None Dared Call It Genocide
Yigal Schleifer. The Jerusalem Report. May 2, 2005. pg. 24
Of course, the question of what occurred fundamentally divides Turks
and Armenians. What’s clear is that with the approach of World War I,
the Ottoman Empire found itself in a state of steep decline, and
confronting a growing sense of national identity among its subjects,
both Turks and non-Turks. The nationalism among its minorities –
especially Greeks and Armenians, who had historical territorial claims
on Ottoman lands – was particularly threatening to the Ottomans.
Armenians claim the Ottoman Turks killed as many as 1.5 million of
their people during the years 1915-1923 through deportations and mass
killings in what is now eastern Turkey. To the Armenians, this was an
ethnic cleansing campaign, meant to drive the non-Muslims out of
Turkey’s Anatolian heartland. On April 24, Armenians worldwide will
commemorate 90 years since the beginning of the massacres. Turkey
rejects the genocide claim, admitting that Armenians were killed at
the time, but disputes the number and says the deaths were unorganized
and part of wider regional wartime violence that also affected Muslim
Turks.
Perhaps inevitably, the newfound readiness to delve into the past is
evoking a backlash in Turkey. Openly discussing the genocide question
is “a radical shift, but it also brings about radical reactions,” says
sociologist [Ferhat Kentel]. “There are two things happening at the
same time: [progressive academics and intellectuals] are talking about
the Armenian issue, while nationalism becomes stronger.” In Turkish
nationalist ideology, Armenians are viewed as a seditious threat,
their claims of genocide nothing more than a ruse to take Turkish
territory. When Orhan Pamuk, one of Turkey’s best-known authors,
stated in a Swiss paper in early February that “a million Armenians
were killed in Turkey,” the response included death threats and
charges of dishonoring the state filed against him in court. A
governor in one rural Turkish district even ordered that all of
Pamuk’s books be taken off the shelves in the district’s few libraries
and destroyed, only to soon find out that none of the libraries had
any books by the author.
“To my sorrow, Israel has become Turkey’s principal partner in helping
it deny the Armenian claims,” says Yair Auron, a professor at Israel’s
Open University and author of “The Banality of Denial: Israel and the
Armenian Genocide.” While countries that have not recognized the
genocide will still send officials to commemoration events or issue
statements that use nuanced language to remember what happened without
calling it genocide, Israel refrains from doing either, Auron
says. The two times Israeli officials have made a public appearance at
a commemoration event – most notably by then- education minister Yossi
Sarid, in 2000, when he referred to what happened as “genocide” caused
strains with Ankara and led to disavowals from Jerusalem. And in 2003,
Naomi Nalbandian, an Israeli citizen of Armenian descent, was
pressured to change the text of remarks she had planned to deliver
when lighting a torch at Israel’s 55th Independence Day celebrations
at Mt. Herzl. Nalbandian was forced to delete a reference to herself
as a “third-generation survivor of the Armenian genocide carried out
in 1915.” Full Text (3876 words) (Copyright (c) 2005. The Jerusalem
Report)
None Dared Call It Genocide
For 90 years, the atrocities suffered by the Armenians at the hands of
Ottoman Turks were a taboo topic in Turkey. Now, the country has begun
to discuss this troubling chapter in its history.
Yigal Schleifer Istanbul
When it was launched 10 years ago, Agos, a weekly newspaper serving
Tur-key’s Armenian community, was meant to be a brash new
voice. Unlike two other papers that had been publishing for decades,
Agos was written mostly in Turkish, rather than Armenian
exclusively. It was a way of reaching out to younger readers of
Armenian descent, while at the same time expanding the paper’s impact
beyond the confines of the 60,000-member Armenian community, making it
both something of a public voice for the community and a window into
it.
If it broke new ground dealing with present-day problems, Agos, like
its older rivals, had to take a circuitous approach in talking about
the past. “Previously, when we talked about history” – in particular,
about the fate of Turkey’s once-sizable Armenian minority – “we didn’t
mention things that actually happened but focused instead on culture,”
says Hrant Dink, the newspaper’s founding editor, speaking in Agos’s
downtown Istanbul offices.
This roundabout method made sense: What happened to the Armenians in
Turkey during and just after World War I had long been one of the most
taboo and explosive topics in Turkey, the limits of its discussion
strictly controlled by the government. Those who claim there was a
genocide could conceivably be prosecuted for tarnishing the honor of
the Turkish state. An attempt two years to screen in Istanbul
Armenian-Canadian director Atom Egoyan’s “Ararat,” which deals with
the genocide issue, was called off after extreme nationalist groups
threatened violence.
Of course, the question of what occurred fundamentally divides Turks
and Armenians. What’s clear is that with the approach of World War I,
the Ottoman Empire found itself in a state of steep decline, and
confronting a growing sense of national identity among its subjects,
both Turks and non-Turks. The nationalism among its minorities –
especially Greeks and Armenians, who had historical territorial claims
on Ottoman lands – was particularly threatening to the
Ottomans. Armenians claim the Ottoman Turks killed as many as 1.5
million of their people during the years 1915-1923 through
deportations and mass killings in what is now eastern Turkey. To the
Armenians, this was an ethnic cleansing campaign, meant to drive the
non-Muslims out of Turkey’s Anatolian heartland. On April 24,
Armenians worldwide will commemorate 90 years since the beginning of
the massacres. Turkey rejects the genocide claim, admitting that
Armenians were killed at the time, but disputes the number and says
the deaths were unorganized and part of wider regional wartime
violence that also affected Muslim Turks.
Since the 1960s, the Armenians have been waging an international
campaign to have it recognized as genocide, a step that has been taken
as a symbolic gesture by legislatures in more than a dozen countries,
most notably France. In response, over the past 25 years, Ankara has
waged its own political fight to keep the word “genocide” from being
attached to what happened.
Until recently, the state’s official version of events was the only
one that could be aired publicly in Turkey. Those who dared to
challenge the taboo could expect a swift backlash in the press, and,
perhaps, in the case of academics, being blacklisted.
But over the last few years, something has started to shift in Turkey,
something that is being reflected in the pages of Agos, Dink
says. “Slowly we started to ask what happened to the Armenians,” he
says. “Now we’re at the point of telling what happened to them.”
But Agos is not the only venue in which a change is taking place. If
the subject of the Armenians’ fate was at one time never talked about
or even mentioned in the media or history books in Turkey, the topic
today has entered the public arena in a major way, particularly with
the approach of the anniversary.
With the government concerned about the country’s undemocratic image
as it presses its bid to enter the EU, it seems reluctant to clamp
down on freedom of speech. In recent years, a group of academics,
small in number but influential, have begun to question the official
narrative. Turkish newspapers are now filled with articles on the
subject. Most of them still ultimately reject the Armenian claims, but
some rather daringly push the envelope on what can be asked. For
example, the mainstream daily Milliyet recently ran a long interview
with Turkish historian Halil Berktay – one of the first academics to
support the genocide case – in which he called the Ottoman plan
against the Armenians “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing.”
Meanwhile, one of Turkey’s best-selling books right now, “My
Grandmother,” by Istanbul lawyer Fethiye Cetin, tells the true story
of an Armenian woman who survived the 1915 massacres and was raised as
a Muslim Turk.
These are developments that would have been unimaginable 10 years ago,
says Dink. “The Armenian problem is no longer seen as a taboo subject
in Turkey,” he says.
Turks say the softening of the country’s historical stance is one
aspect of increasing democratization and reforms, both related to
Turkey’s EU membership bid. These changes have spurred the growth of a
civil society, which has allowed an increasing number of
nongovernmental groups – from academics and businessmen to musicians
and women’s organizations – to meet with their Armenian counterparts,
in the process helping to redefine the debate in Turkey. At the same
time, as the limits on that debate expand – and as pressure grows on
Turkey to confront its past – a backlash is brewing, with the Turkish
state getting ready to fight for its honor.
The 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention defines the act as
measures “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.” Although a clear- cut
definition exists, Turkey has been able over the years to bring just
enough contrary scholarship forward to keep going the debate of
whether what took place constituted genocide. What is certain is that
the Armenian issue, in many ways, long ago left the realm of history –
in Turkey and elsewhere – and firmly entered that of politics.
The Armenians’ campaign for recognition started in earnest in the
mid-1960s, around the time of the 50th anniversary commemoration of
the events of 1915, when their diaspora, especially in the United
States and France, had become more organized politically. By the year
2000, the campaign had picked up enough steam that the U.S. House of
Representatives came very close to passing a resolution recognizing
the genocide. But by that time, fighting the Armenian claims had
become a central tenet of Turkish foreign policy. Ankara has
threatened to sever relations with countries that pass genocide
resolutions, while in the case of the U.S., it threatened to cut off
access to Turkish air bases as well as cancel lucrative defense deals
if Congress recognized the Armenian claims. The lawmakers ultimately
agreed to shelve the bill after an appeal by then- president Bill
Clinton on the grounds of national interest. In the case of France,
Turkey temporarily withdrew its ambassador to Paris, and canceled
deals involving French companies after a genocide bill was passed
there in 2001.
The subject of intense lobbying by both the Turks and Armenians aside,
the genocide issue has also involved American Jewish organizations,
which have put their Washington connections behind Turkey’s cause, as
well as Israel, which has refrained from recognizing the Armenians’
claims, in order not to jeopardize its strategic relations with Turkey
(see box, page 26).
Inside Turkey, meanwhile, the Armenian issue was a non-subject, kept
out of the classrooms and textbooks. In the universities, which until
less than a decade ago were completely state-controlled, the topic was
off-limits for researchers.
“It used to be a silent thing,” says Ferhat Kentel, a sociologist at
Istanbul Bilgi University, one of several private universities that
have opened up in the country in the last decade. Kentel, along with a
colleague in the Armenian capital of Yerevan, has just completed the
first joint Turkish-Armenian public opinion survey, which found a high
level of mistrust and prejudice between the two nations, particularly
on the Armenian side. “When I was a kid, I wasn’t even aware of this
issue,” says Kentel.
Taner Akcam, a professor of history at the University of Minnesota and
the first Turkish academic to publicly describe the World War I-era
events as “genocide,” in the early 1990s, believes the tension with
the U.S. in 2000 over Congress’s actions helped turn the issue into
something Turks can discuss. As Congress came close to passing its
resolution, the Turkish press and public started paying more attention
to what was happening in Washington, contemplating the significance of
the Armenian issue in a way they never had before, he says.
“Before 2000, there was a shield outside of Turkey keeping anything
about the genocide issue from coming in,” says Akcam, 51, who left his
home country in 1997 after becoming a political liability that no
university wanted to touch. “The debate in 2000 made a crack in this
shield,” he says, speaking by telephone from Minneapolis. In response,
the Turkish government decided to add a domestic component to its
fight against the Armenians, introducing lessons teaching the Turkish
perspective to school curriculums. Akcam compares that move to Mikhail
Gorbachev’s Perestroika in the Soviet Union during the 1980s: a reform
that only left people wanting more. “Turkish society was curious to
know what happened. They couldn’t keep [the issue] out anymore,” Akcam
says.
At the same time, other forces were starting to make their mark on
Turkish politics and society. While at its Brussels summit last
December the EU finally decided to begin accession negotiations with
Turkey, EU-minded democratic reforms in Turkey had already started to
be put in place several years ago, creating more space for public
debate on the Armenian question.
“Turkey has transformed. The level of education has gone up and civil
society has expanded, so the state can no longer dominate and
monopolize the public sphere the way it used to,” says Fatma Muge
Gocek, a Turkish sociologist who teaches at the University of Michigan
and who is the co-organizer of the Workshop for Armenian- Turkish
Studies (WATS), a gathering of Turkish and Armenian scholars that has
been meeting annually since 2000.
Meanwhile, the growth of private universities in the country has meant
that researchers can slowly start delving into previously forbidden
topics or can say unpopular things without fearing the loss of their
jobs. “Generally speaking, the average academic mind is not open, but
there are some islands in the academic world who are trying to go
deeper, to investigate,” says Kentel.
Says David Phillips, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relations, in New York, who helped organize the now-defunct Turkish
Armenian Reconciliation Commission (TARC), a group of high-level
Turkish and Armenian academics and former diplomats that held several
meetings between 2001 and 2004: “Five years back, you couldn’t talk to
anyone about Armenian issues” – be it the genocide claims or the lack
of diplomatic relations between Turkey and Armenia – “because they
knew that the history was implicit in the discussion. Now there is a
veritable cottage industry of groups working on the Turkish-Armenian
issue.”
For example, Istanbul freight shipper Noyan Soyak helped found in 1997
a pioneering group that brings together businessmen from Turkey and
Armenia, which became independent in 1991, on joint projects. Though
neighbors, Turkey broke off diplomatic relations with Armenia in 1993
in the wake of its occupation of a large chunk of territory belonging
to Turkish ally Azerbaijan.
Soyak, a boyish-looking 38-year-old with bushy blondish hair, says the
organization stepped into a gaping void when it got off the
ground. “When we started, it was difficult to even publicly pronounce
the word ‘Armenia’ or ‘Armenians’ in Turkey,” says Soyak, whose group
– the Turkish-Armenian Business Development Council – today has some
250 members from both countries. Among other projects, the council is
currently producing a jazz CD that brings together Turkish and
Armenian musicians. “As long as the borders are closed, doing business
is difficult, so we’re doing everything here but business,” Soyak says
with a shrug.
Perhaps inevitably, the newfound readiness to delve into the past is
evoking a backlash in Turkey. Openly discussing the genocide question
is “a radical shift, but it also brings about radical reactions,” says
sociologist Kentel. “There are two things happening at the same time:
[progressive academics and intellectuals] are talking about the
Armenian issue, while nationalism becomes stronger.” In Turkish
nationalist ideology, Armenians are viewed as a seditious threat,
their claims of genocide nothing more than a ruse to take Turkish
territory. When Orhan Pamuk, one of Turkey’s best-known authors,
stated in a Swiss paper in early February that “a million Armenians
were killed in Turkey,” the response included death threats and
charges of dishonoring the state filed against him in court. A
governor in one rural Turkish district even ordered that all of
Pamuk’s books be taken off the shelves in the district’s few libraries
and destroyed, only to soon find out that none of the libraries had
any books by the author.
While civil society groups have taken the lead in pushing Turkey along
in confronting the Armenian question, in recent weeks the Turkish
state has made it clear that it is not quite out of the picture,
stepping in in order to once again try and set the course of the
debate on the issue.
For Turkey’s ruling elite, the Armenian issue still remains a bete
noir, one that is especially threatening today. “Turkey feels [that
recognizing the genocide] might be a precondition for entrance to the
EU,” says Yusuf Halacoglu, director of the Turkish Historical
Society. This quasi-governmental body has recently been stepping up
its work on countering the Armenian claims, even sponsoring
archaeological digs in Eastern Turkey that are intended to uncover
mass graves of Turks allegedly massacred by Armenians. “No one has
said this explicitly, but we see that this is being discussed behind
the curtains.” Although European officials have denied this, it is
also true that the EU – which has been trying to promote a “good
neighbor” policy in Europe and the surrounding region – would prefer
that Turkey patch up its differences with Armenia sooner rather than
later.
In response, the Turkish state has been revving up its in-house
counter-information efforts. Halacoglu’s organization, for example, is
busy collecting material from European and American archives that it
says will prove once and for all the falsity of the Armenian claims.
In his spacious office in Ankara, Halacoglu, dressed in a dark
pinstripe suit, lays out copies of war-era maps and diplomatic cables
on a coffee table. According to his group’s research, Halacoglu says
around 300,000 Armenians died between 1915 and 1918, only 10,000 of
them massacred. The rest died of hunger and disease, he simply
explains, not touching on what role deportation might have had in
bringing on either of those conditions.
“Throughout Europe at the time, we see that a lot of people are dying
from diseases,” says Halacoglu, who previously worked at the Turkish
state archives before becoming director of the historical society a
dozen years ago. “I feel very comfortable after all the research we
have done,” he says. “We are open to dialogue with anyone. We are open
to discussing if this was genocide or not,” he adds.
In fact, the Turkish government, together with the country’s largest
opposition party, recently announced that they also are open to
dialogue and would like to get Turkish and Armenian historians
together under international supervision to investigate the
issue. While the statement was welcomed by some as a step forward,
it’s not clear how far Turkey is actually willing to go and just who
the historians would be.
During an interview in his office in the parliament building in
Ankara, Sukru Elekdag, a dapper member of the opposition Republican
People’s Party (CHP) and one of the main architects of the Turkish
dialogue initiative, says civil initiatives at Turkish-Armenian
reconciliation have so far failed.
“Now, with our march to integration with Europe, this problem has
become much more acute,” says Elekdag, 80, a former ambassador to
Washington who speaks fluent English with something approaching a
Midwestern accent. “Our leaders realize it’s a problem that must be
solved.” While he proposes the joint study by Turkish and Armenian
historians as a way of solving the problem, Elekdag seems to be
already sure in whose favor the joint research will point.
“To my mind, the Armenian allegations are baseless and groundless,”
the legislator says. “When I look at this from a legal and historical
perspective, it’s almost impossible to accuse the Ottomans of
committing genocide. There had been a civil war. It was started by the
Armenians. The events of 1915 are a typical case of revolt and
betrayal.”
Ronald Suny, an Armenian American professor of political science and
history at the University of Chicago, and a co-organizer of WATS, the
annual gathering of Turkish and Armenian academics, says this is a
perpetuation of the historic Turkish position that “there was no
genocide, and the Armenians were to blame for what happened to
them. None of this is sustainable by any credible scholar.”
Despite the work being done by Turks and Armenians on bridging the
gulf between them, truly resolving their differences may hinge not on
agreeing on what happened, but, rather, if one word – “genocide” –
fits those events. In that sense, any real progress may take a long
time. As part of its work, the organizers of the Turkish- Armenian
Reconciliation Commission had the New York-based International Center
for Transitional Justice conduct a legal analysis of the applicability
of the Genocide Convention to the 1915 events. The ICTJ report
concluded that the events could be defined as “genocide,” but because
the convention could not be applied retroactively, Turkey would not be
liable for any reparations, something Ankara has long expressed fears
about having to do if it accepted the Armenian claims.
If the document was an attempt to create a conciliatory way out of the
impasse, it failed. Ustun Erguder, a Turkish political scientist who
was a member of TARC, says the association of the word “genocide” with
the barbarity of Nazi Germany makes the claim especially difficult for
Turks, even forward-thinking ones, to accept.
“I think Turks [who are dealing with the issue] have come a long way
even to say, ‘We did something wrong to the Armenians.’ Turkey is in
the process of recognizing that, but there are few historians or
intellectuals who are willing to call it genocide, although the issue
is becoming debatable in Turkey,” he says.
Agos editor Dink believes the only way forward is to continue the work
that civil society groups have begun and to increase the interaction
between Turks and Armenians. Only this, he says, can break through the
enmity that has developed over the decades. “Both sides are clinical
cases, suffering their own paranoia,” Dink says, speaking slowly and
intently. “Both need their own cure. The remedy is dialogue between
the two nations. This is the best medicine.”
‘The Jewish Lobby Helped Enormously’
In the 1970s and 1980, as Armenian lobbying efforts in the
U.S. started to raise the pressure on Turkey, Ankara began to
understand that the well-organized American Jewish lobby could act as
a counterweight to the Armenians. The Jewish organizations played
along, because the strategic value of the budding Israeli-Turkish
alliance carried more weight than the historical claims of the
Armenians.
“The Jewish lobby helped us enormously,” says parliament member Sukru
Elekdag, who was the Turkish ambassador in Washington from 1979 to
1989.
In realpolitik terms, the arrangement has worked for all
involved. Turkey gets a powerful ally in Washington. The American
Jewish community then has a useful lever to push Turkey closer toward
Israel (which has also refrained from recognizing the Armenians’
claims). Meanwhile, the implicit support of U.S. Jewish organizations
and the tacit support of Israel give moral cover to any American
administration that stops legislation recognizing the Armenian
genocide.
“To my sorrow, Israel has become Turkey’s principal partner in helping
it deny the Armenian claims,” says Yair Auron, a professor at Israel’s
Open University and author of “The Banality of Denial: Israel and the
Armenian Genocide.” While countries that have not recognized the
genocide will still send officials to commemoration events or issue
statements that use nuanced language to remember what happened without
calling it genocide, Israel refrains from doing either, Auron
says. The two times Israeli officials have made a public appearance at
a commemoration event – most notably by then- education minister Yossi
Sarid, in 2000, when he referred to what happened as “genocide” caused
strains with Ankara and led to disavowals from Jerusalem. And in 2003,
Naomi Nalbandian, an Israeli citizen of Armenian descent, was
pressured to change the text of remarks she had planned to deliver
when lighting a torch at Israel’s 55th Independence Day celebrations
at Mt. Herzl. Nalbandian was forced to delete a reference to herself
as a “third-generation survivor of the Armenian genocide carried out
in 1915.”
The person who was probably most responsible for setting this dynamic
in motion is Turkish Jewish businessman Jak Kamhi, the founder and
chairman of Profilo, a large electronics and appliance manufacturing
company. Kamhi, 80, counts various U.S. presidents and Israeli prime
ministers among his friends. Speaking in his cavernous Istanbul
office, which is furnished with toffee-colored leather chairs and
couch, Kamhi says he has helped the fight against the Armenian claims
out of a sense of duty to the memory of the Jewish victims of the
Holocaust. “[Countering] the so-called genocide is more important for
the Jews in the Diaspora and Israel than the Turks,” Kamhi says. “It
is not something you can compare to the Holocaust and the genocide
that happened in Europe. You can speak about a drama, about many other
things, but not about a genocide. That happened in Europe.”
The policy is not without its critics. Jewish lobbyists in Washington
admit that supporting Turkey in the genocide debate is an unpopular
position among many of their organizations’ members. “We get a lot of
criticism from our own members on this,” says one Jewish official, who
asked not to be named. The issue is compounded by the fact that large
Jewish and Armenian communities live side-by- side in places like New
York, Boston and Los Angeles.
“Israel committed an original sin by not explaining to Turkey from the
start that the Armenian genocide could not be negotiated as part of
their relations,” says Auron. “I really think if we had told them from
the outset that this subject is not part of the discussion regarding
our relationship, the Turks would have accepted it.” As custodian of
the memory and lessons of the Holocaust, Israel is obliged to change
course on the issue, Auron says. “You have to take a position: And the
historic and moral position is one that accepts the genocide.”
Y.S.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or
distribution is prohibited without permission.
Section: Middle East
ISSN/ISBN: 07926049
Text Word Count 3876
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