TURKEY HAS MUCH TO BUILD ON TO FACE TRUTH, SCHOLAR SAYS
By Michael J. Bonafield, Star Tribune
Minneapolis Star Tribune , MN
Feb 19 2007
Q&A: Author and teacher Taner Akcam
Q You recently returned from the funeral in Istanbul of Hrant Dink,
the Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor who was gunned down outside
his office on Jan. 19.
A Hrant was a very close friend of mine. A 17-year-old involved in
nationalist circles was arrested for the murder. In 2005, Dink was
convicted of writing the truth about the Armenian genocide, which
Turkish law forbids. At the funeral, there were around 200,000 people
on the street, whose presence said to the Turkish officials that it’s
time to stop all the lies.
Q You are one in the group of Turkish writers — Nobel laureate Orhan
Pamuk and novelist Elif Shafak, author of "The Bastard of Istanbul"
— who have been persecuted for speaking out on the Armenian tragedy.
Why does the government vehemently deny the past?
A The Turkish Republic was established by the same political party
that organized the genocide — the Union and Progress Party. This
created a major handicap and difficulty because it necessitated
calling some of our founding fathers murderers and thieves. This is
an enormous problem. Imagine how it would affect the United States,
for example, if George Washington or Thomas Jefferson were thieves
and murderers. Reverence for founding fathers is an important element
that binds society together.
Q And yet Mustafa Kamal Ataturk, the general who led the revolution
that overthrew the Ottoman Empire and established the Turkish Republic
following World War I, called the Armenian genocide a "shameful act,"
from which you drew the title of your book.
A By distancing himself from the crimes of the party, Mustafa Kamal
provided important ground on which Turkey can build its real national
identity. There is much to build on. In many regions, Muslim peasants
went to the local governors’ offices and protested the genocide,
saying they didn’t want their Armenian friends and neighbors deported
and killed because it is against the Qur’an.
Q What role did religion play in the tragedy?
A Religion was important to the cultural background of the genocide.
We can compare the attitude of the Muslim majority toward the
Armenians, who were Orthodox Christians, with the widespread
anti-Semitism in today’s Europe. However, I don’t think religion
was the motivation of the ruling group in their decision to
deport and annihilate the Armenians. They were, rather, social
engineers. We know they were mostly educated in Europe, either in
medicine or in military schools, and most of them were positivists —
atheists. They used religion to mobilize the Muslim population against
the Armenians. However, we don’t known enough about how the Muslims
helped the Armenians, but we do know that most of the resistance to
the genocide came from the Muslim population.
Q Why did the Ottoman officials launch the genocide?
A The rulers decided in 1913 to remove the Armenians from Anatolia,
the empire’s heartland. We know this from their own memoirs.
Beginning in January 1914, they developed strategies and plans to
create a homogeneous Anatolia. The decision was made after the [1912]
Balkan War [with Serbia, Bulgaria, Montenegro and Greece, all Orthodox
countries] that it was not possible to live in a state with Christians.
Q Why?
A It was the shock of losing the Balkan War. In one week in October
1912, the Ottoman Empire lost 69 percent of its European territory,
and that territory was the homeland of the ruling elite. They lost
their birthplaces, and this was basically at the hands of Christians.
And so the decision was made that it was not possible to live with
them. The Armenians comprised up to 45 percent of the population
of Anatolia.
Q How did the Armenian genocide differ from the Holocaust of World
War II?
A There are many differences, but one of the most telling is that the
Ottoman authorities eradicated the Armenian intellectuals first. They
arrested almost all important intellectuals, religious leaders,
teachers and notables in the local regions who could lead the Armenian
population against the authorities. They hanged them or executed them
inside the prisons, then the actual genocide started.
What we have here is the total annihilation of the intellectual class
of a nation.
Q Why isn’t the genocide more widely remembered in the United States?
A You know, it was a big topic here when it occurred. The newspaper
coverage was enormous. Mothers would tell their kids who wouldn’t eat
their food to think of the starving Armenians. It became an important
topic in the U.S. during the early 1920s. But it required Armenians
to keep the subject alive, and the Armenian community was eradicated
in such a way that it took them three or four generations to create
their own intellectuals to begin to bring the topic to the wider
public’s attention again.