Turkish Article

[Joseph]

enocide File: The Opening of ‘the Pandora’s Book’


Written by Halil Ibrahim Nebioglu **

Understanding the recent explosion of debate in Turkey over the Armenian Question

May 23, 2005
*
On the eve of every 24th of April, the ruling elites of Turkey enter into an impatient and strained waiting: Will the US president employ that disturbing word of “genocide’ in his message about this historical tragedy? So far the USA presidents preferred to bestow a cautious language not to alienate their old ally in the troubled Middle East region-the recent obsession of the USA elite. Turkish authorities even tried to use the weapon of extending the American rights over the use of the military base of Encircle-a strategic base very close to Iraq and Syria, in particular. ‘The Neocons’(US Neo-conservatives’) message was very clear: ‘Mr. Bush would not use that very word but you should be helpful!’ This is actually what happened after the relaxing speech of President Bush when the Turkish Government extended American privileges over Incirlik base. Once again ‘Armenian question’ was tried to be outdistanced from our consciences by the use of dirty politics.



Nevertheless things are not same in Turkey. The number of courageous historians and intellectuals are increasing and they are trying to break the most persistent taboo of the Turkish Republic. It was just a few months ago that the historians Dr. Taner Akçam and Prof.Dr. Halil Berktay were unaccompanied yet boldhearted. When Prof. Berktay insisted that we must face this tragedy there emerged an immediate witch-hunt and some groups even demanded his firing away from his post in the Sabanci University. But now, despite their numbers are few, some critical articles and comments over the Armenian Question seem to appear on a daily basis.

Then, what lies at the background of this explosion of interest? The ruling party in Turkey- Justice and Development Party (AKP) has embarked upon a full-fledged reform agenda to finalize Turkey’s long and fluctuating adventure for the EU (European Union) membership. They seem to recognize the necessity of taking some constructive steps in the otherwise frozen problems such as the divided Cyprus. Indeed, they supported and encouraged the Turkish Cypriots to admit the UN’s plan in a referendum while the Greek Cypriots had decisively rejected it. This activism, however, gave a political initiative to Turkey and secured sympathy in the UN, the USA and the EU circles. Having encouraged by their attempt of ending status quo in Cyprus, the Turks are willing to find out a resolution to the Armenian Question, which they rightly consider as a time-bomb unless some compromise is arrived at. But the tragedy is that the government is willing to “take some measures� to overcome the status quo while the Turkish State is not. This should not create the impression that the AKP elite has overcome their ideological barriers to confront the Armenian massacre. However, they are pragmatic reformers who understand that inertness in this issue will further limit the area of action in the immediate future.

However, the ruling AKP hit a strong rock: The military and civilian elites including the leadership of nearly all opposition parties have shown a stubborn reaction against the AKP’s intention of finding a working solution to this ‘problem.’ Since they were indecisive and held an ambiguous position from the start, they temporarily set back. It is the time, which will prove whether they renounced their claims or not. The prime minister Erdogan tries to settle this problem with the official authorities of Armenia and does not want the involvement of the Armenian Diaspora which he regarded as very uncompromising over the recognition of the genocide. There exists an Armenian community in Turkey with a declining population of 70.000. These people are also willing an immediate solution simply because they face the danger of being the easy target of both sides: The Armenian Diaspora and the extreme nationalists of Turkey who seem to be very determined to use the “minority questions� to provoke the public opinion against the AKP-led reformism in line with the EU membership. Armenians living in Turkey are afraid of becoming scapegoats of uncompromising forces.

Armenian rulers have also their justified reason for coming to terms with Turkey since they feel themselves as deadly isolated and encircled in their forgotten lands. The president Kocaryan has recently reminded that they do not propose the recognition of the Armenian Genocide to re-start and deepen the official relations. In return, Mr. Erdogan suggested forming a common commission to debate the Armenian Question. This attempt by Erdogan has been also praised by President Bush’s speech conveyed to commemorate the Armenian victims in 24th of April. Nevertheless, while such positive steps are put forward for the first time, the “deep state� has reacted severely and staged its own counter-attack by presenting “scientific� proofs against the claims of Armenian Genocide. This is why there has emerged a war of propaganda over the Armenian question. I believe that opening of the Pandora’s Box will definitely be fruitful but it is probable that serious setbacks may emerge in the meantime.

The head of the Turkish History Association-Prof. Dr. Yusuf Halacoglu-seems to have assumed the voice of the civilian and military elites in Turkey. In the beginning, Prof. Halacoglu was employing the language of mutual slaughter (mukatala) intensified by the conditions peculiar to the war environment. For a long time, this has been the official narrative of the Turkish state, as well. Accordingly, the Armenians collaborated with the Russian troops against the Ottomans during the heyday of the World War I and the state authorities were obliged to enforce a mass deportation of the Armenians from the war zone for security reasons. This official standing also admits the dying away of so many Armenians on their way to exile but relates these human losses to the devastating natural conditions. What is ironical nowadays is that Prof. Halacoglu’s further retrograded even away from the aforementioned official position. He gradually increased his tone and started to claim that the Armenian gangs committed a series of massacres against the Turks that allegedly resulted with casualties around 500.000. This self-victimization is an incredible example of escaping from reality that some careful historians try to distance from. I believe Prof. Halacoglu’s denial will be a self-defeating strategy.

Recently the leadership of Republican People’s Party(CHP)-the founding party of Turkey-has also embarked upon a strange policy of targeting a book popularly known as the Blue Book-written by Lord Bryce and Arnold Toynbee in 1916 with the title of ‘The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915 –1916. With the initiative of the CHP deputies in the Turkish National Assembly, 550 members of the Turkish Grand National Assembly have sent a letter to the British Parliament claiming that this book was produced for the sake of war propaganda and should not be taken seriously. It is difficult to understand the underlying rationale of this unwitty letter. But this is indeed a naive attitude for anyone who is trying to escape from the reality by creating self-satisfying agendas over seemingly easy targets. But any such effort of escaping from reality is futile simply because there are at least 60 books containing memories of those saviors of the Armenian massacre and they verify the well- known the Turkish proverb: “The sun can not be covered by the clay.�

My cautious optimism above comes from the conviction that it is potentially more fruitful to have a hot debate over an issue rather than freezing it into the status of an untouchable taboo. Today, at least a group of intellectuals emerged acting in the name of reason and conscience while the great majority is still in constant denial. In such cases, these daring intellectuals would at least set the stage for moderate or middle-ground people to create a compromising position. Interestingly enough, some historians or thinkers belonging to the privileged Establishment are now forced to seek alternative interpretations for obviously pragmatic reasons. These historians are speaking for a tragedy that both sides had suffered a lot from the conditions of the war. And they tend to blame the leadership of Enver-Cemal and Talat trio for involvement in this devastating war. They are also ready to admit that inhuman conditions and outside attacks on the innocent Armenian peoples on their way to exile. This position, of course, contains problems and is still very far away from confronting the terrible nature of a pre-designed, institutionalized and intentional state-led operation. Yet, it may relieve the social reserves on the issue and facilitate the expansion of the limits of discussion.

In this respect, a democratic public discussion environment and circulation of information on the history of the genocide turns out to have a very significant role in the confrontation of the reality by the Turkish society. Following the foundation of the new Turkish republic in 1923, a Turkish nationalist version of history is superimposed on the society through various state instruments such as media and education. Henceforth, especially the generation after 1940s is made to forget and neglect its recent history, particularly the late 19th and early 20th centuries; and re-member this period as full of Turkish national resistance against those ‘harmful and traitorous elements’ in the society who seek to divide the Turkish country in collaboration with some outside forces. The Armenians form one of the most essential constituents of this exclusionary Turkish nationalist discourse according to which the Turks gain their national independence in spite of the Armenians in the eastern Turkey and the Greek Rum population in the west. The resulting losses during the “Turkish National Independence War� were either surpassed or depicted as “natural� war fatalities. Until very recently, before the Armenian issue was not outspoken loudly, it was very probable to meet a Turkish citizen who even could not differentiate between the Jews and the Armenians. Unfortunately, together with the popularization and the internationalization of the Armenian issue, a state of indignation and a denial psychology seem to be replacing the former period of ignorance, disinterest and negligence. In this context, a calm and a democratic discussion environment is necessary in order for the Turkish society to confront the historical realities and to restore a more tolerant and inclusive Turkish identity.

[Joseph]

enocide File: The Opening of ‘the Pandora’s Book’


Written by Halil Ibrahim Nebioglu **

Understanding the recent explosion of debate in Turkey over the Armenian Question

May 23, 2005
*
On the eve of every 24th of April, the ruling elites of Turkey enter into an impatient and strained waiting: Will the US president employ that disturbing word of “genocide’ in his message about this historical tragedy? So far the USA presidents preferred to bestow a cautious language not to alienate their old ally in the troubled Middle East region-the recent obsession of the USA elite. Turkish authorities even tried to use the weapon of extending the American rights over the use of the military base of Encircle-a strategic base very close to Iraq and Syria, in particular. ‘The Neocons’(US Neo-conservatives’) message was very clear: ‘Mr. Bush would not use that very word but you should be helpful!’ This is actually what happened after the relaxing speech of President Bush when the Turkish Government extended American privileges over Incirlik base. Once again ‘Armenian question’ was tried to be outdistanced from our consciences by the use of dirty politics.



Nevertheless things are not same in Turkey. The number of courageous historians and intellectuals are increasing and they are trying to break the most persistent taboo of the Turkish Republic. It was just a few months ago that the historians Dr. Taner Akçam and Prof.Dr. Halil Berktay were unaccompanied yet boldhearted. When Prof. Berktay insisted that we must face this tragedy there emerged an immediate witch-hunt and some groups even demanded his firing away from his post in the Sabanci University. But now, despite their numbers are few, some critical articles and comments over the Armenian Question seem to appear on a daily basis.

Then, what lies at the background of this explosion of interest? The ruling party in Turkey- Justice and Development Party (AKP) has embarked upon a full-fledged reform agenda to finalize Turkey’s long and fluctuating adventure for the EU (European Union) membership. They seem to recognize the necessity of taking some constructive steps in the otherwise frozen problems such as the divided Cyprus. Indeed, they supported and encouraged the Turkish Cypriots to admit the UN’s plan in a referendum while the Greek Cypriots had decisively rejected it. This activism, however, gave a political initiative to Turkey and secured sympathy in the UN, the USA and the EU circles. Having encouraged by their attempt of ending status quo in Cyprus, the Turks are willing to find out a resolution to the Armenian Question, which they rightly consider as a time-bomb unless some compromise is arrived at. But the tragedy is that the government is willing to “take some measures� to overcome the status quo while the Turkish State is not. This should not create the impression that the AKP elite has overcome their ideological barriers to confront the Armenian massacre. However, they are pragmatic reformers who understand that inertness in this issue will further limit the area of action in the immediate future.

However, the ruling AKP hit a strong rock: The military and civilian elites including the leadership of nearly all opposition parties have shown a stubborn reaction against the AKP’s intention of finding a working solution to this ‘problem.’ Since they were indecisive and held an ambiguous position from the start, they temporarily set back. It is the time, which will prove whether they renounced their claims or not. The prime minister Erdogan tries to settle this problem with the official authorities of Armenia and does not want the involvement of the Armenian Diaspora which he regarded as very uncompromising over the recognition of the genocide. There exists an Armenian community in Turkey with a declining population of 70.000. These people are also willing an immediate solution simply because they face the danger of being the easy target of both sides: The Armenian Diaspora and the extreme nationalists of Turkey who seem to be very determined to use the “minority questions� to provoke the public opinion against the AKP-led reformism in line with the EU membership. Armenians living in Turkey are afraid of becoming scapegoats of uncompromising forces.

Armenian rulers have also their justified reason for coming to terms with Turkey since they feel themselves as deadly isolated and encircled in their forgotten lands. The president Kocaryan has recently reminded that they do not propose the recognition of the Armenian Genocide to re-start and deepen the official relations. In return, Mr. Erdogan suggested forming a common commission to debate the Armenian Question. This attempt by Erdogan has been also praised by President Bush’s speech conveyed to commemorate the Armenian victims in 24th of April. Nevertheless, while such positive steps are put forward for the first time, the “deep state� has reacted severely and staged its own counter-attack by presenting “scientific� proofs against the claims of Armenian Genocide. This is why there has emerged a war of propaganda over the Armenian question. I believe that opening of the Pandora’s Box will definitely be fruitful but it is probable that serious setbacks may emerge in the meantime.

The head of the Turkish History Association-Prof. Dr. Yusuf Halacoglu-seems to have assumed the voice of the civilian and military elites in Turkey. In the beginning, Prof. Halacoglu was employing the language of mutual slaughter (mukatala) intensified by the conditions peculiar to the war environment. For a long time, this has been the official narrative of the Turkish state, as well. Accordingly, the Armenians collaborated with the Russian troops against the Ottomans during the heyday of the World War I and the state authorities were obliged to enforce a mass deportation of the Armenians from the war zone for security reasons. This official standing also admits the dying away of so many Armenians on their way to exile but relates these human losses to the devastating natural conditions. What is ironical nowadays is that Prof. Halacoglu’s further retrograded even away from the aforementioned official position. He gradually increased his tone and started to claim that the Armenian gangs committed a series of massacres against the Turks that allegedly resulted with casualties around 500.000. This self-victimization is an incredible example of escaping from reality that some careful historians try to distance from. I believe Prof. Halacoglu’s denial will be a self-defeating strategy.

Recently the leadership of Republican People’s Party(CHP)-the founding party of Turkey-has also embarked upon a strange policy of targeting a book popularly known as the Blue Book-written by Lord Bryce and Arnold Toynbee in 1916 with the title of ‘The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915 –1916. With the initiative of the CHP deputies in the Turkish National Assembly, 550 members of the Turkish Grand National Assembly have sent a letter to the British Parliament claiming that this book was produced for the sake of war propaganda and should not be taken seriously. It is difficult to understand the underlying rationale of this unwitty letter. But this is indeed a naive attitude for anyone who is trying to escape from the reality by creating self-satisfying agendas over seemingly easy targets. But any such effort of escaping from reality is futile simply because there are at least 60 books containing memories of those saviors of the Armenian massacre and they verify the well- known the Turkish proverb: “The sun can not be covered by the clay.�

My cautious optimism above comes from the conviction that it is potentially more fruitful to have a hot debate over an issue rather than freezing it into the status of an untouchable taboo. Today, at least a group of intellectuals emerged acting in the name of reason and conscience while the great majority is still in constant denial. In such cases, these daring intellectuals would at least set the stage for moderate or middle-ground people to create a compromising position. Interestingly enough, some historians or thinkers belonging to the privileged Establishment are now forced to seek alternative interpretations for obviously pragmatic reasons. These historians are speaking for a tragedy that both sides had suffered a lot from the conditions of the war. And they tend to blame the leadership of Enver-Cemal and Talat trio for involvement in this devastating war. They are also ready to admit that inhuman conditions and outside attacks on the innocent Armenian peoples on their way to exile. This position, of course, contains problems and is still very far away from confronting the terrible nature of a pre-designed, institutionalized and intentional state-led operation. Yet, it may relieve the social reserves on the issue and facilitate the expansion of the limits of discussion.

In this respect, a democratic public discussion environment and circulation of information on the history of the genocide turns out to have a very significant role in the confrontation of the reality by the Turkish society. Following the foundation of the new Turkish republic in 1923, a Turkish nationalist version of history is superimposed on the society through various state instruments such as media and education. Henceforth, especially the generation after 1940s is made to forget and neglect its recent history, particularly the late 19th and early 20th centuries; and re-member this period as full of Turkish national resistance against those ‘harmful and traitorous elements’ in the society who seek to divide the Turkish country in collaboration with some outside forces. The Armenians form one of the most essential constituents of this exclusionary Turkish nationalist discourse according to which the Turks gain their national independence in spite of the Armenians in the eastern Turkey and the Greek Rum population in the west. The resulting losses during the “Turkish National Independence War� were either surpassed or depicted as “natural� war fatalities. Until very recently, before the Armenian issue was not outspoken loudly, it was very probable to meet a Turkish citizen who even could not differentiate between the Jews and the Armenians. Unfortunately, together with the popularization and the internationalization of the Armenian issue, a state of indignation and a denial psychology seem to be replacing the former period of ignorance, disinterest and negligence. In this context, a calm and a democratic discussion environment is necessary in order for the Turkish society to confront the historical realities and to restore a more tolerant and inclusive Turkish identity.

The Price of Denial: Why Turkey needs to come to terms with history

*
The Weekly Standard
by Ellen Bork
April 17, 2006
Volume 011, Issue 29

*

IN ISTANBUL LAST OCTOBER, an acquaintance invited me to lunch with three participants in a conference of historians, journalists, and civil society activists that had recently been held at Bilgi University. Its subject was the fate of Armenians in Turkey during the early part of the 20th century.

Although it received far less attention abroad than the prosecution of novelist Orhan Pamuk for speaking publicly about the deaths of over one million Armenians and tens of thousands of Kurds, the conference was just as significant, demonstrating Turkish civil society's growing self-confidence in questioning the official line on the Armenian genocide--and the ruling AKP party's messy flexibility in allowing such questioning to take place. Postponed, then blocked in court after the justice minister called it a "stab in the Turkish nation's back," the conference finally took place with the public support of the prime minister.

According to my lunch companions, the conference participants agreed, as one put it, that these massacres were "deliberately done by a small group within the ruling party." In other words, without using the word "genocide," the specific elements of its definition are increasingly being accepted by Turkish society.

Describing the fate of the Armenians in Turkey as genocide is much less charged in the United States. "Turkish deniers are becoming the equivalent--socially, culturally--of Holocaust deniers," says author Samantha Power in The Armenian Genocide, a documentary by Andrew Goldberg and Two Cats Productions, to be broadcast Monday, April 17, on PBS. The one-hour program provides a compact, evocative, and visually rich treatment of the massacres by the Ottoman sultan's Hamidiye regiments in the late 19th century, and the 1915 deportations and massacres of approximately one million Armenians, including intellectuals from Constantinople, as Istanbul was then called. It also includes the campaign of assassination against Turkish diplomats by Armenian terrorists in the 1970s and '80s.

Even here, however, the matter remains fraught. When PBS decided to follow the documentary with a 25-minute debate among academics and authors, there were objections that this would suggest the genocide itself was in question. Some individual PBS stations, including the Washington and New York stations, have decided not to air the panel discussion.

The reason controversy persists has little to do with scholarship and everything to do with the role the United States plays as a battleground for efforts to achieve official recognition of the genocide. While the Armenian-American community ensures that the issue is brought up annually before Congress, Turkey, a NATO ally with a high diplomatic profile in Washington, wages a campaign that can be presumptuous. Speaking to the Congressional Study Group on Turkey last month, the Turkish ambassador admonished American congressmen to do their patriotic duty by voting down resolutions recognizing the genocide.

Paradoxically, the importance of the Holocaust to Americans ensures both sensitivity to the Armenian tragedy and a reluctance to accord it the significance of genocide. There is also a disinclination to criticize Turkey, a valuable Muslim ally of Israel. These considerations inform the views of Turkey's allies in the foreign policy establishment, of which conservatives constitute a significant part. Within the conservative camp, criticism of Turkey recently has been concerned mainly with an Islamic tilt under the ruling AKP, and growing anti-Americanism across the Turkish political spectrum. And, of course, Turkey's refusal to provide support for the Iraq war.

Little concern has been expressed about persisting limits on speech, which are frequently connected (in the Pamuk case and many others) to criticisms of Turkey's treatment of minorities, and its relationship to a Turkish national identity forged during a period of instability and imperial collapse.

As The Armenian Genocide demonstrates, it is precisely this historical background upon which a specious, yet persistent, objection to recognition of the genocide is based. In its most respectable form it is the contention that the deportations, massacres, and starvation of Armenians took place in a particular "context"--that is, amid (or in response to) rebellion and treachery from Turkey's Armenian population, in league with Russia.

"So, if the Armenians killed and were killed," Yusuf Halacoglu, head of the Turkish Historical Society, says in the film, "the fact is there were two sides involved in a civil war." The argument boils down to a claim that the events were not genocide but a response to provocation in which the victims, including unarmed women, children, and the elderly, brought on their fate.

It is a variation on the argument, made by some in the 1990s, that there was no obligation to stop the killing of Muslims by Serbs in Bosnia since the people of the region had been "killing each other for centuries." Both justifications are red herrings, which can be effective when made with confidence by articulate proponents.

In the documentary, Turkish historians reject this claim, providing historical context that enhances rather than undermines an understanding of the fate of the Armenians as genocide. The loss of Balkan territory, the flow of refugees from these Christian quarters of the empire telling of persecution--all combined, says Taner Akcam, to make "fear of collapse . . . [the] basic factor of the emergence of Turkish nationalism."

The effects of this fear have been profound, and the documentary's most compelling moments come when the Turkish historians describe their experience with their society's most stubborn taboo. Halil Berktay received death threats for being a "Turkish historian inside Turkey that has spoken up." He argues that the new Turkish republic, launched in 1923, dissociated itself from the past by adopting attributes of Western society, including secularism, and found itself embraced and courted by Western powers.

"All kinds of reasons like this made it undesirable for the young republic to maintain an honest memory of what had been done in 1915," says Berktay, and "as a result, you have an enormously constructed, fabricated, manipulated, national memory."

After decades of denial and silence, it took an act of courage for these historians to question the official version. Fatma Müge Göcek expresses the confusion she felt upon realizing "you could actually live in a society, get the best education that society has to offer, which I did, and not know about it or have any books or anything available to read about it."

This situation is changing, as this documentary and events like the Bilgi conference make clear. While my acquaintances in Istanbul have complicated feelings about international pressure on Turkey to confront its past, America has been involved from the outset. Reporters and diplomats relayed news of the atrocities, and charity appeals raised enormous sums, all of which is documented in the film. For some Turks, it was in the United States that they found the freedom, the libraries, and the contacts with Armenian Americans that enabled them to delve into the past and develop independent judgments. Of course, the U.S. government is still the prime target of Turkish efforts to prevent official recognition of the genocide.

It will be up to the Turks to come to a complete understanding of their past, and consolidate their democratic institutions and civil liberties. In the meantime, less deference to the Turkish official position would put America on the side not only of justice for genocide victims, but also of Turks, like the historians in this film, who refuse to accept limits on their speech and scholarship.

Ellen Bork is deputy director at the Project for the New American Century.