Genocide and free speech

May 29th 2007
From Economist.com

Our Europe editor confronts the burden of history

Tuesday

NOBODY should visit Istanbul without going to the Topkapi palace and
Aya Sofia, both now museums. The Topkapi houses a fabulous collection
of rugs, weapons, jewels, pottery and mosaics accumulated by sultans
over the centuries. But almost as big an appeal is its setting: grassy
courtyards, fountains and cool flowerbeds all set high above the
Bosporus. You can while away hours watching the boats, tankers and
ferries scurrying across the busy waters of Istanbul’s harbour.

What really pulls in the tourists is something else: the Topkapi’s
famous harem, which was opened to the public only in 1960. Yet though
it sounds salacious, in reality it simply houses the private quarters
of the sultans, including several of the finest rooms in the entire
palace. Because it imposes an extra charge and does not admit guided
tours, the harem is also mercifully quieter than the rest of the
museum – and than Aya Sofia outside.

Sadly, Aya Sofia is disfigured by internal scaffolding, but the
immense scale of the basilica, built by Justinian between 532 and 537
AD, is staggering. It was turned into a mosque on the day that
Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453. It is fitting, given today’s
arguments over his secular legacy, that it was Ataturk who turned it
into a museum in 1935. Besides the mosaics on the first floor, I am
intrigued to stumble across a memorial to Enrico Dandolo, the blind
90-year-old Doge of Venice who led the appalling 1204 Fourth Crusade –
in the course of which, instead of going to Jerusalem, the crusaders
sacked Constantinople, paving the way for the fall of the city to the
Turks.

That is enough history, I reflect, as I wander off to meet Norman
Stone, an eminent British historian who decamped from Oxford to Turkey
a decade ago, basing himself first at Bilkent University in Ankara,
and now at Koc University in Istanbul. He complains about the traffic
and says that he might return to Ankara if a high-speed train link is
build with Istanbul. We talk about the political situation in
Turkey. But I swiftly find that it is impossible to escape the burden
of history. For one of Mr Stone’s bugbears is the Armenian `genocide’
of 1915.

He shares the mainstream view of many Turks: it happened at a messy
time during the first world war; some Armenians were fighting (with
the Russians) against Ottoman forces; a decision was taken by the
Ottoman government to deport them; a large number of Armenians
died. But he insists that this did not amount to genocide. Other
historians disagree. They have found archived plans laid by the Young
Turks in Constantinople that had the explicit aim of killing Turkey’s
ethnic Armenians.

I cannot judge the truth, but I note one peculiarity with
regret. Inside Turkey, it is an offence to talk about the
mass-slaughter of the Armenians. A number of writers have been
prosecuted. An ethnic Armenian newspaper editor, Hrant Dink, was
gunned down recently on his own doorstep in Istanbul. Elsewhere, it
can be an offence to deny that this was a genocide. The French
National Assembly recently passed a bill to this effect, and there is
one before the American Congress. With laws like these flying around,
whatever happened to free speech and the disinterested unearthing of
historical truth?

Monday

BY ANY measure Istanbul is a world-class historical city. As first
Byzantium and later Constantinople, it was capital of a Roman Empire
that lasted longer in the east than in the west. It became the
Sublime Porte, capital of the Ottoman Empire and seat of the Islamic
caliphate. Coming into the city from Ataturk airport, you pass right
through the thick walls of Constantine (which kept Ottoman besiegers
at bay until 1453) before emerging into a forest of minarets perched
spectacularly above a blue sea.

Yet this is no dead town from the past. Istanbul now has over 10m
people, making it Europe’s biggest and fastest-growing city (in 1950
it had only about a million). The noise, the traffic, the streets
crowding down to the Bosporus and the Golden Horn are overwhelmingly
busy. There is little sign of the political crisis that threatens to
engulf Turkey, and provokes my visit.

This crisis is over the secular inheritance of Ataturk, father of
modern Turkey, who abolished the Ottoman sultanate and the caliphate
in the 1920s, and moved the capital to Ankara. Turks revere Ataturk,
whose secular legacy is jealously guarded by the Army. A month ago the
Army put out a statement criticising the government’s choice of
Abdullah Gul, the foreign minister, as candidate for the Turkish
presidency, and implicitly threatening a military coup.

The Army has always disliked the AK Party government, led by Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, for its Islamist roots. Mr Gul’s particular offence is
to have a wife who wears the Muslim headscarf, which is banned in
public buildings.The details of the subsequent in-fighting and court
cases are too boring to discuss, but the upshot is that no president
has been chosen and Turkey is preparing for a general election in late
July.

It seems likely that the AK Party will win again, though perhaps not
with the same big majority that it won in 2002. The party may again
try to install a mild Islamist as president. So the threat of a
military intervention still hangs over Turkey, which has a long
history of coups.

You might expect that the worldly elite of Istanbul would deplore such
heavy-handed military threats and firmly back democracy. But that is
not the opinion of most of the journalists, former diplomats and
bankers who gather at a splendid dinner party hosted by colleague here
in her apartment in the city’s Galata district. On the contrary, they
are overtly sympathetic to the Army, concerned to preserve secularism
in Turkey, and suspicious that the AK Party has a hidden Islamist
agenda to turn their country into a new Iran.

In an era of creeping fundamentalism throughout the Muslim world, such
concerns are understandable. Yet to a Westerner from Europe the notion
that a military coup might be preferable to a woman’s sporting a
headscarf in the presidential palace in Ankara seems bizarre. The
truth is that, in Turkey, secularism has turned into another form of
fundamentalism that trumps other values, including democracy and the
country’s prospects of joining the European Union.

Here prosperity and urbanisation play a part. Behind these arguments
lies a class issue. What the elite really objects to is the influx of
scarf-wearing Anatolian Muslim peasants that has swelled the
population of Istanbul and other cities. Yet, as in many other
countries, this is something they will just have to learn to live
with.