NOT FORGETTING THE ARMENIANS
by Peter Byrne
Swans.com
6/pbyrne123.html
April 5 2010
De Bellaigue, Christopher: Rebel Land, Among Turkey’s Forgotten
Peoples, Bloomsbury, London, 2009; ISBN 978 0 7475 8628 9, photographs,
270 pages.
Arslan, Antonia: Skylark Farm, Vintage, NYC, 2007; ISBN 978 1 4000
9567 4, translation from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock, 275 pages.
"Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"
–Adolph Hitler, as inscribed on a wall of the Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington, D.C.
(Swans – April 5, 2010) Rebel Land touches us all. The rebel, after
all, is a stubborn version of the "other" who in one guise or another
raises concern everywhere. Christopher de Bellaigue came to grips
with the "other" in Turkey:
The Republic of Turkey is interesting in that it contains, in a big
rectangle, both a "we" and an "other." Just as old Europe regarded
with alarm the advance of the unspeakable Turk, so the republican
elite regards with alarm the advance of the unspeakable Turk — the
Islamists; the Kurdish separatists; the traitors Pamuk and Dink [since
murdered]. (Page 259) De Bellaigue chronicles his own attempt to get
beyond generalities and look the "other" straight in the eye. Born
in London, he went directly from university to work in India as a
journalist. In 1995 he moved to Turkey as a foreign correspondent
and soon considered himself a permanent resident. He was at home in
an apartment in the old European quarter of Istanbul with a view of
the Bosporus and the Asian shore.
His Turkish was faultless and he felt equally at ease in the culture
of the republican elite from whom his friends were drawn.
Like them he kept to the western edge of the country and looked to
Europe. This was Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey and de Bellaigue felt at one
with the great man’s rationalism and agnosticism. He went along with
the certainty of his friends that Turks belonged to Europe. He didn’t
question their view that Ataturk had saved Turkey from dismemberment by
various separatist factions. Nor did he challenge Ankara’s conventional
wisdom on the Armenian question. This was that during WWI, at the time
of the Czarist invasion there had been cruelties on both sides. The
displacement of the Armenians had been a military necessity. In the
third millennium all that was best left to historians. There was no
reason to make it a political issue of the day, as Armenian lobbies
were doing in Europe and America.
It was this Kemalist view that came through in an article de
Bellaigue published in the The New York Review of Books, March 8,
2001. A Harvard specialist immediately challenged his handling of the
Armenian question. Taken aback, de Bellaigue began to reconsider his
historical presuppositions. He had to admit that his article, and his
thinking generally, relied on Turkish and pro-Turkish sources. Was
it possible that Turkey hadn’t been and still was not the ethnically
uniform country the Kemalists pretended?
De Bellaigue was determined to put the Kemalist assumptions to the
test. He would not do so in archives and libraries. His bent was
direct contact with people. But he knew that the various minorities
had their own agendas and their own versions of history. He did not
want to be briefed by the Kurdish, Armenian, Alevi or Sunni lobbies.
He would avoid them and get to know individuals whom he would ask about
their lives and what they had learnt from their forebears. The terrain
of his enquiry would be the east of the country where the Turkish
Republic had always found it harder to conjure away ethnic differences.
But eastern Turkey was vast and de Bellaigue’s preferred close
observation. "I write about small things." He was curious "about land
and identity and the way people view their past." He would center
his attention on one town and its surroundings. This was Varto with
a population of 41,000, tucked into the mountains midway down the
rectangle at the far end of Turkey. It was close to the borders of
Georgia, Armenia, Iran, Iraq and Syria.
Varto was in territory that historically had not only been eastern
Turkey, but also western Armenia and northern Kurdistan. 19th century
Ottoman Varto had three social tiers. The Sunni Kurds were on top,
the Armenians in the middle and the Alevis at the bottom. The Alevis,
usually ignored by Western writers about Islam, are heretic Muslims
despised by both Shia and Sunni. They were long ago driven off the
plains into the hills.
De Bellaigue’s look into present day Varto was not facilitated
by Turkish officialdom that acted very much like a colonial
administration. The all powerful man in the region was the governor
who is appointed by Ankara. Varto’s mayor is elected, but has little
actual power. Moreover, no candidates for mayor would be allowed who
didn’t belong to mainstream parties. All the same, the actual mayor,
Demir Celik, was suspected by Ankara of having relatives in the PKK
(the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party). When de Bellaigue complained
that his work was made difficult by the police and secret service, the
mayor told him: "The state has fears. It fears the Kurds, the Left,
Islamism. It fears each and every one of its neighbors. Everyone is
an enemy. A state that has lots of enemies develops a peculiar shell
as protection." (Page 30)
Did de Bellaigue’s enquiry bear fruit? Only in the sense that it made
him aware of the complexity of a situation that he had complacently
simplified back in Istanbul. But that was no small gain, seeing that
complications defined places like Varto. The Alevis and the Sunnis
were both Kurdish, but not necessarily supporters of the rebellion
that the PKK had launched in 1984. Varto town-dwelling Kurds generally
preferred to speak Turkish, a language they often mastered better
than the Turkish bureaucrats that arrived from Ankara. But there was a
Kurdish language, indeed there were two, Kumanji and Zaza. Many Kurds
agreed with an historian, the Kurdish and Alevi Mehmet Serif Firat,
that there was no such people as Kurds, only Turks. The followers of
the imprisoned Abdullah Ocalan or Apo, leader of the PKK, were also
divided. Many thought he had betrayed them after his capture by calling
for a ceasefire. Others, often former female guerrillas — and here
de Bellaigue agreed — had long thought him a despot who was reckless
with the lives of his fighters and encouraged a personality cult.
Nor was the disappearance of the Armenians from Varto a simple matter.
Many had perished in the displacements ordered by the Ottomans before
the Russian invasion. But when the Czarists arrived with their Armenian
volunteers it went hard for the non-Armenians of Varto.
Moreover, not all the Armenians had disappeared. De Bellaigue
discovered many who had become Muslims, some in the easy to bear
version of Alevism. Contradictions abounded. There were individuals
who spoke treason against the Kemalist state and still worshipped
Ataturk. There was a surviving Armenian who was a fervent Kurdish
nationalist and not at all bothered by the fact that it was the
Kurdish bands who had decimated the Armenians in 1915-16.
In one respect being on the spot proved invaluable to de Bellaigue. He
had known about the official Turkish state ideology taught in the
schools — that the Kurds were mountain Turks and the Armenian subjects
had turned in treason against the Ottoman state. He had also known
of the demands of Kurds abroad for an independent Kurdistan. And
he had known too that Armenians all over the world accused Turkey
of genocide. What surprised him in Varto was that ordinary people,
unlike Kurds in Hamburg or Californian Armenians, often didn’t want
to talk about the past. This wasn’t only because the authorities
might be listening.
Rather the silence here comes from an absence of anything to say in
response to the relentless drumming of politics and communications
and the trajectory of apologies and human rights in the world —
which come together and mean that this catastrophe, unlike so many
before it, will not be forgotten.
In this silence, there is not the scowl and amnesia of an offended
nation, but the cowering of individuals before a truth that has the
ability to overwhelm them. This silence is a silence not of affront,
but of fear. (Page 46) De Bellaigue tries to go beyond stereotypes and
has an eye for the incongruent. He talks to people and reflects on what
they say, and then does a stretch of travel writing until he finds
someone else to talk to. His essay is halting, sometimes confusing,
but rich. Antonia Arslan’s novel, though ostensibly concerned with
everyday living, becomes schematic and hollow. She doesn’t set out
to ask questions but to impose answers.
Arslan followed a road familiar to Diaspora offspring. Born in
Italy and firmly ensconced there in a university job she became
absorbed in her forebears. Nothing original there. Historians of
the future will have a field day tracing the scramble for identity
that began in mid-twentieth century America. This frantic search,
born in the civil rights movement, would soon have its landmarks in
Roots, Fiddler on the Roof, and The Godfather. It would make a lot
of people feel better about themselves or, anyway, self-important,
before degenerating into tales of eccentric great uncles, misery
memoirs, and tips for exotic cooking.
Armenians around the world had a head start. They had been dispersed
like nobody else. Their shrunken home base in the Eurasia didn’t
matter. (Yerevan, where’s that?) It was as distant as Oz for most
of them. But they were well inserted into societies from Paris to
Fresno to Buenos Aires. More important, they had honed their myth
sharp as an obsession. By the beginning of the 21st century, Armenian
communities had obtained considerable leverage over politicians in
places where Turkish votes were scarce. This resulted in various
governments declaring the events of 1915-16 in the Ottoman Empire
a genocide. The West had entered the Age of Apology and Armenians
wanted one from Turkey.
For Ankara, it was out of the question. To please the European Union,
Turkey would go a very long way. But its leaders were not going to
stand up with a Bill Clinton blush and say, "Sorry, back in 1915, our
grandfathers organized one of those regrettable things, a genocide."
That would not have been a bullet in its own foot, but as far as
Turkish internal politics went, blowing off both legs.
Moreover, as historians without an agenda have discovered, the end of
the Ottoman Empire was not something to be encompassed by punchy third
millennium slogans. Libraries have been built to hold the contentions
pro and con. Here we limit our curiosity to Arslan’s viewpoint in
her historical novel.
Sky Lark farm is a country property outside a small Anatolian town.
The author approaches it and Turkey by first introducing the Italian
branch (her own?) of an Armenian family. The first half of the novel
describes the life of this prosperous family in its Anatolian setting.
Its members, like the rest of the Armenian community there, are at once
essential to the well-being of the town and in the vulnerable position
of second-class citizens. They have not forgotten the suppressions
of 1896 under Abdul Hamid II.
Arslan’s Armenians, though sometimes quirky and ingenuous, are always
honorable and hard working. They are all blessed with a streak of
generosity. Not so the Turks we meet, who are mainly Ottoman officials
and military personnel. They are, to a man, envious and self-serving.
When upheaval comes for the Armenians the author will divide the Turks
in two batches, those who are cowardly, corrupt, conniving and lazy
in the old Ottoman manner and a new breed, deprived of all decency,
who are sadistic killers. In a word, Turks either love money or they
love blood.
The author depicts Armenia life just before WWI as colorful, savory,
and alive with the doings of the clan. The town is an Eden flawed only
by bad dreams of the Turkish serpent under the floorboards. Arslan
prepares the Armenian exit from paradise by a reckless bit of
historical fantasy. She invents a conversation at the summit of
power in Constantinople between members of the Committee of Union and
Progress. The key figures, Talaat Pasha and Enver Pasha are gloating
sadists, busy polishing their master plan to liquidate the Armenians
of Turkey.
Back in Anatolia the massacres have already begun. The males of the
extended family introduced to us by the author are brutally murdered.
Their womenfolk have been ordered to take to the road. The author, who
has spared us none of the details of the slaughter, tells us that the
plan she has put in the mouths of her arch villains Talaat and Enver
also calls for the rape and murder of the women. This soon begins
with the incursions of Kurd mounted tribesmen. In Arslan’s script
Kurds are ignoble savages, just as Turks are slothful predators and
Armenians peace lovers given to altruism.
Killing has now spread over the whole country. But our author as a
storyteller must stay close to the survivors of the clan and characters
we know. Since the males are no more, it’s perhaps inevitable that
she settles on the theme of Armenian women as the saviors of the
race. This becomes the subject of the second half of the novel. Even
non-Armenian women — never Turkish women though the country is full
of them — keep popping up and gushing benevolence.
We follow the women of the clan on a death march. They are harassed by
the Turkish policemen that escort them as well as by Kurd bands. The
author reiterates that this is all part of the government plan meant
to kill them off one way or another. The reader is spared none of
the horrors. At one point, in a spot of melodrama, succor comes
from faithful Greek friends and from the novel’s one "good" Turk,
a professional beggar, reformed spy, and addled mystic.
Surviving Armenians from all the forced marches have been brought
to Aleppo. The narrative continues to pile up corpses there while it
interweaves incidents reminiscent of John Buchan’s boyish adventure
stories among the terrible Turks. The resourcefulness of the persecuted
is brought center stage so as not to finish the novel in an odor
of rotting flesh. "Good Europeans" from the French Consulate help
cogitate a bagful of Count of Monte Cristo stratagems to rescue the
surviving women of the family.
The reader might go along with the toppling of history into folk tale
in Sky Lark Farm if the characters had any depth. Or he could accept
it as a somber account of what man can do to man if the top dressing
of mechanical suspense and adventure didn’t blur that picture. As it
is, he is left with airport lounge reading. Arslan has already done
a sequel, not yet translated, for reading on the beach. La Strada di
Smirne takes her Armenian legends to the city of Smyrna.