Left Out in Turkey
Feature
The New York Review of Books
Volume 52, Number 12
July 14, 2005
By Christopher de Bellaigue
1.
“In Turkey we have no minorities,” the leading official in a poor
district in one of the poorest provinces of eastern Turkey told me in
April. The official was in his late twenties; he had studied public
administration at a Turkish university, then received training in Ankara
and spent a few months at a language institute in England’s West
Country. He enthusiastically practiced his English on me. There was not
much use for it in his district, where most people speak one of two
Kurdish tongues, Kirmanji or Zaza, and many of the old people do not
know Turkish.
The Kirmanji speakers in the district are Sunni Kurds, of which there
are at least 10 million in Turkey. The Zaza speakers are members of
Turkey’s roughly 12-million-strong Alevi community, heterodox Shiites of
Turkmen and Kurdish lineage. Neither of these groups, the official went
on, should be called a minority; that would imply that there is
discrimination against them, which is not the case. He told me this with
the assurance of someone who knows that he, and his view of the world,
enjoy the sanction of a large and powerful state. You can find young men
like him throughout Turkey sitting in government offices, where a cast
of the death mask of Kemal Atatürk, the republic’s founder, is hanging
on the wall behind them.
The Turkish Republic’s attitude toward minorities only makes sense if
you have an idea of the contribution that the nationalism of those
minorities made to the decline of the Ottoman Empire. Starting in the
eighteenth century, Europe’s Christian powers assumed the role of
protectors of their coreligionists in the empire. By the nineteenth
century, they were promoting nationalist movements among them and
protecting the newly independent states that had been created from
former Ottoman territories, such as Greece, Serbia, and Romania. The
process of making new nations was lethal for the empire and very often
for those Muslims who were caught up in it; millions of Muslims were
forced out of those newly independent states (besides the new autonomous
territory of Bulgaria) and fled to Anatolia, the empire’s heartland. By
the eve of World War I, Anatolia had become a refuge for dispossessed
Muslims from the Bal- kans and from the Caucasian territories that
Russia had won during the Russian-Ottoman War of 1877-1878.
But Anatolia also had large non-Muslim minorities, including the
Orthodox Greeks and mostly Gregorian Christian Armenians. These
minorities looked to outside Christian powers for protection, especially
to Greece (in the case of the Greek Orthodox) and Russia (in the case of
the Armenians). Many of them were uneasy about the Ottoman decision
during World War I to side with Germany against their own protectors,
while the Ottomans viewed them as potential fifth columnists.
In 1915, following severe military defeat at the hands of the Russians
and an Armenian uprising in the eastern city of Van, the Ottomans
ordered the deportation of Armenians from Anatolia. Well over one
million are thought to have died in what many historians consider to
have been a premeditated act of genocide. In the Treaty of Lausanne,
which was signed in 1923, Turkey pledged to protect its non-Muslim
minorities, but the Turkish delegates at Lausanne succeeded in
preventing Muslim minorities such as the Kurds and Alevis from being
mentioned; and they emerged from Lausanne protected only by general
commitments to linguistic and religious freedom, commitments that, in
many cases, the Turks went on to disregard. In 1925, around one million
Anatolian Greeks were sent to Greece under a population exchange that
was managed relatively humanely and cleansed Anatolia further of
non-Turkish minorities.
Atatürk presented his new state as an increasingly monolithic entity.
Regardless of their ethnic identity, Muslim citizens of the republic
were henceforth to be considered Turks. The glorious national history
taught in schools was supposedly pure in its Turkishness – it starts with
an epic migration from the Central Asian steppe, follows the Turks as
they assume leadership of the Islamic community, and ends as they
triumphantly embrace modern European civilization. “Happy is he who
calls himself a Turk” became Atatürk’s most famous saying, and everyone
was encouraged to agree.
It is well known that millions of Kurds, whose ancestors inhabited parts
of Mesopotamia and eastern Anatolia well before the Turks turned up,
resented being designated as Turks, and that on several occasions they
took up arms to demand autonomy or independence. (The most recent
separatist rebellion, by the Kurdish Workers Party, whose Kurdish
acronym is PKK, lasted from 1984 to 1999 and cost at least 30,000
lives.) But the most striking thing about the Turkish identity promoted
by Atatürk is just how many citizens of the new state enthusiastically
accepted it. Few of today’s Turks are descended from the original
Central Asian migrants. Atatürk himself was not the “Father of the Turk”
that his self-conferred surname suggests, but was probably descended
from Slavic converts to Islam. Many of the people I spoke to in Turkey
this spring told me that their ancestors had fled from the Balkans, the
Caucasus, or Ottoman Mesopotamia during the empire’s collapse. I met
others who were assimilated Kurds; they had, they said, no sympathy for
Kurdish nationalism.
What has induced these people to embrace Atatürk’s national identity? As
Muslims under the Ottoman Empire traumatized by the loss of their former
lands whether in the Balkans or elsewhere, their forebears found refuge
in Anatolia. In the face of new threats to their security, not least
Allied attempts at the end of World War I to carve up Anatolia and
create new Armenian and Kurdish countries, the only thing for them to do
was to assimilate. Most forgot their Balkan or Caucasian languages and
traditions; their children became model Turkish citizens, diligently
learning at school about allegedly Turkish skull types and memorizing
the poems of Ziya Gokalp, an exponent of Turkish nationalism who wrote
much of his poetry in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. And
so modern Turkishness, while theoretically springing from a common
racial heritage, actually means something more and less than that. It
was born in response to irredentist Balkan nationalisms of the
nineteenth century and it became a means of uniting people against
hostile states trying to divide up Anatolia at the end of World War I.
Atatürk chose Turkishness, and not Islam, to bind the citizens together
because he had decided that Turkey should be a secular state, and hoped
that Islam, which he felt retarded modern development, would lose its
influence over people’s daily lives. In the words of the Turkish
historian Taner Akcam, who has written extensively about Turkey’s
self-image, particularly in connection with the atrocities committed
against the Armenians, the national identity “developed together with
the fear of extermination, of extinction” by predatory enemies.[1] For
the Armenians, of course, the fear of extermination turned out to be
real; but many modern Turks concur with the words of Talat Pasha, the
chief vizier who ordered the deportations: “If I had not done it to
them, they would have done it to us.” Any attempt to dismantle
Turkishness, even now, is bound to revive old fears.
2.
In April, I visited the eastern city of Erzurum, 150 miles from the
Turkish border with Georgia and a thousand miles to the east of Ankara.
Commanding both the headwaters of the Euphrates and a vital corridor for
a foreign army seeking to invade Anatolia from the northeast, Erzurum
has a tumultuous history of acquisition and loss, of resistance and
vulnerability. You feel the weight of this history when you visit the
city’s medieval mosques, which more closely resemble fortresses than
places of worship. From the hills overlooking the city, you can see the
plains from which the Russians approached when they conquered Erzerum
three times in less than a century. And you learn quickly about ethnic
conflict. When H.F.B. Lynch, a British writer and statesman, visited
Erzurum in the final years of the nineteenth century, the city’s Turkish
and Armenian inhabitants were complaining of attacks by Kurdish militias
that the Ottoman government had unwisely armed – militias that embarrassed
local officials described as “brigands, disguised as soldiers.”
Erzurum lies on the boundary of the heavily Kurdish southeast. Kurds are
said to make up about 25 percent of the population of Erzerum province,
but the place is better known for its Turkish nationalism. Some two
hundred young men from the province were killed while suppressing the
PKK revolt, which ended after the 1999 capture of the PKK leader,
Abdullah Ocalan, and the PKK’s subsequent cease-fire and withdrawal into
northern Iraq. After that, Turkish nationalists became worried as the
Kurds, having lost the war, began to win the peace. The nationalist
Turks were dismayed when the current, mildly Islamist government of
Recep Tayyip Erdogan released hundreds of jailed PKK members, legalized
Kurdish-language broadcasting, and allowed private Kurdish-language
schools to open.
That it was previously against the law for the Kurdish language to be
used anywhere in public suggests one source of the deep Kurdish
resentment that developed over the years. Turkish nationalists are well
aware of the Kurds’ bitterness and fear its consequences. They felt
uneasy when the main Kurdish party, the Democratic People’s Party
(DEHAP), with its close but informal links to the PKK, won control of
fifty-six municipal councils in the 2004 local elections. In March,
Turkish nationalists across the country, including several thousands in
Erzurum, turned out in the streets to protest the actions of some
Kurdish youths who had been captured on television trying to set fire to
the Turkish flag.
For many Turks, the PKK insurgency was horrendous for its violence, but
at least there was no room for uncertainty about opposing Kurdish
nationalism; this is no longer the case. Last summer, the PKK, which for
a time changed its name to Kongra-Gel but now calls itself the PKK
again, resumed its armed struggle in response to the government’s
refusal both to end Ocalan’s solitary confinement and to offer an
amnesty to around 3,500 rebels. But despite an increase in PKK attacks,
most Kurdish nationalists now see their future in a Turkey that is in
the EU; they are not drawn to the camps that train Kurdish insurgents in
northern Iraq. For the state, this is both an opportunity and a challenge.
In April, speaking to both Turkish officials and Turks on both the left
and the right, I sensed an apprehension that the government in Ankara is
losing control over the Kurdish issue, an apprehension that cuts through
traditional political differences between left-wingers and
right-wingers. The anxiety that arose when the PKK started acquiring a
political presence has sharpened as ordinary Turks have learned more
about the concessions to minorities that the European Union will demand
when negotiations over Turkey’s admission begin in October. In the words
of Mesut Yegen, a columnist at Radikal, one of Turkey’s few sizable
liberal newspapers, the Kurds are increasingly seen by Turks as a
community that is being emboldened from outside the country to resist
Turkification…. In the eyes of the people, the Kurds are increasingly
becoming like the Greeks and Armenians.
In other words, the Kurds have become a minority that looks to
outsiders, not to its own government, to protect its interests.
In the Erzurum branch of the Association of Martyrs’ Families, which
cares for the next of kin of Turkish servicemen killed during the PKK
rebellion, Hatem Tetik, the branch head, articulated the widespread
Turkish skepticism about the EU’s intentions. He said he doubted the
wisdom of a government plan to lower the parliamentary threshold,
currently 10 percent of the vote, that parties must exceed to gain
representation in the Ankara chamber. He said, “It’s clear that the EU
wants DEHAP to be represented in parliament.” (DEHAP won 6.3 percent of
the vote at the last general election, and currently has no deputies.)
Tetik complained about last summer’s release from prison of a prominent
Kurdish nationalist and spoke resentfully of European pressure on Turkey
to safeguard the property rights of non-Muslim religious foundations. He
was aghast at the idea that the European Court of Human Rights would
soon rule on whether or not Ocalan’s trial in Turkey for treason had
been conducted fairly, a decision that could prepare the way for a
retrial.[2]
Surrounded by the framed photographs of dozens of fallen soldiers,
including his own twenty-year-old son, I sensed that Tetik was
struggling to understand a great irony. Having spent fifteen years
fighting to protect the nation’s sovereignty, Turkey was now preparing
to relinquish it voluntarily.
As we spoke of the Kurds, I was reminded of government officials whom I
had met in the Kurdish region of southeastern Turkey. They had
disparaged the “mentality” of the people whose lives they ran, without
bothering to understand that mentality; they never seemed to ask
themselves why many Kurds remain deeply hostile to the Turkish state.
The armed forces, guardians of Atatürk’s republic, have done little to
improve relations. Following the attempt by Kurdish youths to burn the
flag, the General Staff castigated the “so-called citizens” who “breathe
[the country’s] air, drink its water and fill their stomachs, and then
dare to lay a finger on that country’s most sacred shared national
value, its flag.” The statement says as much about the state’s view of
Kurdish nationalists as ungrateful tenants as it does about the
generals’ readiness to encourage Turkish chauvinism. Tetik’s reply to my
question about Kurdish nationalists was in the same vein. “They eat the
same bread as us, they marry our daughters, and then disparage the
country. I don’t understand it.”
In the past, Turkish governments usually came to power speaking of
reconciliation; they soon felt obliged, by a combination of PKK
atrocities and pressure from the generals, to announce their faith in a
“military solution” to what was presented as a simple problem of
terrorism. Now, things have changed. With Erdogan in power, the generals
must deal with a popular prime minister whose AK Party argues that a
shared religion that does not deny ethnic differences will be sufficient
to bind Turks and Kurds together. When I met Abdulrahman Dilipak, a
militant Turkish Islamist based in Istanbul, he called for a “unitary
state of many communities,” i.e., for according the Kurds some recognition.
For the first time in years, the place where the most adventurous
opinions about Turkey’s future are being ventured is the Kurdish
southeast. In the past, the representatives of Kurdish parties spoke
circumspectly, fearing that they might be arrested or their party
banned, but the climate is now freer. In Mus, an overwhelmingly Kurdish
province, the local Human Rights Association representative, a supporter
of the Kurdish cause, told me that “the number of people coming to me to
complain that they have been tortured has gone down to virtually zero.”
This reflects well on Erdogan and his policy of “zero tolerance” toward
torture, which had indeed been widespread, but the atmosphere has
emboldened Kurdish nationalists to articulate their aspirations with a
new frankness. In Mus, when I asked the representative of DEHAP whether
the Kurds wanted minority rights, he replied, “First we want the
privileges that are afforded to minorities, and then we want to go
beyond that.”
For many Kurds that probably means exploring Ocalan’s recent
announcement from prison that he was setting up a “democratic
federation” that would bind together the Kurds of Turkey, Iraq, Iran,
and Syria, but without splitting them from their host countries. How he
would manage that, he did not say. Others envisage a new constitution
that recognizes the Kurds as equal partners with the Turks and that
provides explicitly for Kurdish instruction in state schools. The DEHAP
mayor of Varto, a town in Mus province, spoke to me of bringing about a
“transformation” in attitudes and forcing the state to evolve toward
full recognition of Kurds.
The EU process has elicited fears that the Alevis, too, will seek
special status. As heterodox Muslims, the Alevis were often treated
shoddily by the Ottomans. Many welcomed Atatürk’s secular republic
because it seemed to offer an end to discrimination. More recently, the
heterodox Shia Alevis have felt threatened by Turkey’s Sunni revival and
by the state’s desire to regulate the revival. No room has been made for
Alevi beliefs and practices; at school, Alevi children are instructed in
orthodox Sunni Islam alongside their Sunni peers. In Ankara, Kazim Genc,
who heads the Pir Abdal Culture Association, a big Alevi group, demanded
that religious instruction be removed from the national curriculum and
that the state provide help in building Alevi prayer halls, just as it
helps the benefactors of Sunni mosques. Genc wants the Alevis to be
elevated to their rightful status as a “founding element of the Turkish
Republic.”
A new constitution, recognition for the Alevis, protection for
non-Muslim religious foundations – for millions of Turks, these are
frightening ideas, and they are all the more frightening because they
are being articulated at the same time as the move toward EU entry, the
stated goal of the Turkish state. This paradoxical situation seems now
to be provoking among some Turks a reevaluation of the wisdom of seeking
EU entry, and recent polls suggest a decline in support for that goal
and a rise in nationalist feelings.[3]
3.
Having lived in Turkey during the late 1990s, when most Turks admired
Bill Clinton, I was startled by the anti-American feeling that I
observed when I was there in April. George Bush’s invasion of Iraq and
his support for Ariel Sharon have alienated the devout. America’s
current patronage of the Kurds of northern Iraq has convinced many Turks
that the US is prepared to tolerate an independent Kurdish state there – a
state that could be seen as a model by Turkey’s Kurds. Some Turks
believe that the US wants to take revenge for the Ankara parliament’s
refusal to allow American forces to use Turkey as a launching pad for
the Iraq invasion. Many Turks believe that, far from trying to control
PKK units in northern Iraq, the US is abetting them in order to
destabilize Turkey.
This background helps to explain the success of Metal Storm, a Turkish
novel describing Turkey’s invasion by US forces which has been a runaway
best seller, with a print run, huge by Turkish standards, of 350,000 to
date. Polls suggest that many Turks regard such an invasion as a
distinct possibility. At the end of 2004, the US embassy in Ankara had
to deny Turkish newspaper reports claiming that the Asian tsunami had
been caused by American underwater explosions designed to kill large
numbers of Muslims.
Traveling through Turkey I was struck by a tendency among the people I
met to look for villains. In Mus, for example, right-wing activists told
me there had been a rise in Christian missionary activity, a claim for
which they were unable to provide evidence. Some Turks are passionately
opposed to the proposed reopening of a Greek Orthodox seminary near
Istanbul. They regard this tiny concession to Turkey’s few remaining
Greeks as a serious threat. Most improbable of all, many Turks say they
fear the Sabbataians, a Jewish sect that probably no longer exists.
In the seventeenth century the Sabbataians were followers of Sabbatai
Zevi, an Ottoman Jew who proclaimed himself the Messiah. After Zevi was
induced by the Ottomans to embrace Islam, thousands of his followers
followed his example, but continued to practice Judaism in secret.
During the past two decades, some writers, most of them Islamist, have
received some attention by challenging without any serious evidence the
conventional account of what happened next – namely, that the Sabbataians’
descendants became integrated into Muslim Turkish society. On the
contrary, these writers maintain, the Sabbataians multiplied, maintained
their secret faith, and now exert a sinister stranglehold over Turkey’s
political and economic life.[4]
This is the idea behind Soner Yalcin’s current best seller, Efendi: The
White Turks’ Big Secret.[5] The book is a detailed historical account of
a powerful and tentacular Izmir family, the Evliyazades, many of whose
descendants are well known in Turkey today. Yalcin follows the extended
family from the late nineteenth century as its members make fortunes,
arrange advantageous marriages, achieve high office during the imperial
and republican periods, and are occasionally defeated by politics or
jealousy. In the book’s last paragraph, Yalcin tells his readers his
book was written with the aim of lifting the veil on a secret that
remains taboo in Turkey…. Sabbataiism is our reality. We cannot write
our history if we ignore it.
And yet the alleged Sabbataiism of Efendi is not based on any evidence;
it is suggested by innuendo for the initiated. Yalcin does not say
outright that the Evliyazades are Sabbataians; he only implies that they
are. He does not flatly contradict the Evliyazades’ account that the
family originally came from Anatolia, but he hints that they are
descended from Jewish converts. Once this is accepted, everything else
falls into place: the Evliyazades’ business partnerships with
foreigners; their supposedly effete, Western style of life; their
association with sinister institutions like the Rotary Club and the Miss
Europe competition (the 1952 winner, Gunseli Basar, apparently married
an Evliyazade). Yalcin’s point is that the Evliyazades and people like
them deserve the honorific “Efendi,” a word meaning “gentleman” or
“leader,” that was often used to refer to non-Muslims during the Ottoman
period, and that Yalcin seems to be using ironically. These “white
Turks,” he seems to be saying, can hardly be considered Turks at all.
In a recent issue of a left-wing Turkish magazine, Rifat N. Bali, a
Turkish Jew, sees Efendi as part of the tradition of Turkish
anti-Semitic writing.[6] He describes Islamist journalists who try to
“out” famous Turks as being Sabbataian. He points out several passages
in which Yalcin implies that Sabbataians have intervened during Turkish
history to the benefit of their own (and Israel’s) interest, and to the
detriment of Turkey’s. Without any factual basis for doing so, Yalcin
ascribes a discriminatory tax imposed on the capital of well-to-do
non-Muslims in the 1940s to a plot by pro-Israel Jewish converts in the
Turkish government to persuade Turkish Jews to migrate to the new state.
Whatever the reason for their departure, Yalcin concludes, the Jews who
eventually left showed “disloyalty” to Turkey. In the eyes of Turkish
nationalists, disloyalty and ingratitude are common traits among minorities.
4.
I arrived in Istanbul on Sunday, April 24, ninety years to the day since
the Ottomans began arresting prominent Armenians in the city, an event
that for Armenians marks the beginning of the genocide. A large Armenian
church that I visited in European Istanbul was packed with worshipers
who lit candles in memory of those who had died. Some local Armenians,
along with a few liberal Turkish journalists and historians, had flown
to Armenia to participate in a commemoration there and to support
demands that Turkey recognize the events of 1915 as genocide.
Turkish newspapers had much to say about those events. Columnists and
celebrities presented themselves in the press as experts on history.
Could the deportations of 1915 have been avoided? No, argued Sukru
Elekdag, a handsome former ambassador turned politician, “the Ottoman
government went to great pains” to protect the Armenians during the
deportations, but “due to contagious dis-eases, severe weather
conditions and limited resources there were losses on both sides.” On
April 25, Hurriyet, Turkey’s most slavishly pro-establishment paper,
announced that “today, for the first time, fully ninety years after the
events of 1915,” Talat Pasha, the Ottoman grand vizier who ordered the
deportations, “speaks, joining the debate with hitherto unpublished
documents from his personal archive!” During the next few days, a series
of articles taken from Talat’s journal purported to show that the chief
vizier, who was assassinated by an Armenian in 1921, had been much
concerned for the welfare of the deportees.
The evident purpose behind this display of opinion was to promote the
Turkish version of events. The Armenians, so the Turkish argument goes,
were deported because the Turks credibly feared that they would link up
with the advancing Russians and seize parts of Anatolia. The
deportations could not have been better managed because the Ottoman
Empire was at war and in chaos. Most of the massacres were committed by
brigands who acted without state sanction. And some of the worst
massacres were committed against Turkish villages by Armenian gangs
withdrawing from eastern Anatolia along with the Russians after the
Bolshevik Revolution.
During the past two decades, several Turkish historians have made
careers by developing this thesis, and also by dismissing as inflated
claims that 1.5 million Armenians lost their lives during the
deportations. These historians have been supported by Turkish diplomats,
but they have had little success. Few foreign historians and, perhaps
more important, no foreign countries feel confident defending the
Turkish thesis. Turkish newspapers like Hurriyet carried triumphant
headlines after George Bush avoided using the word “genocide” in a
statement of condolence to the Armenians on April 24, but throughout the
world, the opinion of politicians and historians is decidedly against
the Turks. The parliaments of more than a dozen countries have
recognized the events of 1915 as genocide and a resolution has been
submitted to the European Parliament demanding that “genocide
recognition” be made a precondition for Turkish entry to the EU.
Many Armenians agree that Turkey must recognize the events of 1915 as
genocide. Turkish officials vigorously resist a label that, they rightly
fear, will result in their being associated with horrors comparable to
the Holocaust and may expose them to class-action lawsuits. It is hard
to argue that the writing and understanding of history have benefited
from the bitter controversy over the word “genocide.” Many individual
Turks accept that the Ottomans committed an appalling crime, but the
same Turks violently react against suggestions that the crime was
genocide.[7] The attitude of these Turks, in turn, enrages many
Armenians, for some of whom it is the label of genocide that counts – more
so than an appropriate show of contrition or even an honest appraisal of
the past.[8] So a distorted “debate” is taking place in the shadow of
Turkey’s bid for EU membership.
Some Turks, many of them writers and academics, dare to put their heads
above the parapet, and try to discuss the issue in a dispassionate
manner, but they are not always allowed to do so. In May, academics at
Istanbul’s respected Bosporus University felt obliged to cancel a
conference on the history of the Armenian deportations after the Turkish
justice minister obliquely referred to the event as “treason,” and “the
spreading of propaganda against Turkey by people who belong to it.”
When Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s best-known novelist, made the unremarkable
observation last year that one million Armenians were killed in Turkey,
his words provoked a protest demonstration in the streets. Under
Turkey’s new penal code, it is not clear that referring to Armenian
genocide constitutes “anti-national activity” – a crime that is punishable
by ten years’ imprisonment. (The law’s original footnote, which suggests
that it does, has officially been erased, but this may not have much
effect in practice; many copies of the new penal code that have been
circulated contain the offending footnote, raising fears that lawyers
and judges will apply it.) If saying the Turks committed genocide is a
crime, this is surely as flagrant an affront to intellectual freedom as
the recent decision by the Swiss judiciary to launch an inquiry into
Yusuf Halacoglu, the head of the Turkish History Organization, on the
grounds that his denial of the genocide during a speech he gave in
Switzerland may amount to illegal racism. That court decision was
denounced not only by members of the Turkish establishment, but also by
pro-Armenian Turkish historians such as Sabanci University’s Halil
Berktay, who says that the events of 1915 constitute a “proto-genocide.”
Etyen Mahcupyan, a prominent Turkish Armenian writer and journalist,
also criticized the Swiss decision, saying that he agreed with “none of
Professor Halacoglu’s views,” although he defended his right to express
them.
In the offices of the weekly Agos, a paper published for Istanbul’s
roughly 60,000 Armenians, Karin Karakasli, the newspaper’s general
coordinator, told me that despite the controversy over official
recognition of the killings as genocide, the conditions that Turkey’s
Armenians live under are getting better. Only a few years ago, Karakasli
recalled, the Armenian community was being accused of cooperating with
the PKK; what the government calls “minority affairs,” including
relations with Armenians, were supervised by the police. Until the
cancellation of the Bosporus University conference, it had seemed as
though Erdogan and his government were showing a softer and more
tolerant attitude. The picture is now less clear – and members of the
Turkish establishment, including top army commanders, have yet to show
any sign that they would endorse such a softening. All the same, Agos
has benefited from a relaxation in laws and attitudes concerning freedom
of expression. Minority affairs are now supervised by the Interior
Ministry. Karakasli told me that dozens of Armenian memoirs, novels, and
history books are now being published in Turkish, part of a trend toward
greater pluralism in publishing.[9] For the first time that she can
remember, there is no general desire among Istanbul’s Armenians to emigrate.
Although Istanbul’s Armenians agree that the events of 1915 amounted to
genocide, more immediate practical matters, such as Turkey’s continuing
refusal to reopen its land border with Armenia, seem more important to
many of them than the issue of whether genocide is officially
recognized. Justifying its decision to keep the border closed, Turkey
cites Armenia’s occupation of territory belonging to Azerbaijan, a
Turkish ally, and Armenia’s claim to parts of eastern Anatolia. But
Erdogan has said that he wants improved relations with Armenia and he
recently called for a joint commission of Turkish and Armenian
historians to review the events of 1915. Etyen Mahcupyan has advised the
Turkish parliament that Turkey should reopen relations with Armenia; if
it does, Turkish acknowledgment of the genocide will, he believes,
become less important. He, Karakasli, and other prominent Turkish
Armenians criticize the efforts of diaspora Armenians to persuade
foreign parliaments to pass resolutions denouncing the genocide. “They
seek to protect their identity by generating hatred,” Karakasli said,
“and they end up poisoning themselves…. They have no contact with the
Turks. We live among them.”
Of all Turkey’s minorities, recognized or not, Armenians have the most
tragic past. They may also have the brightest future, since most of them
live in Turkey’s only cosmopolitan city. In more remote and conservative
parts of the country, such as Erzurum, it is harder to envisage a smooth
accommodation of minority demands, still less the sharing of ideas that
would help facilitate the transition. This is why a recent work on
Turkey’s minorities, by Baskin Oran, a political scientist at Ankara
University, is so important.[10]
In his scholarly and exhaustive book, Oran examines the Treaty of
Lausanne, the consequences of Atatürk’s exclusive conception of
Turkishness, and the repressive laws that have been enacted in the name
of both. He contends that Turkey’s foundations could be strengthened,
and many inconsistencies resolved, simply by changing the official
designation of the Turkish citizen from Turk, or Turk, to Turkiyeli,
which means “of Turkey.” It is an ingenious answer both to Turkish
nationalists and also to demands by Kurds that their special status be
recognized, for it convincingly assumes that no one should have special
status. In Oran’s Turkey, everyone is a Turkiyeli. Of course, Oran’s
ideas amount to more than semantic invention. They challenge the way
that the state regards its citizens. In the words of an EU diplomat
based in Ankara, the state has hitherto organized itself in order to
“protect itself from its citizens, rather than the other way around.”
Last November, a condensed version of Oran’s book was issued by a
panel – of which Oran was a member – that had been asked by the government
to examine minority questions. The result was an uproar of objections.
To show his opposition to Oran’s views, another member of the panel
snatched it from the jurist who was reading it aloud, and ripped it up.
Later on, Oran’s suggestion was attacked by Turkey’s second most senior
general, and denounced by Turkish nationalists. Startled by the
reaction, the government disowned Oran’s ideas.
At least Oran was not charged with any crime or fired from his job at
the university, as he might have been a few years ago. He and other
progressives realize that attempts to change Turkey will set off
reactions, not least from a reactionary and ultra-cautious
establishment. Still, a transformation is underway in Turkey, and a
central part of it involves Turkey’s still troubled relations with its
minorities.
– June 16, 2005
Notes
[1] Turk Ulusal Kimligi ve Ermeni Sorunu (The Turkish National Identity
and the Armenian Problem) (Istanbul: Iletisim Yayinlari, 1994).
[2] In May, the ECHR ruled that Ocalan’s trial “was not tried by an
independent and impartial tribunal,” and called for a retrial.
[3] That decline is bound to be accelerated by the crisis that was
precipitated by the rejection by French and Dutch voters of the new EU
constitution. Now Turks have even less of an idea than they did of what
sort of EU they might eventually join – or, indeed, whether rising
anti-Turk sentiment in member states might keep them out.
[4] Yahudi Turkler, yahut Sabetaycilar (Jewish Turks, or Sabbataians)
(Zvi-Geyik Yayinlari, 2000), a collection of articles on the subject by
Mehmed Sevket Eygi, a prominent Islamist columnist, contains the
assertion that “a few thousand Sabbataians control the country’s
affairs,” but provides no evidence that this is the case. He says that
Istanbul contains “secret synagogues” where Sabbataians worship, but
does not say where they are. Like other writers on the subject, Eygi
makes no attempt to distinguish between sincere converts to Islam and
Sabbataians, which further weakens his assertion that Sabbataiism is a
thriving sect. It seems no more than a scurrilous anti-Semitic label.
[5] Efendi: Beyaz Turklerin Buyuk Sirri (Dogan Kitap, 2004). With
fifty-six reprints to date, Efendi is one of Turkey’s most successful
nonfiction books of recent years.
[6] Birikim, June 2004.
[7] In his statement on April 24, Bush referred to the “mass killings of
as many as 1.5 million Armenians during the last days of the Ottoman
Empire.” This contradicts Turkish claims that there were no mass
killings and that only a fraction of that number died. Although Bush was
accusing the Ottomans of an appalling crime, the fact that he did not
use the word “genocide” was presented in Turkey as cause for celebration.
[8] Some people contend that, unless Turkey recognizes that a genocide
took place, no appraisal of the past can be considered complete. I am
not so sure. It is unlikely that Turkey’s justice minister would have
reacted so aggressively to the proposed conference at Bosporus
University if he did not fear that the event would be useful to those
who advocate recognition of genocide. His reaction, naturally, was
strongly attacked by such advocates, including a group called the
Campaign for Recognition of the Armenian Genocide. It is hard to imagine
that the experience of Bosporus University will encourage other Turkish
institutions, especially ones that value academic integrity, to stage
conferences of their own. They would inevitably get caught up in the
dispute between proponents and opponents of genocide recognition – a
dispute that often has the result of drawing a semantic veil over the
Armenian tragedy of 1915.
[9] In Turkey, it is now possible to buy books arguing that genocide
took place in 1915, as well as memoirs, written by Armenians who
survived the deportations, that describe appalling behavior by the
Ottomans. The success now being enjoyed by Fetiye Cetin’s story of her
Armenian grandmother, who was rescued by Turks, has prompted others to
admit that they, too, have Armenian antecedents. In fashionable Istanbul
bookshops, it is possible to find, on the same shelf as Soner Yalcin’s
Efendi, novels that celebrate the Ottoman cosmopolitanism that Yalcin
finds so objectionable. Such books sell less than the chauvinist ones,
Karakasli concedes, but that they are largely available is new and
important. “In the past, you only heard one view.”
[10] Turkiye’de Azinliklar: Kavramlar, Teori Lozan, ic Mevzuat, Ictihat,
Uygulama (Minorities in Turkey: Notions, Theory, Lausanne, Internal
Regulations, Interpretation, Implementation) (Iletsim Yayinlari, 2004).