The Sunday Herald, UK
Oct 28 2007
Turkey has to grasp the past to survive
By Ian Bell
Comment
MY WIFE has no idea where her grandmother was born. Nothing
remarkable about that. In the long century of emigres and immigrants,
when the ships were arriving or escaping, many people grew vague
about half-remembered farmsteads, deserted villages or tenement rooms
in forgotten ports. It happened.
My wife is entitled to be a little more precise, though. "No idea",
means none, nothing. Not a scrap of evidence. Once upon a time,
someone eradicated a large part of her ancestry. This also happened.
Just to ensure that a daughter’s daughter would be forever mystified,
they spent the best part of the long century insisting, sometimes
with extraordinary violence, that no such eradication was ever
contemplated. Just to say so is, to them, an outrage. In their
country there is a law forbidding traitors, fools, journalists and
novelists from mentioning the thing that never happened.
If that isn’t enough, until last week my wife could only guess at
Nana’s given name. Imagine that.
Some heroic research by my sister-in-law says that once there may
have been a girl called Vehanoush Astrick Tchakrian. She had a
beautiful smile.
For years, nevertheless, the glorious myth persisted that this
Vehanoush was actually "Venus" in some perfect, impossible, imagined
past. My wife calculates that Nana spoke nine languages, not because
she was a prodigy of a polyglot – though I bet she was – but because
picking up a tongue around the Med basin was like picking up
insurance. Armenians can never be too careful.
If you believe Turkey’s journalist-slaughtering ultra-nationalists,
1.5 million of that troublesome ethnic group may possibly have
perished in 1915 thanks to an administrative mishap no-one bothers to
explain. You know the script: troubled times, faults on both sides,
regrettable things happen.
Armenians remember swaddled children with their throats cut for a
whim on the long marches through the desert. Memorialised are the
girls raped in ditches and bartered to some local peasant for
"marriage". The lucky ones were tossed into ravines.
American church people and diplomats bore witness to some of it.
Britain, France and Germany got their reports in the embassy bags.
They came for the educated first: for the teachers, doctors, lawyers
and, yes, the journalists. Sometimes, the men were merely butchered
in the street. The point, not overlooked by a junior Austrian
demagogue, was to eliminate the witnesses.
Why does my wife have no knowledge of her grandmother’s birthplace?
Because hundreds of villages, many towns, and one great city were
simply wiped from every map. The next time you take a package holiday
to the country that is gracious heir to Byzantium, ask a single
question. Ask when the tours through the rubble of Van begin.
Still, here’s my most complicated, and least complicated, point. Do I
believe that modern Turkey, and modern Turks, should be held
responsible for any of this? No, not once, not ever. The Ottoman
imperium in its last debauched days slaughtered the Armenians.
Ataturk – who neither denied nor diminished the crime – left a finer
legacy.
How is it, then, that holocaust denial has become an article of faith
for Ataturk’s children? Leave the ancient dead and the forgotten past
behind, for now. The Congress of the United States of America, the
last superpower, has just been bullied with threats and ill-disguised
Turkish menaces merely for suggesting that genocide must always be
admitted, named, and accepted.
Both George Bush and his Democrat rivals have come round to the view
that any slaughter can be overlooked if a strategic airbase is at
stake. How can you resupply the unholy Iraq adventure, or bomb Iran
if Turkey’s national pride is wounded? (And wounded by a fact of
history, a fact for which modern Turkey is in no sense held
responsible. Strategic infrastructure versus whitened Armenian bones:
no contest.) History is not quite done with playful ironies. Turkey
has enacted the role of injured innocent with some panache in recent
weeks. All of a sudden, America is in no mood to argue if a certain
prized ally desires to remove a stone from her shoe. Ankara says it
must solve the Kurdish problem once and for all. A head nods in the
White House. Killing follows.
At this point, Armenians probably lose the capacity for laughter, or
for tears. Long before the Jewish people were caused to suffer and
die, Armenians were forced to learn these lessons. Hilarity has its
limits, however.
First, there is the issue of the Kurdish enclave. Wasn’t that the
single success story of the Iraq experiment, the one viable, peaceful
example of a semi-democracy in the aftermath of Saddam? And the
current plan is to allow Turkey (biggest army within marching
distance of Paris or London) to go on the rampage Genius. So the home
of the US State Department isn’t called Foggy Bottom for nothing,
then?
I mentioned history, and irony. When the women and children of
Armenia were being dragged through the deserts, they had a pair of
tormentors. One was the Turkish state, the other comprised an ethnic
group making themselves useful, in those days, to Ottoman Turkey.
They stole homes, farms, livestock and (much the same thing, it
appears) fertile girls. Screams of grief and agony, it is remembered,
could be heard all over the hills and valleys. The Kurds did that.
Now those same Kurds fight the Turks. They have my support, too. Are
we still pursuing irony? Simultaneously I support the accession of
the great Turkish state to the European Union, and as soon as
possible.
"Possible" hinges, however, on the ability of real democracies to
acknowledge, accept and – who knows? – apologise for the past. If
Ankara continues to insist that the Armenian genocide is a strange
conspiracy, let me into the Ottoman archives.
Then fix the constitution. The European ideal and laughable legalese
invoking a nation’s shallow pride will never cohere. In my country,
journalists are not killed in the street for an opinion; generals are
fired when they grow over-mighty; we understand genocide and (since
we invented most of it) geopolitics. We do not tolerate a barbarism
such as article 301, underpinning the Turkish state, threatening free
expression.
That sounds patronising, no doubt. Clever of you to notice. Proud
Turks, like slow Americans, have very thin skins. Armenians could
meanwhile turn victimhood into a folk dance. But Armenians are the
actual raped victims of someone else’s proud foreign policies.
Someone killed 1.5 million versions of someone’s beloved Vehanoush.
Those multitudes of Armenians died, in essence, because no-one cared.
This week, with another century gone, the Kurds have become the ducks
in the shooting gallery. So why has this liberal (you think)
non-interventionist got nothing to say about Iraq, and echoes?
Before you dare to hurt you must calculate the quantities of hurt. In
the case of Armenia, no-one bothered to count.
When Turkey undergoes purgation, as it must, something vital will
take place. That truth will transform us all. At Europe’s heart,
remember, is a reunited Germany with a history, dark and bloody, we
do not yet understand. The Bush White House is grubby, but tawdry and
dull: it will pass. So here’s an idea. Armenia’s past is Turkey’s
future. Does Turkey want, need, or remember how to grasp a future?
Let’s have two countries come home simultaneously.
My wife has no idea where her grandmother was born. Can someone
please, once, explain that odd, unspeakable fact?
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