TURKEY’S GENOCIDE DILEMMA
by Jasper Mortimer
The Media Line, NY
p?NewsID=21305
April 24 2008
[Ankara, Turkey] History surrounds the newly refurbished park where
old men sit and smoke and stray dogs bark on the slopes beneath Ankara
Castle. There are the massive medieval walls of the citadel, the Museum
of Anatolian Civilization at the park’s southern end, and across the
valley stands a column erected by the Romans in the fourth century.
But there is nothing in Hisar Park that reveals its own history,
what happened there before it became a park.
Photographs of the area taken in the early 1900s, such as those
published in Ankara Magazine in November 2005, show a densely built
district called Hisaronu, which means "in front of the castle."
The houses were posh – three stories high with balconies and flagpoles
– and the men in the street were smartly dressed in black coats and
fezzes. After all, Hisaronu was home to the city’s mohair merchants,
doctors and lawyers. It was also known as the Armenian Quarter.
Two events destroyed Hisaronu in the decade 1910-1920. The first came
in 1915 when the Ottoman authorities applied the policy of "deporting"
Armenians to remote parts of the empire. But this did not empty the
district, as Greeks and Muslims lived there as well. Then in 1917 an
accidental fire sped through the wooden-clad buildings of Hisaronu
and razed it.
Curiously, Hisaronu’s inhabitants never rebuilt their homes. Many of
them had second homes, with gardens, on the outskirts of the city,
and they may have lived there in the hard times that followed World
War One. The Greek residents may have left Turkey in the exchange of
populations that accompanied the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923.
But what became of the Armenians?
The census of 1914 said there were 11,646 Armenians in Ankara,
but the census of 1927 recorded only 705; "so we can conclude that
more than 10,000 Armenians were forced to leave Ankara in 1915,"
the journalist Seden Bayat wrote in an Ankara magazine article.
Thursday (April 24) is the 93rd anniversary of what is regarded as the
start of the crackdown on the Armenians. On the night of 24 April,
1915 police arrested 235 leading members of the Armenian community
in Istanbul, then the capital of the Ottoman empire.
During the next seven years up to 1.5 million Armenians died, either
through massacres or deprivation in forced marches, according to
Armenians. Turkey denies this, saying that 300,000 Armenians died in
civil strife that emerged after Armenians in eastern Anatolia sided
with invading Russian troops.
But there was no local strife or collusion with the enemy to justify
the deportation of Armenians in Ankara and Istanbul. And it is the
persistence of such questions, or the failure to answer them, that
burdens Turkey like a ball and chain.
Last year Ankara had to exert all its diplomatic and military
weight to stop the U.S. Congress from passing a resolution that
declared 1915-1922 to be genocide. Ultimately Turkey succeeded, but
everyone knows the resolution will return after the U.S. electoral
season. Democrat candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have
pledged to support a genocide resolution should either become president
(Republican candidate John McCain has not).
Inside Turkey Armenian-related events continue to unfold and embarrass
thinking Turks. Last month the little-known eastern town of Askale, ,
hit the front pages when its municipality staged a re-enactment of a
massacre committed by Armenian militants in 1918. Mainstream newspapers
condemned it as "shocking" and a "disgrace," arguing that such plays
would encourage children to emulate the teenagers who killed an Italian
priest in Trabzon in 2006 and the Armenian editor Hrant Dink last year.
The two trials of those allegedly involved in Dink’s murder have
revealed a series of blunders, and worse. Officials in the security
services were pre-warned of the plot to kill Dink but took no action
and, in two cases, forged documents after his death to cover their
negligence. The suspicion is that the state was careless of Dink’s life
because it despised him for challenging the official line on 1915-1922.
Turkey has to re-address 1915-1922. As former diplomat Mehmet Ogutcu
wrote in the Turkish press last year: "We do not want the Armenian
question to top our national and international agenda as it impairs
Turkey (from) becoming an effective regional power and opens Turkey
to the whims of international pressure."
The question is how to revisit the issue. Prime Minister Recep Tayyib
Erdogan, whose penchant for problem solving has led his government
to break ground on many fronts, surprised many Turks when he invited
Armenia to set up a joint commission of historians that would delve
into the Ottoman archives and report on what happened to the Armenians.
Turks were dismayed when Armenia did not seize this offer. Instead the
Yerevan government replied it wanted Turkey to establish diplomatic
relations, and then such a commission would be one of several items
on the bilateral agenda. Ankara-Yerevan ties have been stalled for
years by the Nagorno-KarabakhWHAT IS IT? dispute.
Mehmet Ali Birand, Turkey’s equivalent of Walter Cronkite, has
proposed that Turkey invite a third country, such as a Britain, to
chair a commission of Armenian and Turkish historians to look into
the issue. Birand, who does not believe genocide occurred, made his
suggestion in a column, which stressed that while Turkey won last
year’s battle in Congress, it may not win the next.
Gerard Libaridian, a former adviser to the Armenian president,
now teaching Armenian history at Michigan University, told this
correspondent that while a joint commission was worth pursuing, it
would be difficult to create. He predicts a lot of argument over the
appointment of commissioners, terms of reference and the evaluation
of evidence.
Moreover, Libaridian adds, the commission’s findings would create a
political problem for at least one of the governments that appointed
it.
"Accepting a commission that will make a determination means that you
are open to the possibility that it wasn’t genocide, just as Turkey
might be open to the possibility that it was," he says.
Even if such hurdles could be cleared, it is doubtful how influential
the commission’s finding would be. Turks and Armenians have been
weaned on inflexible views of 1915-1922.
"It’s impossible to get Turks to admit that their forefathers were
committers of genocide. It’s a very strong accusation," Tayyibe Gulek,
a politician and deputy chairwoman of the Democratic Left Party,
said in an interview.
For Gulek, the way forward is "to have historians look at the
archives," and she is utterly confident these will vindicate Turkey.
The Turkish Armenian talk-show host Hayko Bagdat says there is
something to be said for a Turk who cannot admit the possibility of
genocide: "That he takes this line shows he has moral values."
The views of Hayko, as he was known to listeners of the Istanbul radio
station Yasam, conflict with those of U.S. Armenians, who see people
such as Gulek as proof that Turkey has not changed since 1915. In fact,
the 60,000 Armenians in Turkey and the 1 million Armenians in America
have very different ideas on how to push Turkey to change on 1915-1922.
U.S. Armenians seek a Congressional acknowledgement of genocide,
which would add the United States to the list of 19 countries whose
parliaments have passed such declarations. They see such resolutions
as due recognition of a massive injustice, and they believe ultimately
these motions will produce change in Ankara.
But that is not all that is going on. The U.S. Armenian Libaridian has
said the demand for "genocide recognition" has become a rallying cry,
"a principle of community organization," for diaspora Armenians.
American Armenians need "April 24" as a means of retaining their
identity and values in a foreign country, Hayko says.
"There is a unity built on common pain, hatred and reaction. But that
isn’t present among Armenians of Turkey because we haven’t left our
land, and we kept our identity," says Hayko, whose talk show Unkept
Promises focused on Turkish Armenian issues.
What Hayko wants to see is not Congressional resolutions, or even
recognition by Ankara. He wants a change of heart by people in
the street.
"It would not satisfy me if (Prime Minister) Erdogan were to say,
‘I’ve been thinking about 1915-1922 – so many Armenians were killed,’"
Hayko says. "This would not change my daily life.
"What I would like is for Turkish people to empathize with what
happened then. That would make me more confident about the future
for my child in Turkey."
Leading the way to such a change, he adds, were the 100,000 Turks who
walked behind Dink’s hearse in his January 2007 funeral, the like of
which the country had never seen before for an Armenian.
Etyen Mahcupyan, who replaced Dink as chief of Agos newspaper,
also argues against resolutions in foreign parliaments, saying that
Turks must change their views for "moral reasons" and not because of
external pressure.
Hayko and Mahcupyan seek the slower route to change, that which
comes about through the gradual accumulation of evidence and opinion,
in private as well as public debate.
And it is not only Turkish conservatives who must take part in this
opening up. There are Armenians in Turkey who have closed the door.
A case in point is Sultan Onkun, a member of Ankara’s small Armenian
community whom this correspondent met at the French Consulate church
in Ulus, which now functions as the only Armenian church in the city.
"My attitude is that 1915-1922 is past and no good can come from
digging into it," says Onkun, a mother in her mid-forties, who manages
a store selling top quality cutlery and crockery. Her great grandfather
served in the Ottoman army during World War One, and her relatives
never told her that Armenians were singled out, let alone massacred.
Onkun criticizes the controversial 2005 conference in Istanbul in
which liberal and conservative Turks debated whether genocide occurred.
"Instead of spending time on this sort of thing," Onkun says, "people
should look forward and think about how to maintain the unity of
Turkey. People should focus on maintaining that unity rather than
digging up the past and disturbing things."
While Onkun has chosen to assimilate the mainstream of Turkish
thinking, other Turks are trying to change that thinking. Two examples
deserve mention.
The writer Elif Shafak created a stir in 2006 when she published
The Bastard of Istanbul, a novel that deals with an Armenian woman
whose family members were massacred in 1915-1922. Educated abroad,
Shafak first encountered the Armenian issue when she read about the
Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia, a terrorist group
that was targetting people such as her mother, a Turkish diplomat.
Turks are discussing 1915-1922 as never before, Shafak said in an
interview with the Boston-based Armenian journalist Khatchig Mouradian:
"The problem is that the bigger the change, the deeper the panic of
those who want to preserve the status quo."
Another trailblazer is Taner Akcam, one of a handful of Turkish
academics, who have courageously said that the evidence remaining of
the events of 1915-1922 shows Armenians were systematically killed.
His 2006 book A Shameful Act takes its title from a remark by the
legendary Turkish leader Ataturk about the killings of 1915-22. Drawing
heavily from Ottoman, German and Austrian archives, Akcam tells the
story of Mazhar Bey, the governor of Ankara province who was sacked
for resisting the orders about the Armenians.
"One day Atif Bey came to me and orally conveyed the interior
minister’s orders that the Armenians were to be murdered during the
deportation," Mazhar testified at a post-WW1 trial. "’No, Atif Bey,’
I said, ‘I am a governor, not a bandit, I cannot do this."’
Akcam, who teaches at the University of Minnesota, has been castigated
in the mainstream Turkish press and has received death threats by
email. But his book is freely available in mainstream bookshops in
Istanbul and Ankara.
Twenty-five years ago Akcam’s book would have been banned, and a
coffee-table publication such as Ankara Magazine would not have
delved into the city’s Armenian history. We still do not know what
happened to the Armenians who lived where Hisar Parki stands today,
but Turkey is moving down the right road.
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