THE WATER FINDS ITS CRACK: AN ARMENIAN IN TURKEY
Written by Hrant Dink

Australia.TO
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Jan 19 2009
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The interest of foreign journalists, politicians and intellectuals in
Turkey is more intense than ever. Their opening inquiries are clear
and strong: "Where is Turkey going? Will nationalism increase? If it
does, to what kind of a regime can Turkey slide?"

Then comes a special question, the one that people like me – a Turkish
citizen and an Armenian – can always expect: "Are you minorities
afraid of the way things are going?"

It is striking that those looking at Turkey from the outside are much
more impatient, eager for quick answers and solutions, than those on
the inside. To what degree is this impatience realistic? After all,
throughout the period of the modern republic since 1923, Turkey is
a country where changes have been dictated from top to bottom and
thus one where inner dynamics from bottom to top are not easily
activated. Turkish society is far more used to accepting change,
allowing it to happen, than to initiating it.

This consistent structural character has allowed the "deep state"
– the network of military and security forces that exercises real
political control in Turkey – to survive the three major international
developments influencing the country in recent decades.

First, the cold-war years of conflict (1940s-1980s) between the
United States-led capitalist world and the Soviet Union-led socialist
world. This external dynamic favoured the emergence of a radical,
social left in Turkey, but the state’s preference for western
capitalism – aided by successive military coups d’état – crushed
the left’s challenge before it could become too powerful.

Second, the mullahs’ revolution in Iran (1979). This external dynamic
too had a harsh effect on Turkey; those in power instinctively saw its
influence among religious Muslims in Turkey as equivalent to the demand
for a change of regime, and thus something to be opposed by all means.

Third, the European Union (1960s-2000s). This outer dynamic is
very different in its impact on Turkey than the first two. The main
reason is that the EU finds nearly all elements of Turkish society
and its institutions divided against itself on the issue. Political
left and right, secular and religious, nationalist and liberal,
state bureaucracy and military – the situation is the same in that
everywhere there are internal conflicts over Europe at least as much
as conflicts between the camps.

Since no part of Turkish society is homogeneously "for" or "against"
the European Union, the EU process has had a singular effect:
dissolving Turkey’s existing polarisations and becoming itself the main
inner dynamic of Turkish development. As the negotiations for Turkey’s
accession to the EU continue over the next decade, this dilemma will
increasingly constitute the basis of Turkish politics. Every change
experienced in the near future will "touch the skin" of nearly every
section of society, creating widespread friction and probably a lot
of annoyance.

>From the inside, therefore, the questions facing Turkey are different
from those posed by outsiders: "How can the oligarchic state, so
accustomed to holding power, consent to share its sovereignty as a
member of the European Union? Why is it so desperate to abandon the
world it knows for an unknown future in Europe – is it the desire to
be western, or the fear of remaining eastern?"

The great taboo

But the questions are not all one way. When the European Union is
asked why it wishes to include Turkey, with its lower economic and
democratic standards, the answer suggests an uncomfortable truth –
that the relationship between Turkey and the EU is governed less
by reciprocal desire than by fear. The military elite of the Turkish
republic probably calculates that a Turkey unable to enter the European
Union is in danger of becoming a strategical irrelevance, while the
European Union’s power-brokers must consider that a Turkey remaining
outside of Europe might become a combatant on the other side of a
"clash of civilisations".

As long as the engine of fear pushing from the back is stronger
than the engine of desire pulling from the front, the dynamics of
Turkish-European Union relations will be uneasy and contested on all
sides – not just in Turkey.

Where fear is dominant, it produces symptoms of resistance to change at
all levels of society. The more some people yearn and work for openness
and enlightenment, the more others who are afraid of such changes
struggle to keep society closed. In Turkey, the legal cases against
Hrant Dink, Orhan Pamuk, Ragıp Zarakolu or Murat Belge are examples
of how the breaking of every taboo causes panic in the end. This is
especially true of the Armenian issue: the greatest of all taboos in
Turkey, one that was present at the creation of the state and which
represents the principal "other" of Turkish national identity.

In this atmosphere, a guiding watchword can be found in the first
words of our national anthem. Indeed, I concluded my presentation to
the conference at Bilgi University, Istanbul on "Ottoman Armenians
During the Decline of the Empire: Issues of Scientific Responsibility
and Democracy " on 24-25 September 2005 with these very words:
"Do not fear".

The real desire

The best contribution to the understanding of modern Turkey I can
make at this stage is through a theme I developed at that Istanbul
conference.

The relation between every living being and its area of existence is
contained within it and (in the case of human beings) embodied in its
very name. The animate is present, together with its area of living
existence, inside and not outside this being. If you take this animate
away from its area, even on a golden plate, it means that it is being
cut at its very root. Deportation is something like that. People who
lived on this territory for 3,000 years, people who produced culture
and civilisation on this territory, were torn from the land they had
lived on and those who survived were dispersed all over the world.

If this axe to the root dominates the psychological condition of
generations of this people, you cannot simply act as if the rupture
does not exist. The experience is already internalised, recorded on
its people’s memory, its genetic code. What is its name? The discipline
of law can be preoccupied with this question, but whatever it decides
we know exactly what we have lived through. It can be understood,
even if I should not use the word genocide, as being a tearing up of
the roots. There is nothing to do at this point, but this should be
understood very well.

I would like to illustrate this internalising of experience with a
personal anecdote from several years ago. An old Turkish man called
me from a village in the region of Sivas and said: "Son, we searched
everywhere until we found you. There is an old woman here. I guess she
is from your people. She has passed away. Can you find any relative
of her, or we will bury her with a Muslim service".

He gave me her name; she was a 70-year-old woman called Beatrice who
had been visiting on holiday from France. "Okay, uncle, I will search",
I said.

I looked around and within ten minutes I had found a close relative;
we knew each other because we are so few. I went to the family’s
store and asked: "Do you know this person?" The middle-aged woman
there turned to me and said "She is my mother". Her mother, she told
me, lives in France and comes to Turkey three or four times a year,
but after a very short time in Istanbul prefers to go directly to
the village she left many years earlier.

I told her daughter the sad news and she immediately travelled to
the village. The next day she phoned me from there. She had found her
mother but she suddenly began to cry. I begged her not to cry and asked
her whether or not she will bring her body back for burial. "Brother",
she said, "I want to bring her but there is an uncle here saying
something", and gave the phone to him while crying.

I got angry with the man. "Why are you making her cry?", I said. "Son",
he said, "I didn’t say anything… I only said: ‘Daughter, it is your
mother, your blood; but if you ask me, let her stay here. Let her be
buried here…the water has found its crack’."

I became thrown away at that moment. I lost and found myself in this
saying produced by Anatolian people. Indeed, the water had found
its crack.

A lady at the Istanbul conference implied that remembering the dead
meant coveting territory. Yes, it is true that Armenians long for this
soil. But let me repeat what I wrote soon after this experience. At
the time the then president of Turkey, Suleyman Demirel, used to say:
"We will not give even three pebblestones to Armenians." I told the
story of this woman and said: "We Armenians do desire this territory
because our root is here. But don’t worry. We desire not to take this
territory away, but to come and be buried under it."

Hrant Dink is a journalist and editor of the bilingual
(Armenian-Turkish) weekly newspaper Agos in Istanbul. In October 2005,
he was given a six-month suspended sentence for "insulting the Turkish
identity" in a newspaper article which discussed the massacres of
Armenians in 1915. He is appealing this decision.

Since April 2005, Hrant Dink (along with the Turkish human-rights
activist Sehmus Ulek) is also being prosecuted under Article 301 of the
Turkish penal code (formerly Article 159) for speeches they delivered
in December 2002 at a conference in Urfa, southeastern Turkey,
entitled "Global Security, Terror and Human Rights; Multiculturalism,
Minorities and Human Rights". In his speech, Hrant Dink discussed
his own relationship to official definitions of Turkish identity. The
next hearing of the case is due on 9 February 2006.

On the comparable case of renowned Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk,
see this article by Murat Belge (himself facing charges along with
four colleagues under Article 301 for his willingness to discuss the
genocide, in a case that will come before an Istanbul magistrates’
court on 7 February 2005):

"Love me, or leave me? The strange case of Orhan Pamuk" This article
is published by Hrant Dink, , and openDemocracy.net under a Creative
Commons licence. (This article was first published on 13 December 2005)

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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress