpetuity, in a state
of limbo. The roots of almost every family story told from Mush to
Artvin to Sassoon traced back to this common denominator of Armenians
and ethnic minorities tossed into the grinder of history and forced
to accept belief systems and lifestyles in order to survive.
Will there be more of these conferences in the east and south of
Turkey, and will they continue to convert ignorance into knowledge
and knowledge into respect for all cultures and faiths? Is that too
idealistic a notion to hope for given the irreversible magnitude of
the bloody history that birthed this generation of minorities wanting
to be given a place to stand, to be heard, and, more importantly,
to be accepted on their own merits without precondition? Will there
be another conference on the braided and inter-related histories of
the Greek, Armenian, and Assyrian Genocides? Some day, in a possibly
more democratic future, will these conferences be converted into the
impetus to grant official civil and human rights to these people,
and all remaining religious properties and foundations in Anatolia?
Will there come a time for the “others” culture, faith, and history to
be respected, preserved, and taught in schools, instead of plundered
by grave-robbers fancying themselves as treasure hunters of the fabled
Armenian gold? Where will the commission be in the Kurdish areas to
help stop this rampant and insulting quest for the so-called buried
treasures that has dug hole after hole in our churches, spurring only
more pillage? In the process of trying to form the building blocks of
reconciliation through cultural diplomacy and meaningful dialogue,
respect for cultural landmarks and touchstones are fundamental to
the trust-building process.
This incredible conference was a much-needed gift in giving voice to
the voiceless and unofficial histories of the Islamized Armenians. And
through this first of what will hopefully be many conferences to come,
the tangible results require time and will be measured in the long
run. This region has a long way to go until it comes to grips with
its own Civil Rights Movement on a massive national scale. But the
important work of converting ignorance into beads of knowledge braided
together into inspiration and the meaningful exchange of ideas has
begun, and continues quite nobly thanks to the Hrant Dink Foundation.
http://www.armenianweekly.com/2013/11/14/bastards-of-the-infidels/