REBEL LAND B
A.V. Club New York
-bellaigue-rebel-land,39084/
March 11 2010
Review by Vadim Rizov March 11, 2010
Author: Christopher de Bellaigue
Publisher: Penguin Press
Rebel Land: Unraveling The Riddle Of History In A Turkish Town
originated from an error. In a 2001 New York Review Of Books piece
about Turkey’s history, Christopher de Bellaigue stated in passing
that the deaths of Armenians in Turkey during the 1890s and the
infamous genocides of 1915 were aberrations rather than a calculated,
coordinated, state-endorsed effort. Many letters of outrage later, he
realized he’d gotten his information "only from Turkish or pro-Turkish
authors." Mortified, de Ballaigue pulled up stakes and decided to
move to one place where he could learn about Turkey’s 20th century
of ethnic conflict in microcosm. He ended up in the town of Varto,
where he spent more than two years piecing together the narratives
he heard, slowly gaining local trust. The result is Rebel Land,
a rich but problematic history.
De Bellaigue reaches back, briefly, to Varto’s origins, but really gets
down to business (some 60 pages in) in the 1890s, with the formation
of Hamidiye regiments–auxiliary cavalry regiments composed of Sunni
Kurds whose harassment of Armenians was the opening governmental salvo
in a long history of repression. The many struggles frequently centered
around the same questions: What does it mean to be Turkish, what past
wrongs can be redressed, and what can be done? What de Bellaigue
sees is often depressing: An early interview with Varto’s district
governor yields the flat assertion "We have no minorities in Turkey."
Rebel Land is thorough, serious, and informative, a scholarly
investigation that pieces together histories the country itself could
never officially acknowledge. It’s also often confusing. Though de
Bellaigue eventually minimizes the number of personal interjections,
already-hard-to-follow stories are interrupted by walks, observations,
and reflections that tend to stop the book dead rather than enriching
it. His exhaustive research is all there on the page, and his
admirable unwillingness to simplify anything can make things impossibly
opaque. (Typical sentence: "According to people I spoke to in Varto,
the Kurdish response to the firman was founded on expectations of
pillage… and not on sectarian hatred, for the Sunni Kurds did not
generally hate the Armenians, certainly not as intensely as they hated
the Alevis.") Tribes and terms are introduced with dizzying speed,
often out of order: De Bellaigue alludes to PKK leader Apo many,
many times before explaining (some 200 pages in) that Apo is actually
Abdullah Ocalan, and what he did. Much of this is fascinating and
comprehensive, but the way he presents it is often a mess; it’s a
valuable correction, but getting through is a task for the patient.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
