VIOLENCE IN EASTERN ANATOLIA: GIVE UP THE G-WORD

Economist
isplaystory.cfm?story_id=13895055
June 25 2009

MOST of the people who devote themselves to chronicling the history of
Anatolia during the first world war fall into one category or another:
those determined to prove that the Armenians suffered genocide, and
those determined to prove the opposite. This Manichean split amounts
to a "travesty of history and memory". What is needed is a "vaguer
designation, avoiding the g-word but clearly connoting criminal acts
of slaughter."

That is Christopher de Bellaigue’s argument and many people will
be shocked by it. How could anyone want to blur the outlines of an
unspeakable phenomenon whose precise definition has, in recent years,
been of keen concern to liberal internationalists and humanitarian
law buffs? What hope is there of stopping genocide if people do not
even try to decide what the word means?

But honest readers of this moving and intricately woven look at
Turkey’s 20th-century history will surely see his point. By focusing on
a single, remote area in the east Anatolian highlands, and describing
not only its blood-drenched history but the multiple layers of denial
that obscure every episode, Mr de Bellaigue, a former correspondent for
this newspaper, conveys some important messages about the elusiveness
of historical truth.

As he shows, in places where "the past is not even past", the passage
of time does not always make it easier to discern or speak the
truth. It is difficult, though not impossible, to establish even the
basic facts about the fate of the Armenians in this part of Anatolia;
it is also hard to establish what horrors occurred during the Kurdish
uprising which began in the 1990s and is still sputtering away.

So many of the people who might be able to offer enlightenment–be they
local residents, or migrants to Istanbul or Germany–are consciously
or unconsciously hiding truths: about themselves and their family
histories, as well as more public events. For example, some Armenians
who escaped in 1915 were re-socialised as Turks or Kurds, without
entirely losing their genetic memory. This has odd effects on the
way such people, and their descendants, think and talk; this book
analyses those effects shrewdly but not unkindly.

Indeed, the best thing about the book is the intelligence with which
the author deconstructs all the private and public myths that seem to
be haunting his interlocutors, including the various servants of the
Turkish state who take it upon themselves to set him straight about
their country’s history.

Many of his official informants assume that a person of Anglo-Saxon
appearance, speaking fluent Turkish, must belong to the long line of
spies and troublemakers who have meddled in this part of the world
on behalf of perfidious Albion. The reader is not invited to mock
or despise these envoys of the state. On the contrary, the feeling
is that for all the peculiar and indeed downright wrong things they
believe, such people have their own particular integrity.

As an account of the way truth is constructed by communities and
families living in a state of war and fear, "Rebel Land" ranks in
sophistication with any primer of postmodern philosophy or social
anthropology. It is also far more gripping, not least because it is
told in the vulnerable but never self-indulgent voice of somebody who
loves this part of Turkey, and has a soft spot for all the peoples
who have lived, loved, died and killed there.