Assyrian International News Agency
Sept 29 2005

Turkey After The Armenian Genocide Conference

(AINA) — After efforts of deterrence by the executive in May and
obstruction of the 4th Istanbul Administrative Court on September
23rd, the conference entitled, ‘Ottoman Armenians in the Final Period
of the Empire: Scientific Responsibility and Problems of Democracy’
has been successfully completed on the 25th of September. The venue
of the event had to be changed from one university to the other and a
three-day conference had to be telescoped to two days. The
participants and audience had to pass through a barrier of slandering
nationalist protestors throwing eggs and tomatoes. Yet two and half
institutions deserve credit for standing behind academic autonomy,
freedom of expression and culture of deliberation. The first is the
government who spoke through the Prime Minister. His resolve dwarfed
the initial resistance of the Minister of Justice who called the
initiative “treason” and “back stabbing the nation” in May. The
second is the university as an institution who defended the rights
and liberties that make it a center and advocate of freedom. The
third institution is the media; of course some of it, which is
conscious of the fact that, this conference was not all about the
Armenian issue that needs to be discussed impartially but it is
rather a matter of democracy.

The speakers, or better deliberators, were all Turkish scholars
serving at domestic or foreign universities to avoid prejudice
against ill-willed foreigners. Among a sundry of topics some like,
‘An Identity Squeezed Between the Past and the Present’, ‘Examples of
Forgetting and Remembrance in Turkish Literature: Different Breaking
Points of Silence’, ‘The Armenian Issue and Demographic Engineering’,
‘Scenes of Conscience through a Bitter History’, ‘From Heranush to
Seher: A Story of “Salvation”‘, ‘Mother Fatma, the Child of
Deportation’ and ‘Thinking About the Stories of the Survivors of
Deportation’, suggest that the issues were not limited to just
historiography and document rattling. That has been taking place for
a long time. Both the Armenian and Turkish nationalists and ‘official
historians’ have unfortunately narrowed down the discussion of this
important matter to the acceptance or denial of “genocide”. This
radical stance has not only impoverished scholarship but has
politicized the matter forcing individuals to take sides. In this
ado, unfortunately the human side of the matter, the suffering of
real human beings, no matter who they were, has been neglected.
Indeed what we ought to start discussing is the human condition at
the turn of the last century.

A multicultural society existed with different ethnic, linguistic and
confessional groups. They were torn apart, their age-old relations
were severed, an economy was shattered, the lives of ALL were changed
irreversibly and forever. The majority of them had little to do with
the fate they were forced to live through if they had not lost their
lives in the chaos of World War One years.

I will not go on into the arguments of “clashing nationalisms”,
“securing the eastern-front where a war was waged with occupying
Russian armies” or simply, “revenge of the Turks over the Armenians
where a part of the Armenians took up arms and tried to carve out an
independent Armenia by exterminating Turks in eastern Turkey”. All of
these are parts of the wider truth. But the truth is larger than that
and larger than the lives of individuals or groups that were caught
up in the turmoil of the decade between 1910-1920. Turks were
recruited to go to the Libyan (or Tripoli) campaign in 1911 to be
followed by the Balkan War next year that ended up by loosing all of
the East European lands of the Empire in 1913. In the next year WW1
broke up that ended with the dissolution of three major empires of
the time, the Ottoman being one. During that fateful decade, Ottomans
lost 2 million soldiers. No one knows how many civilians perished
during hostilities and following forced migration, by hunger and
famine. But a rough estimate is that five million Turks or Muslims
identifying themselves as Ottoman had to migrate into present Turkey
and remaining territories. They left behind dead family members,
their property and a life that had taken root on European soil in the
past centuries.

They were frustrated, impoverished, uprooted and bitter. However,
they had come to a friendly land where they were welcome and the
government of the day compensated their loss to a certain degree.
That is why they chose to forget. Did they forgive? Obviously not.
Historical evidence shows that the ruling cadre in the last Ottoman
decade was the government of the Committee of Union and Progress,
better known as the Young Turks. The leading group, including the
dictating triumvirate, Talat, Enver and Cemal Pashas of the Young
Turks were basically of Balkan stock. When they moved the
headquarters of their semi-secret organization from Selonica to
Istanbul in 1912, they brought their feelings of loss, betrayal (by
the non-Muslim peoples of the empire who had attained their
independence through painful struggles for national liberation by
fighting against Ottoman officers and officials who were mainly
members of the Union and Progress.

We all know what “never again” means. These new rulers of the Ottoman
terrain promised the remaining lands not become a second “Macedonia”
as they called the bulk of the Balkans. They made a conscious effort
to prevent a second catastrophe by adopting the method of demographic
engineering. There were two aspects of this engineering: 1) Removal
of the Christians; 2) Mixing of the non-Turkish Muslims. The first
method was territorial; the second was demographic engineering. The
Bulgarians living in Edirne and in Thrace (European part of Turkey)
was sent to Bulgaria or exchanged with Turks who felt victimized and
wanted to go to Turkey. Deterring Greeks from remaining in Western
and Black Sea regions was realized without overt exertion of force
but with a convincing determination. The policy was to cleanse the
Aegean littoral off Greeks 50 kilometers into the heartland. This
policy reached its peak point by population exchanges with Greece in
1924.

Territorial mopping concerning the Armenians was put into effect with
the official policy of deportation. It was an announced and
acknowledged government policy of the time. However, territorial
sterility was not only directed to these largest Ottoman peoples, it
encompassed all Christian peoples, large or small including the more
peaceful Assyrians in the southeast. How could the vengeful and
wrathful Young Turks could know that by scaring off the peaceful
Christians they would allow the Kurds to have sole control of
southeast Anatolia and the ‘later Turks’ would have to put up with
the unruly behavior of the more favored Muslims?

As regards the non-Turkish Muslims, the ratio of one-to-ten or 10%
was observed when they were moved from places where they were more
crowded into wider Turkish communities where they would be a
controllable minority. This plan was put into effect and the
Armenians faced the harshest fate of all because there was no
receiving state willing to compensate for their loss like the
Bulgarians and the Greeks. From the day when Armenian deportation has
started the event is no more a political matter born out of the
exigencies and vagaries of the day and its power struggles. It is a
human condition, which imposes on all of us, on all human beings, the
responsibility to understand and to reconcile with.

The present Turkish government bears no responsibility to what the
adventurous Young Turks who led the Ottoman State into demise had
done to the peoples whom they ruled over. They did not only deport
Christian subjects, they sent armies totaling two million recruited
from among Muslims to three continents and watched them perish in
pursuit of their ambitious scheme of creating a Turanian Empire out
of Turkic peoples. They depleted the Turkish stock of the motherland
too. The conference drew attention to these (other) angles of the
last decades of the empire during which the Armenian disaster took
place. It was not particular to the Armenians. It was a human tragedy
staged by an adventurous cadre who valued their imperial design more
than human life, without distinguishing between that of their own or
others. Their Machiavellian political methods justified the means
they used for their exalted end that never succeeded but consumed the
lives of millions as well as their own.

What befalls on us is to acknowledge what happened to the Ottoman
peoples of the time and why? No nation or nationality, no adherent of
any creed can claim that those fateful years are the mark of history
that denotes only their losses and grief. This is a shared calamity
that we all lived through and bare responsibility for, some much
less, some much more. Those days are left behind, not to be forgotten
though. We must remember what has taken place; what ambitions,
policies or impossible dreams have led to such large scale suffering
then, so that we do not commit the same mistakes again. However, our
primary duty is to understand what role our forbearers played and
what we can do to ease the pain of those who still suffer today
because they feel that their wounds are psychologically bleeding.

We need a little empathy just like the former Minister of Health, Mr.
Cevdet Aykan has said in the “Memories and Witnesses” section of the
conference said: “In 1915, Tokat was a part of the Sivas Province.
According to the 1908 Sivas Population Registrar, there were 240
Muslims, 24,000 Armenians, and 14,000 Greeks in the province. The
population of Tokat at the same time was 28,000. Of this number 8,600
were Armenian and they were all living peacefully together. When the
news of deportation reached Tokat and Sivas, the Turkish and Armenian
community leaders got together and sought for a solution. The
Armenian merchants and artisans transferred their property to their
neighbors and trusted their spouses and daughters to Turkish families
with mock weddings. Those who were sent away never came back”. Mr.
Aykan has told this story as a witness and added the most honorable
statement: “I am telling these to pay back my moral debt to my
Armenian citizens”.

This sentence tells all. Now, both the Armenians and Turks must get
together not to accuse each other for the injustices of the past and
how much suffering their great parents have inflicted on the other.
Humanistic stories can be produced just s much as inhuman ones like
officers committing suicide not to carry unjust orders or neighbors
hiding forbidden citizens forsaking their own lives. No, what we
ought to discuss is how we can heel the wounds that is no body’s
monopoly. If we do not want to carry the burden of history we must
unload our feelings and expectations by cleansing our thoughts and
souls from vengeance and hatred and wish for dialogue, which we can
hopefully turn into an agenda for peaceful coexistence and mutual
history building. Can we do it? Restless minds and souls only produce
hatred and violence. Let us leave the souls of our grand parents
alone to rest in peace. They have suffered enough and they do not
want to be awakened to fight another war just because we want them on
our side.

By Dogu Ergil