REBEL LAND UNRAVELING THE RIDDLE OF HISTORY IN A TURKISH TOWN
by: Jay Winter, The Weekly Standard
BOOKS & ARTS Vol. 15 No. 31
by Christopher de Bellaigue
Penguin, 288 pp., $25.95
The Weekly Standard
May 3, 2010 Monday
Land of Secrets; A visitor to Turkey discovers the truth beneath
the stories.
The east of Turkey is home to a multitude of people whose history
rivals any in the world in terms of brutality, hostility, and
endurance. A river of blood has flowed through this area for over a
century, with Kurdish, Armenian, Alevi, and Turkish tributaries of
suffering and embittered memories living in vigorous incompatibility
alongside one another.Christopher de Bellaigue is a British journalist
who has found both the linguistic skills and the human sympathy to
tell the story of these people, and to do justice to their competing
narratives and distortions. He started as a lover of Turkey and of
a Turkish woman, an excellent reason for developing an affection
for the people and language of Istanbul. That relationship gave way
to one bringing him together with an Iranian woman, and naturally,
his affections moved east.
Not to Iran itself, but to the part of Turkey contiguous with it. He
settled on a small town named Varto which, in microcosm, showed
him the full richness, complexity, and tragedy of contemporary
Turkish history.De Bellaigue is a fine observer, and is in the
long and distinguished British tradition of debunking national
myths. First came the Turkish national myth: The Armenian genocide
never happened; the West was then and is now preparing to carve
up Turkey, whose territorial integrity must be defended to the
last. Lies and geopolitical blackmail have worked for generations to
keep under covers the nasty secretââ~B¬"which never was a secret at
allââ~B¬"that the ruling triumvirate of Turkey in the First World
War ordered the elimination of the Armenian community in the east and
southeast of Turkey. This was not collateral damage or deaths lost in
the fog of war; this was cold-blooded murder on an artisanal scale,
but still tantamount to genocide. Killing the children; converting
the women; murdering the men: That is what it amounted to, and, by
and large, Kurdish gangs carried it out.That story is one the author
progressively uncovered, and by doing so, he began to lose his sense
of ease within Turkish society. Then, when he changed women and moved
east, both physically and linguistically, he began to confront other
national myths, which he takes apart in this book. In particular, the
Kurdistan Workers’ party and its leader Apo, now permanently a guest
of the Turkish prison system, are taken apart, and in traditional
British fashion, the big words are brought down to sadder and more
tragic realities. The Kurdish struggle for liberation has come down
to a confidence trickster like Apo doing a volte face in prison to
save his neck.Political leaders of all colors are given short shrift
in this book; it is the ordinary people who arrest de Bellaigue’s
attention and fire his imagination. He digs into his adopted home in
eastern Turkey and learns, as he says in a borrowed phrase, to smell
of skunk. But this is one travel writer who never looks down on his
subjects, or their predicament. He therefore abjures stylistic irony
in a place abounding in it. The result is a finely observed portrait
of a very mixed population, whose stories cannot be tied up in little
boxes fashioned by "the planckton of state historians or the advocates
of one diaspora or another." To be sure, de Bellaigue does not hide
his contempt for Turkey’s paid hacks, but he is not above wondering
whether Armenians can see any shade of gray in their story of real
persecution. Do they have a genocide fixation, he asks? I am less
critical than he is about this subject: A people whose population
was reduced by at least 50 percent in a few short years have a right
to dwell on the matter, and we have a duty to listen to them. But on
balance, de Bellaigue keeps his sanity and his balance while living
in a part of the world which will turn anyone, as Amos Oz once said
about Jerusalem, into an authority on comparative fanaticism. Varto is
no different. Indeed there are similarities with the occupied east of
Jerusalem, in that the presence of informers and highly visible police
and army units reminds inhabitants of who is running the show. They
tolerate de Bellaigue, but remind him, at times in a desultory manner,
that they are watching him. He returns the gaze and the contempt of
some of the more unsavory Turks located in this ethnic patchwork of a
place, and seems more interested in probing the messy ethnic interface
of this part of the world. He is never the superior outsider coming
to look at "primitive" peoples, nor did he "go native," as the French
writer Pierre Loti did a century and more ago. His view, in sum, is
that of a talented linguist and traveler, a populist conservative,
attuned to the voices of those who have to pick up the body parts
and corpses after the latest installment of intercommunal violence,
or the latest case of torture or assassination on the orders of what
he terms the secret state, the Turkish security apparatus. He speaks of
admiring "feats of loyalty and self-sacrifice, poppies amid the refuse,
and the pleasing symmetrical propensity of those who hate with passion,
to love, disinterestedly, with passion also." He tasted these passions,
by getting to feel them ripple through this rough landscape, and has
left us a fine, brooding portrait of a part of the world which has had
more than its share of suffering. Jay Winter, professor of history at
Yale, is the author, most recently, of Capital Cities at War: Paris,
London, Berlin 1914-1919.