PeaceJournalism.com, Nepal
Nov 3 2006

Reflections on Turks and Armenians, Nations and Society

Editorial Opinion Posted On: 2006-11-03 18:07:55

By: Greg Somerville Unsettled

It is unsettling to think about some matter after we have learned
that the words we were going to use are themselves in question, and
that we had best avoid them in order to speak truly. But it is a
constant possibility we must acknowledge.

In speaking about peoples located here and there, banded together as
nations, yet sharing across today’s borders most of the features
which enable us to recognize society and culture, we use words like
‘French’ or ‘British’ or ‘Irish’ or ‘German’ without much worry. You
have to start somewhere. But then you look a bit more deeply at
history and at conflict and you begin to wonder whether the conflict
has been misconceived, even by its participants. Nagging doubts begin
to complicate your life. Who shall we say was fighting? Who were
these people and what sort of a fight was that? And who should say?

Elizabeth Kolbert has written a short piece in the November 6, 2006,
edition of The New Yorker, describing the Armenians and the Turks and
a new history of this conflict by Taner Akcam, "A Shameful Act: The
Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility."
Kolbert can be forgiven for starting somewhere and for writing a book
review rather than a tome. But it is all food for thought on the
table of life.

Who are these "Turks"? I will leave the corollary question regarding
Armenians aside for later delectation, anyway less pressing while we
address this course of our historical feast. The sentences of
Kolbert’s which piqued my interest are these, where she makes a claim
unremarkable among all the notions we entertain as facts concerning
the early twentieth century:

"As the rulers of the Ottoman Empire, the Turks had been fighting
against history; they had spent more than a century trying – often
unsuccessfully – to fend off nationalist movements in the regions
they controlled. Now, in defeat, they adopted the cause as their own.
In the spring of 1920,"…

And Kolbert goes on to sketch the establishment of the Ankara
government and their work to reject the Treaty of Sevres, just drawn
up by the Allies in 1920, and replace it in 1923 with the Treaty of
Lausanne recognizing the Republic of Turkey. And Kolbert draws our
attention to the pertinence of 1915 actions for the competing
treaties of five and eight years later. When a million Armenians lost
their lives at Ottoman hands in April of 1915, Kolbert (with Akcam,
we must presume) observes that it "changed the demographics of
eastern Anatolia; then, on the basis of these changed demographics,
the Turks used the logic of self-determination to deprive of a home
the very people they had decimated." Thus a war crime is made
foundational as to boundaries of a nation and self-organization of a
people.

But what people are we talking about? Kolbert and many others when
describing the legal adventures of Orhan Pamuk bring up the Turkish
penal code which outlaws "insulting Turkishness" and I think most of
us wince or smile chidingly at such bald defensiveness inscribed into
criminal sanction. And when we hear that Kurds are routinely called
"mountain Turks" so as to avoid their right name, we roll our eyes at
stubborn, willful racism ill-suited to a civilized modern
understanding.

Our own context frames a beginning, maybe, for diluting our disdain
with modest realism, for stepping back from such easy superiority as
leads us to mock the Turks for foolishness. In her final paragraph,
Kolbert leans this way, pointing to the forty million indigenous
people living in the Americas before Europeans came and fewer than
ten million visible by 1650. Racism in the United States is marked,
certainly, by no less confusion and argument over the proper naming
of people than our conventional reading of Turkish history and
custom.

But if we step back from the fog of the Great War and perform the
slightest of reality checks, we will find that empire and nation and
people and ethnic identification are far from simple, and Turkey is a
wonderful place to start. We should look at Turkey through two
lenses: composition of empire and bonds between people. That is to
say, from the top down and the bottom up, we will try to answer the
question of how society organizes, and how it ought to organize, with
Turkey as our focus. Let me announce my findings right off the bat.
We are all amateur humans; there are no professional social
practitioners; there is no agreement as to how we form society.

Alexander the Great swept eastward signally, momentously. In making
his conquered lands Greek, he Hellenized their people. Language is
implicated mightily in identifying one people or another, and has
become the lasting tool of historians, albeit ethnicity and
nationality cannot quite conform to its marker. But language can be
rejected, secret, disused, forbidden or broken: like memory, of which
it is one token, one treasury. One primary fact we can state with
certainty is that none of Alexander’s conquered peoples spoke such an
Altaic language as Turkish is. That family, standing apart from
Indo-European, lurked behind mountains north of Alexander’s route and
of Ashoka’s after him, reversing some of the Hellenic conquests.

Kabul would come to hear both the Mongolian and the Turkic branches
of the Altaic family spoken, and so would Jerusalem. So would the
Viking princes who followed the Huns in Ukraine. But it took some
time for Constantine’s city to lose its Greek accent, and much
Western European connivance. Turkic tribes moved through, and named,
Turkistan over long, disputatious migrations strikingly similar to
the uncoordinated arrivals of Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians on
Britain’s coast. Like those Germanic speakers we now call English,
Turks displaced a number of indigenous inhabitants along the way.
Romans had already laid claim to Celtic lands both in southern
Britain and in central Anatolia, fielding first pagan, and later
Christian legions. Very few descendants of Celtic Britons persisted
as landowners outside Wales, learning Old English, but Galatians
sheltered within the Roman Empire, a subject kingdom where Paul would
preach and which even Jerome found flourishing.

So, when Seljuk tribes encroached ever more successfully upon the
well-trodden soil of Anatolia, Greek-speaking inheritors of
Alexandrine and Roman imperial tenure resisted militarily and
demographically, leaving an ethnic crazy-quilt more brightly colored
than even Byzantium sported. China, Christendom, Islam and Tibet were
all predecessor empires to the Ottoman establishment which made
Istanbul its capital, and all diverse.

Armenians, Kurds, Arabs, Jews and Bosnians retained their identity
within the Ottoman framework, along with many other minoritarian
ethnicities. While Ottoman rule consolidated its bicontinental
holdings, Persia to its east recovered national integrity. This was
Europe’s Renaissance as well, and it birthed new commercial economies
under Italian, Spanish, Dutch and English leadership. Which way was
history trending? When did the winner become clear, if there was a
race to organize best?

Frankly, I think the organization of society is no more a settled
matter than the organization of business enterprises. My own
experience has been that in any large business, there are a certain
number of quite obvious operational chores to be done. And if we
leave that bottom-up reality and adopt the perspective of the chief
executives, there is a clear mission: make money. In between, middle
management struggles constantly to find synergistic arrangements of
medium-sized blocs of staff and function. Corporate history is
littered with unsuccessful efforts at this sort of integration. So is
the history of our social arrangements. If you study the changes in
political maps, over time, you will see that there is no optimal size
or shape for national definition. Even the definition of nationalism
flaps in the wind of experience.

Ottoman forces suffered major defeat at Russian hands. Some Armenians
participated actively, helping Russians resist a siege of Baku. New
"Bolshevik" Russia was not invited to Paris, where President Wilson
checked them and Turkish self-determination by proposing that
generous terms of Allied settlement be granted all Armenian subjects,
Russian and Ottoman. Sevres extended exceptional generosity to the
Kurds as well, declared sovereign in their mountain passes for only
the second interval in their national existence. In all this the
Greeks were surely complicit, receiving for themselves large
Anatolian territories to rule with a sovereignty which they must have
viewed as an acknowledgement of their undisputed historic tenure, in
such places as the port of Smyrna. And the bitterness of Greeks at
the eviction codified in Lausanne is with us still. Is that, too, a
historical trend? But what of those who intermarried down the years,
submerging an original ethnicity and learning languages they never
heard in the cradle? Are they trendy or traitorous?

No matter what mixture of ethnic extraction today’s Turkish citizens
enjoy, and what ancestral languages war has bloodied with bad
memories, people in Asia Minor and everywhere else must hope that
human efforts to build society do it peacefully.

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