TURKISH LIBERALS SHOULD BACK ERDOGAN’S MESSAGE TO ARMENIANS
Al-Monitor
April 30 2014
Author: Rasim Ozan Kutahyali
Posted April 30, 2014
My piece last week for Al-Monitor, “How I faced the Armenian genocide,”
sparked reactions in the Turkish media, especially after Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan — a day after my article was published
— issued an unprecedented condolence message to the victims of the
Armenian genocide. Turkey’s polarization has reached such an insane
level that even an issue like the 1915 tragedy, which is supposed to
unify, is easily overrun under its weight.
A telling example is the reactions faced by Amberin Zaman, Turkey
correspondent for The Economist and fellow Al-Monitor contributor,
for sharing my article on social media. Here is what happened, in
her own words, from the Turkish daily Taraf: “Rasim Ozan Kutahyali,
who is known to be close to Prime Minister Erdogan, penned an article
for Al-Monitor, where I also contribute, in which he called the 1915
events genocide and said that those who deny it make him nauseous. I
shared his article on Twitter late on April 22 with the note ‘A good
piece.’ Many people were infuriated. In their view, I had ‘betrayed’
my profession by ‘polishing up’ someone who did not deserve it.
Moreover, they believed Kutahyali had written the piece on Erdogan’s
orders — to dupe foreigners.”
So, Zaman came under attack for simply liking my article, which
explicitly termed the 1915 events as genocide. Moreover, the people
who attacked her were not some group of Turkish fascists but the very
quarters who, ostensibly, are sensible over the 1915 events. In their
view, I — as someone who does not belong to their political camp —
was not capable of acknowledging the Armenian genocide. Being close
to Erdogan, as Zaman describes me, was a big crime in their eyes.
My first article acknowledging the genocide was published by the
Turkish media on Sept. 10, 2008. I was also among activists who
took part in the 2008 “We apologize to the Armenians” campaign. In
a television debate the same year, I had a fierce argument with a
retired Turkish general who denied the genocide.
Yet my detractors spread black propaganda that I wrote my article on
Erdogan’s instructions to dupe foreigners. In fact, a writer close to
Erdogan penning an article that faces up to the genocide is something
that should please people who urge the Turkish state to recognize
the 1915 events as genocide.
Erdogan’s condolence message, too, should have been welcomed. But
unfortunately, Turkey’s leftists and pseudo-liberals are more concerned
with their personal obsessions against Erdogan than the wishes of
the descendants of the Armenian genocide survivors. As I wrote in my
previous article, they are fine with anyone but Erdogan as Turkey’s
next president. In contrast, Turkey’s two most renowned liberal
Armenian intellectuals, Etyen Mahcupyan and Markar Esayan, openly
support Erdogan in the Aug. 10 presidential elections, just as I do.
Now, let’s leave aside Turkey’s leftists and move on to the letters
from the Armenian diaspora to the Turkish people, sent as part of a
campaign by the bilingual Armenian-Turkish weekly Agos.
Armenian filmmaker and intellectual Eric Nazarian, for instance, sends
the following message: “I’d like to tell Turkish society that this day
of remembrance [April 24] is yours, too. Our collective recovery will
be impossible as long as you refuse to join us and acknowledge this
day. Is our collective recovery possible? Through meaningful dialogue,
through acknowledgement of the short- and long-term consequences of
the terrible tragedy and facing up to the past and the genocide? This
day belongs also to the memory of righteous Turks and the lives
they saved.”
I fully agree with Nazarian. Turkish society’s recovery, too, depends
on facing up to 1915. And Erdogan is the chief figure who can convince
Turks to come to terms with the truth after nine decades of black
propaganda by the same mindset that committed the genocide. His
popularity is obvious. Political pundits agree that Erdogan will
almost certainly govern Turkey in the next decade as president.
Nazarian’s emphasis on lives saved by righteous Turks is also
important. Indeed, a significant number of Turkish officials defied the
orders of the Talat Pasha government in 1915. Let me briefly mention
some of them, borrowing from the book of Turkish academic Ayhan Aktar.
Following the Young Turks’ order for the massacres, Ankara Gov. Hasan
Mazhar Bey replied, “I’m a governor, not a bandit. I cannot obey
unlawful orders.”
Konya Gov. Celal Bey saved the lives of tens of thousands of Armenians,
defying the decision for their deportation. A former governor of
Aleppo, Celal Bey, knew that deporting those people to the Syrian
deserts was tantamount to murder. The biggest support to this honorable
statesman came from Konya’s sheikhs and religious scholars — those
sons of the Turkish nation who displayed strong morals and virtue
by resisting a deportation order that amounted to murder and flouted
both Islam and humanity.
Kutahya Gov. Faik Ali Bey was another dignified man who refused
to follow the deportation order. He instructed his subordinates to
protect the Armenians who had managed to reach Kutahya in a miserable
state after being deported from other cities. He dismissed the city’s
infamous police chief who was pressing the Armenians to convert
to Islam to let them stay in Kutahya or else “join the deportation
convoys.” A true symbol of nobleness, Ali Faik Bey shouted in the
city’s town hall, “The Turks in Kutahya have not and will never take
part in the atrocities against the Armenians!” It is because of people
like him that I feel honored to have Kutahya in my surname.
Kastamonu Gov. Resit Pasha, Basra Gov. Ferit Bey, Yozgat Gov. Cemal
Bey, Lice Sub-Gov. Huseyin Nesimi Bey and Batman Deputy Sub-Gov. Sabit
Bey were all among those honorable statesmen we are proud to have had.
Some of them lost their lives, too. The Young Turk mentality did not
spare them either, just as it pressed ahead with the deportations
knowing perfectly well they amounted to an atrocity.
So, let’s ask ourselves this question: Do we see ourselves as the
grandchildren of those noble Turkish statesmen? Are we going to
erect monuments of them in the cities they served? Or are we the
grandchildren of the wicked men who made a conscious decision to kill?
Do we keep lauding the murderers? If we continue to shamelessly insist
that “we did it and we were right to do so,” that would make us the
grandchildren of the second group. So, we have to make up our mind:
Who are the Turks we see as true ancestors?
In almost every Turkish city today, streets and boulevards are named
after Young Turk leaders. And what about the names of the noble
Turkish statesmen who listened to the voice of their conscience and
humanity? Are any of them inscribed on a school, hospital or street?
Not even one? These questions go to Erdogan. As the man likely to
be Turkey’s president in 2015 — the centenary of the massacres —
he is now expected to take even more momentous steps.
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/04/turkey-armenian-genocide-erdogan-condolence-legacy-liberals.html