Armenians Once Again!
Radikal newspaper
12/20/2004
When the European Union occupied the agenda of our lives entirely,
we turned around and looked at them in anger. There they had appeared
again. And they were even worse than the Kurds. Their existence
was never forgotten, never made to forget. Even into elementary
school curricula education we placed learning units about how we as
Turkish citizens can protect ourselves, our nation and our glorious
past against their claims. In order to be convincing in our denial,
we had to poison our children with this hatred and bestow upon them
a language to employ against this eternal enemy rights after the
reading and writing and the multiplication table. We tried for so long
and could not manage to do it. Now, as fully equipped tiny Turkish
officers, you start right away to fight against the ghosts of the past.
We could not get rid of employing official language practices such
as ‘the Armenians have once again gone rabid,’ ‘Armenian terror,’
‘Armenian seed’ that have totally lost its composure and dignity.
To top it all, we even tried to get the dark eyed, reticent children
in the Armenian schools of this motherland whose cultural mosaic we
now try to market to memorize this terminology. Of how Armenians were
such treacherous, deceitful enemies.
The talented musician Arto Tuncboyaciyan who multiplies the sounds of
this land in the United States narrates in the Postexpress journal:
“When I was six years’ old…I attended an Armenian school. Everyday we
had two hours of Turkish history there. In those history lessons I
learned how bad my own culture and Greek culture were. That was the
only thing we learned. Can you imagine the psychology of a six year
old child? When I got out of school, I could not look at peoples’
faces for those people were like my enemy. Just recently, about
ten days ago, they covered the course book of the National Security
course. In that book too it is as if two enemies are living together.
People do not know these things that I am talking about. We have to
talk about the things that deeply disturb us.”
The Turkish Armenians have always been forced to hide.
It has not been long ago, we still remember the
attacks against Hrant Dink and the Agos newspaper that made a news
item out of a claim strengthened by the statement of the historian
and linguist Pars Tuglaci. Tuglaci, who was a close friend of Gokcen,
stated that Gokcen (an adopted daughter of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and
the first woman pilot of Turkey – MG) knew she was an Armenian but
remained silent on this matter because she was fearful of the reactions
it would produce. Of course, the reactions of the brave Turkish
nationalists against the claim that Gokcen had been ‘Turkified’ much
later through a manufactured imaginary family line were indeed violent.
The claim that Ataturk’s adopted daughter was Armenian was evaluated
as blasphemy, slander and mudslinging. And that was not enough, the
General Staff of the Turkish Military warned the media on the subject
of ‘dangerous’ thoughts. The Turkish Air flight Society decreed that
“knowingly or unknowingly there is an attempt to destroy another value
of being a Turk.” The crime of Hrant Dink and Agos was of a kind that
could never be forgiven. Immediately pillagers appeared on their
footsteps crying out ‘We may suddenly descend upon you one night,’
‘Love it or leave it.’ As the strongest, longest living taboo, the
‘Armenian’ topic never let go of us.
Abdullah the Lizard
We ranted a lot about the Armenians. As they could not say anything,
as they continued to exist in this country as shadows, we kept
elaborating on the history our elders wrote with an increasingly
irritable language. Against the ill-temper of the diaspora Armenians,
we became even more ill-tempered and ill-treated more and more the
citizens with whom we lived together. But now it is their turn to
speak. After being silent for a century, they have many stories to
tell. We have to make it a priority to listen to them. We all have
a lot to learn from the story of having to live on these lands as
Armenians. I want to share with you an editorial of Hrant Dink,
summarizing it a little.
“The year is 1918, a village on the skirts of the Suphan mountain.
He had barely escaped from all that had transpired. He had barely found
refuge. To the village of Ismail of the Pelteks. There he was mixed
into the peasants living away. It was as if the shadowy shelter he had
made at a corner of the sheep fold was as big as the thin crack between
the two stones on the built wall. Like the lizards at the corners
of those cracks… He lived hiding away. He occasionally surfaced,
appeared next to those whose hearts carried some sense justice,
helped out with the harvest, sweated as much as he was capable,
had some bread, and returned to his shelter. His new name among the
peasants was Abdullah. ‘The one Allah sent.’ There he lived away in
a hole in the wall Allah had forgotten. Until Memo, the third son
from the last of the Pelteks of Ismail saw him peeing by a wall.
He jumped and started running away shouting. “Run here, you guys’
he shouted, ‘Look at Abdullah’s. His has a cap on it.’ It is narrated
that Abdullah’s escape from the wall to the sheep fold was just like
that of a lizard. Soon after stones started to rain on the sheep fold.
Young old, everyone had gathered and were stoning the fold shouting:
‘come out, infidel, we know who you are, come out.’ After a while
the shouts came closer and turned into footsteps. The door of the
fold opened. The first to enter was Ismail of Pelteks who had always
protected Abdullah, followed by others. Ismail stopped the ones
behind him, took a step forward. ‘Where are you Abdullah, come here
so I can save you, give me your hand.’ Ismail’s hand did indeed touch
the hand Abdullah had extended, but he suddenly withdrew startled.
What was extended was a bloodied piece of skin. Ismail turned to
those behind him. ‘Let’s go guys, leave the poor thing alone, we’re
going out.’ After that they left the circumcised Abdullah alone.
They did not touch him again. Those of you who as children have
hunted lizards would know. When you reach out and grab them only
their tails remain in your hand. The year is 2004. Some (newspaper)
has declared on their headline ‘Look at the Armenian.’ (As a reaction
to the Armenian lobby in Europe protesting Turkey’s candidacy to the
European Union on the grounds of Turkey’s denial of the events of 1915
– MG). Some people are obviously out to hunt lizards. And I now feel,
don’t let it be misunderstood, of course not because I am frightened
or humiliated, like ‘Abdullah the lizard,’ go figure? Forgive me,
must be in the nature of being a reptile!”
We have to listen to Hrant Dink who states that “To situate one’s
identity in relation to the existence of the other is sickly.
If you need an enemy to keep your identity alive, your identity is
diseased.” By not forgetting that both the diaspora Armenians and
Turkish nationalists are stricken with the same illness, by tenderly
cherishing all the identities living on these lands, we can beckon
those days when all these identities will live by protecting each
other’s stories. We can establish our world on painful confrontations
cleansed of secrets and lies. Starting from ground zero.
Memoirs are being written
You should immediately read the memoir entitled ‘My Grandmother’ by
Fethiye Cetin, a member of the Istanbul Bar Association and the Human
Rights Executive Council. The story of her grandmother Seher is also
the reality of these lands. For the adventure that starts with her
telling the granddaughter she loved very much that her real name was
Heranus, that she had witnessed the violence at tehcir, that is, the
march of death is the adventure that belongs to all of us. The story
that Cetin narrates with great sincerity is not about the unknown
rituals of faraway lands. Unless we know the long life and existence
of Heranus, whose identity papers had the notation ‘convert’ writ on
it, who in her old age asked her granddaughter to track down those of
her family who survived, unless we know how she lived like a ‘lizard’
yearning for her family from whose bosom she was torn away as a puny
little girl, unless we do all of this, we will not be able to develop
any thoughts or feelings about a people whose roots were eradicated
one way or another. For us to be able to not only look the Armenians
who have remained among us in the face but also to look each other
in the face, the memoirs of no one should be buried into darkness.
You must also read Takuhi Tovmasyan’s extraordinary ‘Cookbook-Memoir’
entitled ‘May Your Table be Plentiful.’ What remains in her memory
and palate from the kitchen of her grandmothers also reflects the
traces of a culture we pretended until now to not exist.
Finally, let us once again listen to Hrant: “We should not really think
of the disappearance of Armenians solely as the absence of one group.
With their three thousand year old settled existence, the Armenians
were the driving force of these lands. They were the craftsmen,
artisans, merchants. They carried the cultural and artistic power
of this society to the West. They were close to the West with their
economy as well: the entrance of Western culture into this society
was through their windows. What happened? We eradicated the roots of
all of them. Left behind neither a craftsmen nor an artisan. I read
the books of that period. There was a college in Harput providing
instruction in seven languages for instance.
In Harput, Van, Erzincan, Erzurum, there was unbelievable development.
I sometimes think that if the Armenians were still living in those
lands, today it would have been the West that would have imploring us
‘Let us be together.'”
–Boundary_(ID_DfqKXjLiHusqO+oqQhM3BA)–