LIBERAL TURKS CALL POGROM A ‘GENOCIDE’
By Iason Athanasiadis
Washington Times
liberal-turks-call-pogrom-a-genocide/
April 30 2009
Lend credence to the stance of Armenians about history
ISTANBUL | A group of Istanbul’s liberal intelligentsia clustered
outside the Tutun Deposu gallery, an old tobacco warehouse in a
working-class neighborhood of Istanbul to mark the anniversary of a
1915 pogrom.
Inside the renovated building, an all-female choir performed a
selection of folk songs from the musical traditions of minorities
persecuted during the last spasms of the Ottoman Empire.
"The reason we call what happened a genocide," said Eren Keskin, a
Turkish lawyer with a history of challenging the state, "is because the
destruction wreaked on these lands was not just to the Armenians, but
to their culture, too. Buildings, churches and cemeteries were razed."
One of the most emotional issues bedeviling Turkish society today
is what exactly happened in 1915 to Turkey’s Armenian minority. The
Ottoman Empire was collapsing as a new republic emerged. Newly released
files of Ottoman official Enver Pasha reveal the disappearance of
almost a million ethnic Armenians from population records between
1915 and 1916.
The Istanbul-based think tank European Stability Initiative issued a
report on the eve of the April 24 anniversary criticizing the Turkish
government for spending considerable political capital on fighting
pro-genocide campaigns. "This is a battle Turkey cannot win," the
report said.
The day before the anniversary, the Turkish Foreign Ministry announced
it was moving to end its 16-year blockade of Armenia that was imposed
as a gesture to fellow Turkish ally Azerbaijan resulting from a 1993
war over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.
However, bad blood between Turkey and Armenia goes back further,
to the Cold War that pitted Turkey against Armenia, which was then
part of the Soviet Union.
During his election campaign, President Obama promised America’s
Armenian community to recognize the 1915 pogrom as genocide.
He backed away from his pledge after a successful visit to Turkey
in April, during which he is credited with helping to broker a
breakthrough in Turkish-Armenian relations.
Turkish society has largely ignored the events of 1915, which
go untaught in public schools. Children hear little about the
disappearance of their Armenian compatriots on forced marches across
the Ottoman Empire’s former Arab provinces of Syria and Iraq.
Inside the anniversary ceremony, black-and-white images were broadcast
on a screen of some of the 250 Armenian notables detained in Istanbul
in 1915, at the beginning of the persecution.
"Turkish society has been led to think that on 24 April, Armenian
terrorists and criminals were arrested," said Ayse Gunaysu, one
of the organizers. "But they were lawyers, jurists, publishers,
intellectuals."
The event organized by the Turkish Human Rights Association (THRA)
is only the second public commemoration of the 1915 events in the
Turkish Republic’s 86-year history.
"Twenty years ago, this would have been impossible," said publisher
Rober Koptas, pointing at the activity around him. "In the long run,
what we’re doing today will give us a space to talk about issues such
as the Armenian question, democratization and freedom of speech."
About 150 participants crowding into the art gallery knew well not
to tread on red lines in a country where "insulting Turkishness"
is a punishable crime.
In 2007, a prominent Armenian newspaper publisher was assassinated
by right-wing extremists, sparking mass protests.
"As long as it’s not seen as a straightforward political meeting,
it doesn’t upset the nationalists," said Adnan Eksigil, the owner
of Tutun Deposu and director of a cultural organization involved in
resuscitating the cultures of Anatolia.
Turkey admits that hundreds of thousands of Armenians perished in
1915 but presents its own actions as legitimate self-defense. It
blames the killings variously on the fog of war or on the purported
collaboration of its Armenian citizens with an uprising sponsored by
czarist Russia. Nationalist circles sometimes support the ethnic
cleansing of Turkey’s minorities as an essential component in
constructing an ethnically homogeneous modern state.
In December, Defense Minister Vecdi Gonul publicly stated that the
deportation of Greeks and Armenians was a "very important step"
in the construction of a Muslim national bourgeoisie.
"If there were Greeks in the Aegean and Armenians in most places in
Turkey today, would it be the same nation-state?" Mr. Gonul asked.
"I don’t know what words I can use to explain the importance of the
population exchange, but if you look at the former state of affairs,
its importance will become very clear."
Kerem Oktem, a research associate at St. Anthony’s College, Oxford
University, said that Mr. Gonul’s remarks, while racist, also
reflect a widely held consensus "that the emergence of modern Turkey
was predicated upon the removal or destruction of its non-Muslim
communities."
Today, there are signs that Turkish society is opening up to the
idea of debating its past. Two films have been released in the past
year that challenge the official narrative: an examination of a 1955
state-sponsored pogrom against the Greeks and a biography of Turkish
leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk that breaches historical taboos, such
as his drinking habit.
In December, 200 Turkish intellectuals launched an Internet petition
titled "I Apologize."
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan reacted angrily, saying there was
"no reason" to apologize. Sixty former ambassadors rallied to publicly
call the petition an act of betrayal.
However, such debates hardly percolate beyond elite intellectual and
political circles. In the working-class neighborhood around Tutun
Deposu, none of the locals accepted there had been a genocide.
"I don’t think the Turks were involved in a genocide," said Mustafa
Ozel, a worker in a print shop. "Since the Ottoman period, we Turks
have been peaceful and based our behavior on justice and a peaceful
society."
Feyzi Atak owns the Bahceli Cafe next to the Tutun Deposu gallery. His
exclusively male clientele gathers throughout the day to play cards,
drink tea and smoke cigarettes. The often unemployed locals from the
surrounding area were poles apart from the sophisticated crowd inside
the gallery.
"I’m against the debate of what our grandparents did to each other,"
said Mr. Atak as he sat alongside two friends, one of whom wears
a lapel pin of the Turkish flag. "It just clouds our children’s
judgment."
"The Armenians are wrong to make such a fuss about it," said Fatma
Ciftci, a passer-by. "The Armenians maintained very good historical
records while the Ottomans didn’t, and that was the gravest historical
mistake we made."
Turkey recently announced that it has opened up its Ottoman-era
historical archives to inspection. Though the term "genocide" had
not been coined yet in 1915, the U.S. ambassador at the time found a
more-graphic term to describe the events in his urgent reports to the
State Department, describing the systematic slaughtering of Armenians
as "race murder."
Iason Athanasiadis is reporting from Turkey on a grant from the
Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.