TURKEY’S LIBERALS
by: Maureen Freely
ProspectMagazine
March 29, 2007
Since its birth in 1923, the republic of Turkey has been engaged in
a war of words with the Armenian diaspora, with the latter insisting
that what Anatolia’s Armenians suffered in 1915 was genocide. The
Turkish state has put a lot of effort into denying that claim, both
at home and abroad. Its allies have traditionally agreed not to "make
an issue of it." For 82 years, the Turkish intelligentsia did the
same. But in February 2005, the novelist Orhan Pamuk broke the taboo.
The hate campaign to which he was then subjected was widely reported,
both in Turkey and abroad, as was his prosecution for insulting
Turkishness. In the nationalist press in his own country, he was
branded a traitor. In the west, he was cast as a lone voice, and that
is how most people here continue to see him.
In fact, Pamuk is not alone. I know this because I grew up in Istanbul,
and many members of my family still live there. In the late 1960s,
I attended an American-owned lycee in Istanbul. Orhan Pamuk, who is
my exact contemporary, and whose books I now translate, attended our
brother school, which has since merged with my alma mater to become
Robert College. Though we can thank these schools for giving us a
world-class education, it carried contradictions that continue to mark
us all. For example, Turkish nationals at the colleges were required
to study certain subjects-history, geography, Turkish literature,
and military science-in Turkish, and to study them as the ministry
of education decreed.
This involved memorisation and discouraged the intellectual inquiry
that was so encouraged in the lessons taught by Americans. This meant
that my classmates had almost to change personality several times
a day.
By mid-afternoon, we would have left our beautiful, secluded campus
to return to a city that was ever more virulently anti-American. By
the late 1960s, universities had become war zones, with leftist
students fighting daily pitched battles with the police. There were
also repeated attacks against US personnel, especially those working
on its 17 military bases.
In March 1971, the military stepped in to "quell anarchy and restore
order." During its first few months of stewardship, disorder continued,
and the public continued to be of two minds about the students. The
turning point came in June, when a Maoist cell that may or may not
have been acting alone kidnapped and murdered the Israeli consul. Mass
arrests of student leftists followed, and the same pattern prevailed at
the American university where my father taught, and where most of my
classmates were now studying. After hearing that they had an informer
in their midst, another Maoist cell put this traitor "on trial," found
him guilty, chopped him up and put him into a trunk. But the girls who
were sent to drop the trunk into the Bosphorus were caught red-handed.
In the days that followed, just about everyone at that university
who was associated with the student left was imprisoned. Many were
tortured. Most were freed in an amnesty in the mid-1970s, but those
who remained politically active were back in prison, or forced into
exile, after the military stepped in again in September 1980.
I wrote about all this ten years ago (Prospect, December 1996). The
essay was reprinted in Turkey, and it lost me several friends. I
fear they may have misunderstood my motives, and I hope that they
will understand that the trunk murder in my new novel, Enlightenment,
exists only in fiction. In real life, the murder remains a mystery.
We will never know if the perpetrators were acting alone, or if they
were aided, abetted and encouraged by an agent provocateur in league
with one or more intelligence agencies. But in the real world, as in
my novel (which is anchored in the present), the abiding mystery is
my classmates’ resilience. Like so many others of their generation,
they did not just survive two bouts of imprisonment and torture; they
picked themselves up, continued their lives and flourished, not just
as professionals but as Turkey’s leading pro-European democrats. For
these are the people who-together with Pamuk-broke Turkey’s 82-year
ban on open discussion of the Armenian question.
Who are they? They come for the most part from the urban bourgeoisie.
Most are Turkish Muslims, with the complex family histories that are
the legacy of Ottoman multiculturalism. The rest belong to Istanbul’s
Greek, Jewish or Armenian minorities. Whatever their background,
they were all required by law to attend Turkish primary schools. Most
moved on to study at one of the foreign lycees that were established
during the Ottoman empire, in the mid to late 19th century, and that
remained in place after the founding of the republic to educate its
westernising elites. Many from this generation went on to further
education in Europe or the US. Some returned to take up university
posts in Turkey. Others stayed in the west.
Seven years ago, a sociologist and former classmate of mine named Muge
Gocek established a network of Turkish and Armenian scholars that
aimed to open up a space wherein the intelligentsia from both sides
of the divide could settle the Armenian question through debate and
research. Although the organisation was based at the University of
Michigan, many academics and writers living in Turkey were on its
list and attended its conferences, which at first were held only
abroad. But by 2005, a series of EU-driven reforms had given Turkey
a new and democratic face. A cultural renaissance was under way;
the streets of Istanbul were full of Greek and Kurdish and Armenian
music, and its bookstores were packed with memoirs that, however
gently, belied the official line on Turkishness. So Gocek joined
with her colleagues and old classmates to organise a conference,
the first in Turkey’s history to allow Turkish scholars to engage
with serious genocide research on Turkish soil, in Turkish. There was
an outcry in the right-wing press, and in the national assembly, the
justice minister accused the organisers of "stabbing the country in
the back." But, after many attempts to shut it down, the conference
went ahead, and for the 700 participants it was a cry not just for
truth, but for reconciliation.
But for Kemal Kerincsiz and the ultranationalist Grand Union of
Lawyers, who staged protests outside, it was treason. We will never
know if Kerincsiz acted alone or if he enjoyed the protection of
ultranationalists inside the state, but we do know that he initiated
most of the high-profile prosecutions of Turkish intellectuals for
insulting Turkishness, organs of the state or the memory of AtatUErk.
Having attended a few of these trials, I can tell you that Kerincsiz
and his colleagues have used each one as an opportunity to hammer
home the ultranationalist line, on prime-time television. Many of
his targets-the human rights activist Murat Belge, the novelist Elif
Shafak and the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink-were speakers
at the Armenian conference.
Since 2005, according to some sources, there have been 172 prosecutions
under the infamous article 301 (insulting Turkishness) and related
laws. In the beginning, it was difficult for western observers to
see the point of them, because most defendants were acquitted or had
their cases dropped on technicalities. My own view was that we were
seeing the first stage of a larger strategy. After Turkey’s leading
intellectuals had been publicly named and shamed for treason and
subjected to a stream of death threats, we were being told, worse
would follow.
And so it did. But when Hrant Dink was assassinated outside his office
in January, Istanbul took to the streets in record (and, I suspect,
unanticipated) numbers. One hundred thousand people attended Dink’s
funeral, many of them carrying placards that read, "We are all Hrant,
we are all Armenians." A backlash followed, with nationalist rallies
and headlines declaring, "We are all Turks" and that anyone who
wasn’t should "clear out." At present, ultranationalists lack an
electoral base: the Nationalist Action party (MHP) does not have a
single deputy in the national assembly. But this could change when
Turkey goes to the polls in the autumn, for the sustained campaign in
the press against the traitors who have "sold the country to Europe
for their own gain" has had its effect. A recent opinion poll found
that 81 per cent disapproved of the democrats who took to the streets
after Hrant Dink’s murder.
After one man arrested in connection with the assassination used
the cameras outside the courthouse to advise Pamuk to "be smart,"
Turkey’s first Nobel laureate chose to leave the country. Though he
intends to return, it may not be safe for him to do so in the short
term: most of the other article 301 high-profile defendants remain
under police guard. In the meantime, even those who live abroad are
not immune to harassment or worse. The Turkish scholar Taner Akcam
has been repeatedly harassed during the US publicity tour for his
recent book on 1915 (A Shameful Act), and he was detained for four
and a half hours at Montreal airport.
A small band of columnists-some of them with strong establishment
links-are urging Turkey to stop fighting the genocide resolution that
the Armenian diaspora have introduced in the US legislature. Others
are calling for the opening of Turkey’s border with Armenia. Several
hundred writers are taking part in a co-ordinated civil disobedience
campaign, in which groups present themselves to prosecutors, repeat
the statements for which Dink was prosecuted and ask to be prosecuted
also. Many have chosen to write for Agos, the Turkish-Armenian
newspaper that Dink edited. Though its primary audience is Turkey’s
70,000 Armenians, it now serves as the symbolic centre of Turkey’s
democracy movement.
In the west, Dink was known mainly as a campaigner for Armenian
rights. Inside Turkey, he was known as a campaigner for all suppressed
minorities, Muslim and non-Muslim. In the months to come, we can
expect the democracy movement to carry on his work. And we can expect
counterattacks from the ultranationalists. The death threats will
continue. Those under police guard will continue to wonder just how
far they can trust their protectors. There will be more rumours and
more assassinations. As the Kurdish problem deepens, we can expect
more democrats to be denounced as PKK sympathisers and terrorists,
and perhaps prosecuted under Turkey’s newly strengthened anti-terror
law. These are scary times-particularly for those of us who remember
how the army marched in to smash the intelligentsia following the
coups of 1971 and 1980. But these democrats are not naive. They
know what a prison cell looks like. They have had their principles
tested by the electric truncheon. Like the characters in my novel,
they understand the game. So the story isn’t over. Despite the rise
of ultranationalism, there is still hope.
>From the Prospect archive
Jonny Dymond on AtatUErk; cngel Gurria-Quintana interviews Orhan Pamuk
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
