Common ground

A group of historians wants to reconsider the 1915 Armenian genocide –
and prove that Turkish and Armenian scholars really can get along

The Boston Globe
April 24, 2005

By Meline Toumani

Five years ago, Ronald Grigor Suny, a professor of political science at
the University of Chicago, sat in a tiny room on campus and waited
nervously for a group of colleagues to arrive. ”What have we done?” he
asked his wife. ”What if these people choke each other to death?”

The conflict that Suny feared was no arcane ivory tower dispute. It was
the first meeting of the Workshop for Armenian-Turkish Scholarship, and
most of the participants were of Armenian or Turkish descent. In other
words, in addition to being historians, sociologists, and political
scientists, they were members of ethnic groups that – particularly in
the diaspora – view one another as sworn enemies.

Animosity between the groups stems from events in 1915 in Ottoman Turkey
that Armenians – along with most prominent historians worldwide – call
the ”Armenian genocide,” and that many Turks call the ”so-called
genocide” or the ”Armenian allegations,” if they don’t use the phrase
employed by Turkey’s foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, at a press
conference last month: ”unacceptable claims by the [Armenian] diaspora
to continue its existence.” The Turkish government promulgates a view
that the number of Armenians who died is much lower than Armenians claim
– around 500,000 instead of 1.5 million – and that their deaths were the
consequence of their collusion with Russian forces in World War I, not
preplanned extermination. A revision to the Turkish penal code proposed
last year would impose a prison sentence of up to 10 years for use of
the term ”genocide” to describe the events of 1915.

For decades, Armenian groups, particularly those in the diaspora, have
lobbied governments, news organizations, and academic institutions to
officially label the events of 1915 as genocide, observing April 24 as
the date the massacres began. (The Boston area is home to one of the
largest communities of Armenian-Americans whose families were dispersed
from Turkey following the genocide.) And while Turkey is a long way from
such recognition, public discussion of the issue has reached
unprecedented levels there in recent months, following recommendations
from many European Union leaders that Turkey take steps to resolve the
issue before becoming an EU member.

When the Workshop for Armenian-Turkish Scholarship held its fourth
meeting last weekend in Salzburg, Austria, Turkish journalists were
invited for the first time. Workshop members would like to see their
work influence Armenian-Turkish relations, but they are adamant that
scholarship and politics are separate enterprises. They also know from
personal experience just how psychologically difficult it is for either
side to take a neutral look at either history or current developments.

For Suny, an Armenian-American, the idea of working with Turkish
scholars was inspired by a visit to Istanbul’s Koç University in 1998.
Suny lectured about the genocide, and although several people walked out
during his talk, others received him with curiosity and respect.

But following his visit, the New Jersey-based newspaper Armenian
Reporter published a series of articles that accused Suny of being an
agent of the Turkish state and questioned the intentions of Turkish and
Armenian scholars who chose to work together. Suny replied with a
blistering letter to the editor. ”What a colossal intellectual and
political mistake it would be,” he wrote, ”for Armenians to slam the
door in the face of those Turks who want to open a dialogue, who are
prepared to take risks and suffer the consequences from their own
government by proposing a fresh discussion of the events of 1915.”

One of those Turks was Fatma Muge Gocek, a sociologist at the University
of Michigan who co-founded the workshop with Suny in 2000. When Gocek
came to the United States from Turkey in 1981, she quickly learned that
to be a Turk among Armenian-Americans was to stand accused of crimes
committed almost a century ago.

In 1998, at a Michigan conference marking the 75th anniversary of the
Turkish Republic, an audience filled with Armenians drilled her and
other speakers with questions about genocide denial. An elderly Armenian
woman stood up and said, with great emotion, that her parents died in
the massacres. Gocek was deeply moved. ”I don’t have to be Armenian to
feel terrible for you,” she recalls saying. ”I can see that you’re a
person in pain, and I’m in pain with you.”

Her reply left the woman speechless. ”I had never realized, until that
moment, the trauma that is created by a lack of acknowledgment,” Gocek
says.

Taner Akcam, another Turkish-born scholar in the workshop, is more
accustomed to speaking out against mainstream Turkish views. Now an
associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Akcam was imprisoned
in Ankara in 1976 for publishing an article stating that there were
Kurds living in Turkey. (The legal term was ”mountain Turks,” and even
today the government does not recognize Kurds as an official minority,
though they constitute 20 percent of the population.) Instead of serving
his 10-year sentence, Akcam dug his way out of jail – literally – and
escaped to Germany. There, he became a researcher at the Hamburg
Institute for Social Research, working alongside German scholars who
were studying the Holocaust.

Akcam is often credited with being the first Turkish historian to label
the events of 1915 as ”genocide,” but even he admits this did not come
easily. ”It was a certain psychological process to use the word
genocide,”’ he says. ”That’s why I can understand my Turkish scholar
friends who are ready to talk about it openly, but never use that word.”

Suny welcomed colleagues to that first workshop at the University of
Chicago by calling it ”a small, humble, and historic meeting” inspired
by ”tolerance of difference on the basis of equality and respect,
rather than exclusivist and insular nationalism.” The meeting was not
without tension. Many Armenian scholars refused to attend, and some
insisted (unsuccessfully) that participants sign a document stating that
they recognized the genocide.

In the end, some used ”the G-word,” others didn’t. But the goal, Suny
says, was no longer to decide whether it did or it didn’t happen. ”We
say, It happened,”’ he explains. ”Now we have to find out: Why did it
happen? How did it happen?”’

Simply asking these questions challenges not just Turkish orthodoxies
but the mainstream Armenian attitude, which has been defined for many
years by the quest for acknowledgment – for ”the G-word” – above all.
Suny says this is not enough. ”If you don’t seek an explanation of why
it occurred, it becomes a kind of racism,” he says. ”Then the
explanation implied is that Turks are a pathological group of people who
simply do these things.”

Suny, whose great-grandparents died in the 1915 massacres in Yozgat and
Diyarbakir, says he himself didn’t use the term genocide until he’d done
enough research on the subject. And he has questioned the view, held by
many Armenian scholars, that the genocide was planned well in advance,
arguing instead that even the deliberate massacre of a specific ethnic
group could have been an emergency strategy, not a long-term plot. The
point does not sit well with those who fear it bolsters Turkey’s claim
that the massacres were not genocide at all, but consequences of war.

In Turkey, meanwhile, discussion of this once-taboo subject continues to
develop. Last week, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, backed by
opposition leader Deniz Baykal, called for an international
investigation into the events of 1915. (Armenian president Robert
Kocharian rejected the proposal, pointing out that many such efforts
have already been completed.) And last Sunday the Turkish state archives
released a list of more than 523,000 Turks allegedly killed by Armenians
in Turkey between 1910 and 1922 – a move that added to suspicion that
Erdogan’s initiative was a bid to appease EU pressure, not a sincere
reconsideration.

Yet some who would like to see Turkey officially recognize the genocide
believe that it should not be tied to EU membership. If genocide
recognition is imposed from the top down – just as genocide denial was –
it may please Armenians in the short term, but it could be
counterproductive by creating more hostility among Turks. Better, they
say, to allow open discussion and study of the genocide to percolate
from the bottom up.

Perhaps members of the Workshop for Armenian-Turkish Scholarship will
get a warmer reception from their own communities. In a near-comic
example of mistrust, both sides have accused Gocek of being an Armenian
posing as a Turk. Never one to rest easy on assumptions, Gocek
reconstructed generations of family history to confirm that her
ancestors were, in fact, ”Sunni Muslims to the core.”

But what, after all, does ethnic identity mean for someone who spends so
much energy resisting the lure of nationalism?

A lot, it turns out. ”I love my country!” declares Akcam, quoting the
climactic line from a poem that Nazim Hikmet, Turkey’s most famous
dissident, wrote in an Istanbul prison in 1939.

Suny, too, is unequivocal. ”No one can take being Armenian away from
me,” he says. ”My grandmother always told me that I am Armenian and we
are the most wonderful people in the world.”

Meline Toumani is a writer living in Brooklyn.

PHOTO CAPTION: A boy paused last week in front of a poster in Yerevan,
Armenia, depicting survivors of the mass kilings of Armenians that took
place in eastern Turkey between 1915 and 1923. In recent years, a group
of Armenian and Turkish historians have been working together to bridge
the gap between the two sides’ sharply polarized views of the events.
(AP Photo / Herbert Bagdasaryan)

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress