Turkey still refuses to confront its past
By FATMA MUGE GOCEK

Globe and Mail, Canada
June 3 2005

Friday, June 3, 2005 Page A21

Last week was supposed to mark the opening of an unprecedented Turkish
conference on the issues surrounding the killing of Armenians during
the First World War. Organized at Istanbul’s Bosporus University,
the three-day event was intended to provide a platform to academics
to question Turkey’s official view of the 1915 killings. It also
would have showcased a new open approach by Turkish authorities,
eager to show the kind of freedom of expression that the European
Union expects of prospective members.

The conference never took place.

In the days leading up to the event, pressure was put on organizers
to include scholars who would defend Turkey’s official state view —
which denies that the killings were genocide and rejects estimates
that 1.5 million Armenians were massacred.

The more the university organizers resisted any such intervention,
the more the pressure mounted, with the conference ultimately being
described as “detrimental to the interests of the Turkish state
and nation.”

Turkish Justice Minister Cemil Cicek condemned the gathering as
“treason” and “a stab in the back of the Turkish people.” University
officials had little choice but to “postpone” the event.

It is apparent that the government feels threatened by the significant
segment of the Turkish population who are increasingly determined to
face the long-standing issue of the Armenian question in a way that
counters the official Turkish thesis.

This official view is predicated on a Turkish nationalism that
perceives all existing interpretations of the Armenian issue as either
for, or against, the interests of Turkey. Because the conference
participants did not sanction the official thesis, the Turkish
government characterized the participants as rabble-rousers.

The Turkish state is unable to come to terms with its past because its
national identity is predicated upon the rejection of that particular
past. Advocating the nationalist ideology that the contemporary Turkish
state was built upon the ashes of the Ottoman Empire through the War
of Independence fought between 1919-1922, the Turkish state has always
argued that the nation had to look forward and not back into its past,
especially not into the period before 1919 that is considered to be
the birth year of the Turkish nation.

The alphabet reform in 1928, when the official script was changed
from Arabic to the Latin script, further alienated the Turks from
their own history. Given the dearth of historical knowledge, Turkish
society could not help but accept the official thesis on the Armenian
issue as historical reality.

With more scholars delving into that past to generate their own
interpretations, the state thesis began to lose ground. The state
efforts to cancel the Istanbul conference comprise what I hope is
the last attempt to salvage the dominance of the Turkish official
state thesis.

Turkey’s possible membership in the European Union is an underlying
reason why debate of the Armenian issue is becoming increasingly
prominent. The EU advocates the recognition and protection of the
rights of all minorities. Among such minorities that currently exist
in Turkey, the tragedy that befell the Armenians before, during
and after 1915, is the most dramatic, and the one that needs to be
most addressed and recognized by Turkish society and the state. Such
recognition necessitates an awareness of minority rights and a public
commitment to protect them.

Yet, such a recognition would undermine the Turkish state’s control
over the public sphere. The unwillingness of the Turkish state in
general, and the military and the political parties in particular, to
relinquish that control over society has generated this crisis. This
state unwillingness translates into a nationalist stand that portrays
European standards of human rights as inherently destructive and
debilitating. All advocates of such rights within Turkish society
likewise end up branded as subversive elements in service of either
Europe or the United States or both.

The chances of Turkey joining the European Union are diminished
without a state commitment to protect the rights of its citizens. In
the meanwhile, however, recent developments in Turkish society such
as the liberalization of the economy and the privatization of mass
communication have generated an increasingly conscious and vocal public
sphere that is willing to take issue with the current nationalist
stand of the state. If the current government utilizes its enhanced
communication with Turkish society — if it forms, in particular,
alliances with the liberal academics and public intellectuals to
develop a new democratic, multicultural vision for Turkey — then
the Turkish state could overcome this quagmire.

Fatma Muge Gocek, associate professor of sociology at the University of
Michigan, was an organizer of the cancelled Turkish-Armenia conference.