An open letter to Aslı Aydınsbas
By Aram Yardımyan
August 2, 2012
Every now and again, Turkish ministers and diplomats go on what appears
to be a search for the historical soul of Anatolia. Calls are made,
invitations are written, conciliatory public overtures are carefully
recorded and published, and superfluous historical commissions are
proposed. All, ostensibly, in the name of repairing relations with
Armenians. That each of these heart-wrenching gestures happens to
occur with the approaching of April 24th or some other small threat
to the feelings of Turkish conservatives, should not betray a small
amount of calculation on the part of Turkey. In fact, the gestures are
timed atomically, their sunrises and sundowns, with the events. They
are designed as means to obfuscation and distraction and the purchase
of time. And often enough successfully. For hypnosis seems to affect
thousands of Armenians and liberal-leaning Turkish intellectuals who
get sucked in each time as if never before.
In your Turkish-language editorial in July 7th’s Milliyet, you
expressed a hope that Foreign Minister Davutoglu’s three-step plan,
properly implemented, will result in a road toward pan-Anatolian
reconciliation. Are you, too, affected by this hypnosis, Aslı? Make
no error in judgment, the man is not sincere, and this three-phase
plan is nothing more than a bigger carrot dangling from a bigger stick
that will disappear by magic on April 25th, 2015. It is nothing more
than a way to ensure indefinite suspension of Armenia’s pain, all
the while looking good and pro-active to the eyes of Hilary Clinton,
Obama, and other Turkish houseplants.
If this sounds cynical, go and review the last ten years worth of
diplomatic overtures and pay close attention to the wording. Each one
is reservedly conciliatory, highly generalized–often to the point of
meaninglessness, and ultimately self-serving on Turkey’s part. Each is
an offer for Armenia and its diaspora to come forward to meet under
the frame of equitable symmetry, and yet the symmetry can never be
equitable. Each one has its goal to tailoring of a brand new suit for
Armenia–one too tight to fit any compensation money in its pockets,
one so shiny as to distract from the deterioration of its religious
monuments in Anatolia, and one chained to a pocket dictionary of
acceptable terms for the events of 1915-1917.
Davutoglu knows well what is at stake. Let him make a concrete proposal
for reparations, and dispense with abstractions about prodigal children
coming home, and from these vampiric invitations for fireside chats
about pain over common foodstuffs. Turkey has actually very little
to lose by opening the border; or by allowing Armenia access to the
Trabzon port; by rebuilding and returning our religious sites to the
Armenian Patriarchate of Istanbul; by compensating the descendants of
deportees and genocide victims; by returning confiscated properties to
the descendants of their owners; etc. These are small gestures. Any
attempt to forge a new language of obfuscation will fail, both among
Armenians who will accept nothing without the word ‘genocide’, and
among Turkish nationalists whose solicitors will smear it down the
walls of the court.
Turkey will not be genuinely forthcoming about these things. I do not,
therefore, even begin to share your optimism in the approach of 2015,
Aslı. Nor do I hold out for anything from a country who speaks of
redefining diaspora while Kurds are still by many referred to as
‘Mountain Turks’, and in which Article 301 continues to thrive not
as government conspiracy but as public imperative. Turks everywhere
still revere Talat and Enver and Nihal Atsız as national heroes. And
do not forger the ‘Ä°ttihat’ in Ä°ttihat ve Terakki. Your country is
founded on it. Davutoglu simply cannot be taken seriously if he means
to challenge the Ä°ttihatists, and if he is serious, his family has
my advance condolences.
And what could he possibly mean by ‘kapılarını acacak’? Who is
invited and to what would they come back? Falsified textbooks, murdered
newspapermen, throngs of football hooligans chanting the name of an
assassin (they are all Oguns, indeed), and dead churches. What is
Akhtamar now? A museum. What do you put in museums? Dead things. Who
prays at Ani? Only the Nationalist Action Party. We are invited to
join them in this? Delightful. Why not invite Zulus to a reenactment at
Blood River? Why not invite German Jews home to celebrate Kristallnacht
with skinheads?
Davutoglu is at least right about one thing: Turkey is not Germany.
Turkey has no Willy Brandt to fall on his knees in the Warsaw ghetto.
It has only hidebound intellectuals and the own-tail-chasing of nth
generation Ä°ttihatists. They are the meningitis in your country’s
spine. Imagine Germany attempting a presumption as self-serving
as Davutoglu’s ‘just memory’. Does ‘adil hafıza’ mean doubly
‘obfuscation’? Does recognition of the Shoah sideline the losses of
German life? Why do the Hutus not ask for ‘just memory’? Why does
only Turkey seek to share its culpability over baklava?–These are
questions I would very much like to see Minister Davutoglu own up
to. In 1915, the destruction was deliberate and systematic, just as
it was in Nazi Germany and Rwanda and Kosovo and Cambodia. And in
none of these places was there an absence of internal threat–real
or imagined–to the integrity of the state. There is no need for a
new word to describe the events of 1915-17.
When the smoke has cleared and the mirrors have shattered, and the
hypnotist’s coin has been stored away, perhaps you will see that your
foreign minister’s overtures are a Queen’s Gambit and a thin sham. He
offers nothing but what he offers himself.
http://www.armenianlife.com/2012/08/02/an-open-letter-to-asli-aydintasbas/