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A Genocide, Three Constituencies,
Thoughts for the Future (Part II)
By Halil Berktay
Who is (was) Responsible for What?
My main point here is that today, that is to say more than
90 years after these catastrophic, cataclysmic events, we
urgently need to broaden out from a “Turkey vs. Armenians”
view of the prospects and processes of recognition and
reconciliation to a “multiple constituencies” approach. The
horrors of 1915 continue to cast a long shadow over, and to
affect the political cultures, mentalities and future
horizons of, at least three groups of people : (1) the
Armenians of Armenia; (2) Armenians of the diaspora; and (3)
Turks in Turkey and elsewhere. To these, probably there
should also be added (4) Turkish Armenians, whose presence
and identity has been blurred and muted until very recently,
but who—in what we might call “the Hrant Dink era”—have
gradually been emerging into greater visibility and
distinctiveness both in Turkey and abroad.
Just by putting things in this way, I must emphasize that
consciously, deliberately, I am already diverging from a
beaten path. For the way the Armenian question is usually
posed entails a simple opposition between Turkey and
Armenians, or even between Turks and Armenians, if only by
way of a verbal shorthand. I think this is wrong and
misleading, the worst aspect of it being the final, hostile
counterpositioning of Turks (as Turks) and Armenians (as
Armenians). Against this, the proper way to address the
question is to begin by making a clear distinction (a)
between the Turkish establishment and Turkish civil society,
and also another distinction (b) between Turkish nationalism
(and nationalists), and Turks in general.
This is because “Turks” in general did not order and carry
out the genocide in 1915, and again, “Turks” in general are
not primarily and spontaneously responsible for the current
production and dissemination of denialism. Let me recap some
of the implications of the genocide analysis that I
undertook in Part I of this article. The 1915 expulsion and
extermination of Ottoman Armenians was conceived and planned
by a dictatorial military triumvirate, a non-accountable
warlordship rendered “rootless and ruthless”2 by its own
social conditions of existence and by its politically
abnormal, arrivistic route to power—an army-party leadership
which was also standing at the apex of a similarly rootless
and ruthless, and newly nationalistic3, type of
military-bureaucratic cadre. Under direct orders from
especially Talaat, the intellectual mastermind and talented
organizer of the triumvirate, the mass expulsion and
extermination of Ottoman Armenians was carried out not even
by the entirety of this military-bureaucratic cadre, but by
its most loyally nationalistic elements in turn mobilizing
the most tribally or criminally organized, the most
fanatically xenophobic, anti-Christian, anti-Armenian4, and
perhaps also the most materially covetous elements of the
local populations of parts of Asia Minor. Many were
unenthusiastic, but were coerced or were otherwise swept
into a volcano of violence, while many others were repelled,
choosing to stand aloof, perhaps helping save a few
Armenians here and there, or in some cases protesting
outright.5 Then from the 1970s onwards, it was once more by
a military-bureaucratic establishment, by a state-class
locked into the ideological legacy of that same mostly
Unionist nationalism (which had been coopted into and
subsumed, reified under a post-Kemalist façade of Ataturkism),
that a systematic denialist discourse came to be
constructed. Today, such denialist indoctrination continues
to emanate from the most authoritarian, militaristic,
nationalistic, anti-European and anti-Western elements of
the military-bureaucratic complex, which are forcefully
imposing it on the rest of Turkish society, including the
media, political parties, and even the government. They are,
indeed, using and manipulating this discourse to pursue
objectives that are not limited to the Armenian question as
such. What they are maximally after is straitjacketing all
other public visions, outlooks and discourses, and
establishing un-crossable “red lines,” so-called, so as to
maintain the whole political system in ideological bondage
to the deep state.
It is as part of that blinding, blinkering and
straitjacketing attempt that they are also trying to
persuade (or rather, stampede) all the rest of Turkish
society into standing in solidarity with the main actors of
1915, the decision-makers and the executors, on the grounds
that they were—Turks. In Turkish nationalist discourse,
therefore, Enver, Talaat and Cemal, and Bahaddin Sakir,
Kuscubasi Esref, Dr. Nazim and all others of the TM, and the
likes of the sub-governor of Bogazliyan, are divested of all
other qualities except their Turkishness; stripped of their
dictatorial inclinations, their putschism, their
authoritarianism, their extra-legality and
non-accountability, their propensity to have their opponents
and critics (including free-thinking journalists)
assassinated, their extreme nationalism tinged with racism
and Social Darwinism—stripped, in other words, of all
evidence of a political-ideological outlook that today, with
the advantage of hindsight, we might qualify as
proto-fascist—it is as nothing but Turks in the abstract
that they are presented to the citizenship of modern Turkey,
who are also thereby divested of all distinguishing
characteristics, including all their very real ideo-political
differences, and purely as Turks are asked to engage in
primitive ancestor worship with regard to these other Turks
of a bygone generation. So it was precisely against such
obfuscation, that back in fall 2000, I likened the
perpetrators of 1915 to the undercover, extra-legal,
fascistically motivated deep state agents of the 1990s, such
as the Hizbullahin, or those former Grey Wolf types that
were accidentally caught in flagrante delicto at Susurluk.6
I was trying to tell Turkish society: Look, living in the
present, do you identify yourselves with these people simply
because they too happen to be Turkish? If not, why should
you identify yourselves with their 1915 counterparts? At the
time, this was an innovative explanatory strategy, and
appears to have had quite an impact—to judge, among other
things, by the amount of nationalist ink and invective that
has been spent on trying to neutralize it. But then, might
it not be worth the while of the Armenian diaspora (or
diasporas), too, to pay a little attention to just this
point?
Who stands to gain?
This is crucial, for only if we put things in this way does
it become possible to see, to envisage that Turks and
Armenians need not be enemies, but can actually be partners
or allies in efforts to come face to face with both
historical and contemporary reality, and to recognize and to
exorcise the demons of the genocide. It cannot be emphasized
enough that each of the three or four constituencies I have
referred to stands to gain, albeit in different ways, from
reconciliation through genocide recognition, broadly
understood (whether this means the widespread dissemination
and acceptance of the historical truth in Turkish civil
society, or an Establishment act of recognition, or both).
What are these gains? How can we describe or define them?
This could be the subject of a very long discussion in
itself, where we would also have to take into account the
heterogeneity of the three or four constituencies in
question, which are of course divided into different groups,
ideologies, partiers, factions or outlooks. Clearly, for
example, there are questions among Armenians themselves as
to what Armenians really want—why they demand genocide
recognition, and what they hope to obtain through it.
Closure pure and simple, and the mental and emotional peace
that could come with it? Or perhaps also reparations of some
kind? Or even territorial concessions? Let us not be too
naive about it; it cannot be denied that there are some
Armenian groups, leaderships or individuals that aspire to
such reparations or concessions. I have no way of knowing
whether they are in the majority or the minority (of just
what geography or demography), but at least on this panel,
Henry Theriault has already made a statement to that effect.
This, of course, presents some very thorny problems. The
first and most important is that this, indeed, belongs with,
and can only belong with, the sphere of the state. Such
demands, in other words, can only be addressed to a state,
and by the same token can only be accepted or rejected by a
state. Hence, too, especially in their maximal form
(involving not private but collective reparations or
concessions), they can only be pursued by another state, or
at least a state-like “collective will” unit. So this puts
us back into that exclusively vertical relationship between
Armenia and Turkey (qua nation-state), or between some
notion of Armenian diaspora representation and Turkey, which
I regard as very narrowly restrictive, and which I have been
trying to avoid in the first place. Simply put, it does not
allow much room (mildly put) for lateral dialogue between
civil society constituencies, does it? In fact, so drastic
is it at the moment, that I cannot help wondering whether
putting it on the table might not actually reflect an inner
desire to put paid to any hopes for lateral dialogue (by
people who love the problem, and who do not want to solve it
but to continue living with it and by it). Speaking purely
as a hypothetical observer of future events, it cannot, of
course, be ruled out that as a result of unpredictable
twists and turns, the internal situations of Turkey and
Armenia, and therefore also the power relations between
Turkey and Armenia, might evolve so that this becomes
possible. But that is precisely the point—that it can only
be a by-product of international power relations in the
rather distant and unforeseeable future. In terms of a
current project of lateral civil society dialogues, it can
serve as a least common denominator for—precisely nothing.
So let me assume, for the sake of convenience if nothing
else, that as a bare minimum, as a least common denominator,
many, maybe most diaspora Armenians demand closure through
sincere and genuine (not sham) recognition—and they are
certainly entitled to it. At least for the moment that
enables me to come back to the third constituency named
above, that is to say Turks in Turkey and abroad. They are
absolutely critical in this regard, for the Armenian
question is first and foremost a Turkish question in some
profound sense. It began in Turkey, and if it is ever to
end, it will have to end in Turkey. It was exorbitated into
genocidal proportions by early Turkish nationalism, and if
it is to be meaningfully recognized, it will have to be
recognized by contemporary Turks in an act of
self-liberation from the shackles of latter-day varieties of
that nationalism. What is crucial here is for Turks
themselves to come to understand, and for it to be made
possible for them to come to understand—and here I am
jumping ahead a bit—through the help, yes, not just of world
public opinion in general but also of Armenians especially
in the diaspora, in conveying messages to the effect that
such recognition need not entail succumbing to a vindictive,
hence punitive conspiracy, and that given such facilitation,
they themselves stand not to lose but to win through
confronting, understanding and recognizing the historical
reality of 1915 for what it was. If this can be done,
genocide recognition, and reconciliation and closure through
genocide recognition, can be redefined not as a lose-win
(i.e. zero sum) game, or, worse, even a lose-lose (negative
sum) game, but actually as a win-win (positive sum) game.
For Turks do stand to gain enormously. They stand to gain by
doing away with the national myths and taboos that serve as
the ideological markers of a quasi-military
authoritarianism. They stand to gain by relieving themselves
of the constant tensions inculcated by a “national security
state” that requires a “culture of the enemy” to be able to
perpetuate abnormality. They stand to gain by forging a new,
open, brave and honest relationship with the world at large.
They stand to gain in terms of a real and comprehensive
democratization of Turkish society.
Turkish weakness: relative lack of historical knowledge
In the long run, therefore, working for genocide recognition
and for democracy in Turkey are not contradictory. But
whether genocide recognition, here and now, can be an
immediate demand, is something else altogether. It is not
going to be easy, basically because each of these
constituencies also has its specific strengths and
weaknesses. Among other things, they have been separated and
isolated from each other, and thereby also come to (or been
made to) distrust or suspect each other for far too long.
Partly as a result, they have come to embody (a) different
levels of historical knowledge and understanding; (b)
different political experiences and vocabularies in current
time; and (c) different assessments of the external and
internal dynamics available. These and other factors are all
reflected in the present outlook of the diverse intellectual
elites that claim to be speaking on their behalf. All in
all, we are facing, and trying to cope with, different
institutional histories.
Let us begin with Turks or Turkish society. Confronted with
the Armenian question, what are its, or their, strengths and
weaknesses? The key weakness is very obvious: lack of
historical knowledge and understanding. This has not been
absolute and immediate; evolving over time, going through
various stages, it has had its own relativity and
historicity. Neither has it always been the outcome of a
fully conscious conspiracy. Many Armenians might believe
that denialism arose virtually as soon as the genocide. This
is not so. An interesting aspect of late 20th or early 21st
century Turkish nationalist denialism is that its spokesmen
or proponents are so shallow as to appear to have forgotten
all about the Turkish memoirs and media accounts that were
published in the 1920s and early 30s. So they frequently
engage in speculative gyrations overlooking how easily these
can be contradicted by period witnesses. For in Turkey in
these first Republican decades, there was no question about
whether something enormous had happened to the Armenians.
They had been there, and then they were no longer there, and
it had all happened within living memory. There could really
be no question of rejecting outright the fact of their
uprooting, expulsion and demise. Basically, there were two
options, and two camps: Had this been good or bad? Mustafa
Kemal himself was hostile to the Unionist leadership that
had previously marginalized him, and whom he had come to see
as dangerous adventurists who with their pro-German
sympathies had dragged Turkey into the Great War. He had
taken over from this Old Guard, and never forgot that their
underlings were trying to jundermine and ovethrow his own
power. He was also pursuing a project of all-out
Westernization and reconciliation with Europe. But at the
same time, his power base rested on the former Unionist
rank-and-file. They were all around him: his captains,
majors, colonels; his adjutants, aide-de camps; his party
stalwarts, his governors and sub-governors. His own hands
were clean, though not those of many in his new command
apparatus. Hence he had to be circumspect, politic, to be
able to balance things.7 So for example he had to distance
himself from the 1919 court martial, which after all had
taken place under that same Entente Occupation whose defeat
underpinned his entire legitimacy; as a result, at one point
we have him talking favorably about the “unjustly executed”
Bogazliyan sub-governor. But on various other occasions, we
also have him condemning the atrocities of 1915, and even
referring to them as “a shameful act,” to quote the title of
Taner Akçam’s latest book. Others around him could be more
open, such as Falih Rifki (Atay), who after the great fire
of Izmir/Smyrna in September 1922 gave voice to his anger
about “why we were doing this to the Greeks or Armenians,”
and who also quoted the outburst that Halide Edib directed
at him, Falih Rifki, for having introduced her to Bahaddin
Sakir: “How could you make me shake hands with this
murderer?” she vehemently demanded. It is difficult to
imagine Falih Rifki writing such things without Mustafa
Kemal’s approval. So there was a circle of more
liberal-democratic minded Kemalists for whom it was
emphatically a bad thing, but of course there were also
others for whom it was a good thing, a heroic act of
patriotic self-defense, argued along the lines that if “we”
had not got them, those Armenians were eventually going to
get “us.” This bit of law-of-the-jungle Social Darwinism
closely echoed Talaat’s own words to Halil Bey (the head of
the Ottoman parliament, later Halil Mentese) upon the
latter’s return from Berlin a few months after the
deportations and massacres had begun; they also became the
main line of defense for many of the accused during the 1919
trials, dovetailing into Ziya Gokalp’s aphorism about how
“it was not a case of we massacring them; rather, both sides
fought and massacred each other.” Nevertheless, even
alongside such brazen defiance (including Halil Mentese’s
memoirs), as well as in other works of sober reporting, such
as Ahmed Refik’s testimony on the plight of the Armenian
deportees that he observed in transition to the unknown, one
can find ample evidence about what actually happened. These
are not hidden archival documents that we are talking about;
they are narrative sources that are easily available in any
library if not bookshop.8
After the infighting and the purges of the 1920s, however,
as the new régime not only consolidated itself, but also,
under the impact of the Great Depression, became more
rigidly and autarkically statist in the 1930s; furthermore
with all the great powers courting Ankara, and with Armenia
in particular controlled by the Soviet Union, and also with
the various new Armenian diasporas created all over the
world still not very effective in making their voices
heard—under these conditions, it seemed safe for the Turkish
establishment to allow the nightmare of 1915 to recede
further and further back into the fogs of time. In Murat
Belge’s words, inside Turkey itself “the production of
knowledge” on the cataclysm was gradually abandoned,
resulting in decades of induced forgetting, of collective
amnesia (think of what Americans might know and remember of
Hiroshima by 2045, for example, if for the next 38 years
nothing more were to be written about it in textbooks or the
media). Such silence was also reinforced by a sense of the
state carefully watching over as yet not very sharply etched
“red lines,” though such guardianship was not very explicit.
But elsewhere, of course, such production of knowledge
continued apace, not only accelerating but also (with
Lemkin’s and others’ contributions) coming to be more
radically re-conceptualized in time, thus giving rise to an
impressive (though perhaps uneven) body of genocide
literature. Thus it was that from the 1930s to the 1970s,
there arose a growing, eventually immense discrepancy
between what the world knew about the Armenian genocide and
what was “known” (or was allowed to be known and said)
inside Turkey.9
It was on top of this, then, that the ASALA attacks on
Turkish diplomats came from the 1970s onwards—partly under
one military dictatorship or the other, or just as the
country was moving from the Nationalist Front coalition
governments of Suleyman Demirel (with strong backing by, and
therefore also protection for, the MHP’s Grey Wolves) to
Kenan Evren’s September 12, 1980 régime. It was a disastrous
combination. After decades of ignorance or misinformation,
the military had a field day with the indignation that rose
inside Turkey against these bombings and assassinations.
This was the time of the creation of a truly systematic
denialist discourse about “baseless slanders” and “the
fabrications of Armenian propaganda,” curtly imposing it
upon an already considerably muffled and intimidated media,
and through it upon all of public space. From the 1990s into
the first decade of the 21st century, this was followed up
by the instalment of a comprehensive network of the
ideological apparatuses of the new national security state,
including new school curricula or teaching packs imposed on
the National Education Ministry from the outside, as well as
various schemes of cooperation between YOK (the Board of
Higher Education), TTK (the Turkish Historical Society,
which under Yusuf Halacoglu has increasingly had less and
less to do with scholarship and more and more to do with
propaganda), and ASAM (the Center for Eurasian Strategic
Studies, a hard nationalist, right-wing, privately endowed
Ankara think-tank). From 2000 on, it is from around or
within this triangle that materials appear to have been
originating for smear campaigns and intimidation campaigns
launched against dissident scholars and intellectuals in the
media (including the internet), and with more than a whiff
of masterminding by some Psychological Warfare Department
hanging over the whole affair.
The final stage of denialism is a historical moment of
inertia or autonomy. When Hamlet and Ophelia are watching
“the play within the play,” at one point “Methinks the lady
doth protest too much,” says Ophelia. The Turkish
nationalist deep state, too, has “protested too much.” That
is to say, it has resorted to anything and everything,
regardless of consistency, to counter “Armenian
allegations.” All such bits and pieces of “refutation,”
produced mostly for domestic consumption but internationally
worthless (in the face of world knowledge), have now turned
into a cage imprisoning—Turkish policy. “After having denied
it for so long, how can we now turn around and tell the
Turkish public that, er, you know, it did happen?” In
domestic politics, that has become an immeasurable
liability. It is as if, in war, one side had started to dig
what it regarded as a defensive trench—and then dug so far
and deep that it ended up having dug itself into a hole that
it cannot get out of. It has become a habitus, a mental
prison, an end in itself. Having lost all defensive value,
it still cannot be abandoned.
Turkish Strengths: Size and Heterogeneity; Traditions of
Political Dissent and Critical Scholarship
But so, these are the tools with which an increasingly
anxious and wrathful deep state has been trying to spread
disinformation, to bludgeon dissenting voices back into
line, and to restore its weakening, eroding monopoly over
public space—though not always to any great avail. For at
the same time, there is a significant degree of strength and
resiliance in Turkish civil society, though this is not
always obvious from the outside. First, there is the matter
of sheer size, which tends to go hand in hand with
heterogeneity. Turkey is much bigger than, for example,
Armenia, and therefore also has a much higher level of
internal differentiation, and not just in terms of regional
development or its wealth and income distribution
corollaries. Turkish society is also much more explicitly,
vocally, self-consciously divided into a wide range of
educational backgrounds, ideological outlooks, sub-cultures
and political preferences. Furthermore, all these find
expression in a huge media sector that is of course under
pressure to conform to the “national line” but nevertheless
stands closer to the freedom end than to the dictatorship
end of the scale—a media that comprises large numbers of
newspapers, radios and television channels.
By that token, Turkey is, and Turks are, also that much more
difficult to control, and to impose unity and uniformity
upon. For example, part and parcel of that heterogeneity are
traditions of critical Left-opposition that are deeply
suspicious of the deep state. The intelligentsia still
remembers even distant acts of duplicity or arbitrary
high-handedness—such as, in 1938-39, the trumped-up charges
of fomenting revolt within the army and navy colleges that
led to Nazým Hikmet’s imprisonment for nearly two decades
(and the Kafkaesque military tribunal that handed down an
already decided sentence); during the transitional 1945-50
phase, the novelist Sabahattin Ali’s mysterious murder, as
well as the mobilization of right-wing rabble to destroy the
offices and printing presses of the independent daily Tan;
then a further nationalist mobilization to carry out the
September 6-7, 1955 pogrom against the remaining Greeks (and
other non-Muslim minorities) of especially Istanbul and
Izmir.10 Closer to home, tens (perhaps even a few hundreds)
of thousands of young people who went through torture and
harsh prison conditions under the March 12, 1971 or
September 12, 1980 army coups and régimes are now in their
forties or fifties, and very far from forgetting. Also
inscribed in their collective memory are numerous other
provocations that paved the way from the first to the second
of these military takeovers, such as the 1977 May Day
massacre, or an attempt to assassinate the late Bulent
Ecevit during that year’s election campaign, or the
mysterious bombing and sinking of a moored liner in the
Golden Horn and the equally mysterious fire that ravaged
Istanbul’s main opera house—all perpetrated by the same dark
forces that then blamed “communists” or “terrorists.” People
also know how brutal Diyarbakýr prison was already in the
1970s and then just how much more indescribably savage it
became for its Kurdish detainees in the 1980s (and how this
then turned into a breeding ground for the PKK). They know
about the comprehensive post-1974 infiltration of the
extreme right into the police and other security forces (as
demonstrated for the whole world to see by videos of Hrant
Dink’s murderer being congratulated by those who had taken
him into custody). As a result, there is a profound
revulsion built into non-negligible sections of Turkish
society—not just against such acts of oppression, repression
or provocation, but also against all the attendant
hypocrisy, the Orwellian double-talk, the facile lies and
the disinformation statements perpetually dished out by the
military-bureaucratic complex. Who were the huge crowds of
Istanbuliotes, estimated at anywhere from 100,000 to
200,000, that turned out to mourn Hrant Dink, striking fear
into the establishment simply by marching in silence behind
the slogan “We are all Armenians”? The simple answer is that
they were (are) people “taught by need and sorrow,” as
Bertold Brecht would have it—people for whom all of the
above has been their life-experience.
A third point is that this tradition of dissent, which is
not to be underestimated in itself, goes further and deeper
insofar as it is not confined to streets and public squares,
nor to political rallies and protest marches, but has also
come to inspire, to be embodied in, and to receive
permanence and paradigmatic status from, a new critical
scholarship. Like everything else, myths arising from
revolutions and nation-states also have their half-life.
There is an early phase in which the revolution maintains
immense momentum and prestige, and its self-narration,
persuading everybody to embrace a black-and-white contrast
between the old and the new order. Gradually, however, even
that new régime ages, the public mobilization subsides,
rituals of enthusiasm become shop-worn, while the costs of
making a revolution begin to emerge, including not only the
casualties but also the structural legacies, on which new
generations of cool and sober scholarship start to
concentrate. In Turkey, this kind of sea-change has been
taking place since the 1970s, when it became precisely the
March 12th and September 12th crackdowns, in the name of
Ataturkism (or Ataturkist Bonapartism), on a Left that had
hitherto imagined itself to represent the true revolutionary
legacy of Ataturkism, that launched successive generations
of then-young students and scholars on the way to
re-examining that imagined relationship. Today, many of them
are amongst Turkey’s foremost historians and social
scientists. Yes, the September 12, 1980 military régime in
particular has also created numbers of very docile state
universities, especially in the provinces, that are more
“state” than “university,” and which adhere to the
military-bureaucratic state center in pretty much the same
way that German universities adhered to the Bismarckian
state in the 1870s and 80s, or the only two Turkish state
universities that then existed adhered to the Kemalist state
in the 1930s. Yes, over the last two or three years, we have
also witnessed some (literally) incredible public gestures
from some of these university administrations that have
nothing to do with their educational raison d’être,
such as declarations of support for Denktashite die-hardism
in Cyprus, or against any AKP leader’s presidential
candidacy, and even a single act of banning all French
courses in response to the extension of the “Loi Gayssot” to
cover the Armenian genocide. But at the same time, abroad as
well as inside Turkey, in other and more serious
institutions of higher knowledge that serve as safe havens
for academic freedom, driven by disenchantment with official
ideology, and benefiting from both Turkey’s size and degree
of openness to the outside world (which enable good scholars
to break out of parochialism and connect with the mainstream
of their respective disciplines as universally practised),
there flourishes a new sociology, a new anthropology, a new
political science, and of course a new history of an
increasingly high caliber. In particular, more and more
historians (as well as other social scientists working with
a historical approach) have been producing rising numbers of
excellent books and articles subjecting virtually every link
of the old triumphalist narrative of a “perfect” revolution
to intense scrutiny. In effect, on the 19th century
(comprising the Tanzimat and the Hamidian eras) and the
first half of the 20th century (comprising the Young Turks
and Kemalist revolutions), a comprehensively non-statist,
non-nationalist New History has arisen in Turkey and the
Turkish diaspora over the last 30 years or more—as evidenced
only partially by the list of participants in the “Ottoman
Armenians” conference of September 2005. To put it in
another way, the scholarly recognition of the historical
realities of 1915 has come about not just because of a civic
reaction against an atmosphere of stifling hypocrisy, but
also as a by-product of this entire historiographical
development. Simply put, serious Turkish scholars have made
major strides in both deconstructing Turkish nationalism and
developing empathic insights into its significant”others,”
ultimately finding their way into the Armenian case.11 It is
not for me to ask whether my generation’s and then
succeeding generations’ critical re-examination of Turkish
nationalist mythology has any counterpart, in terms of
scope, emotional intensity and intellectual sophistication,
in Armenian and Armenian diaspora scholars’ critical
engagement with their “own”—that is to say Armenian—statism
or nationalism.
Turkish Strengths: The Rise of a Pro-European Islam
Last but not least, there is the enormous fact of the
current divide in Turkish politics to consider. The same
process of disenchantment with the authoritarian outlook and
implications of post-Kemalist Ataturkism, or with the
seeming impossibility of democratising that outlook12, that
has led to a scholarly enterprise of desacralisation, has
also called forth a political project of seeking
representation for Islam and Islamists in the public sphere.
After ups and downs involving electoral successes, party
bannings and re-formations from the 1960s to the present,
over the last decade this drive has produced the present AKP
government, resting on a nearly two-thirds majority in
parliament, and frequently described as embodying a marriage
of moderate Islam with conservative modernism. But why
should that be at all relevant to our present subject? I am
aware that from the outside, and especially from a diaspora
vantage point, at first sight the entire Turkish
establishment might appear monolithic when it comes to the
Armenian question. Are they not all opposed to genocide
recognition “here and now”? In the face of H.Res.106, has it
not been Abdullah Gül as the AKP Foreign Minister who has
responded with a Washington Times guest editorial that looks
like nothing but a delaying exercise? At the end of the day,
aren’t they all denialists of some kind or other?
During the March 31st panel, too, such questions inevitably
arose, and all I can do here is to summarize some of my
answers in general form. Once more, outside appearances (of
homogeneity) can be very deceptive, leading to quick and
easy errors. There was a 19th and early 20th century moment
in Ottoman-Turkish history when secular nationalists (or
Turkists) were modernists, whereas Islamists were more
anti-modern. As the inheritor of a Young Turk and Kemalist
mantle, the CHP as the founding party of the Republic long
persisted in combining nationalism with the universalizing
implications of modernity. Especially after its 1950 move
from power to opposition, over the last half-century it was
to the CHP that the public kept turning for defense of human
rights, against torture and political executions, for social
democratic alignments with Europe against military régimes,
or in the quest for a less conflictual foreign policy.
But all this has changed, drastically and comprehensively,
over the last decade. It is as if, in the persons of the
AKP’s Erdogan-Gul leadership and the CHP’s
Baykal-Oymen-Elekdag leadership, the secular Ataturkists and
the moderate Islamists have switched places, moving to
opposite sides of modernity’s universalization project. It
is the AKP government that, especially over 2003-04, has
moved exceptionally rapidly to fulfill the Copenhagen
criteria through a series of legal-institutional reforms
(though practice has lagged behind legislation). Against
this, it is the CHP that has positioned itself as the
champion not of Europeanism but of nationalism, choosing to
oppose and attack the AKP not over “too little” but over
“too much” Europeanization. In the process, the CHP has
virtually abandoned the modernity leg of its traditional
platform. Specifically with regard to all the most critical
issues of Cyprus, the Kurdish question, and, yes, the
Armenian question, the CHP (with two retired, hawkish senior
diplomats in ominously key positions) has repeatedly aligned
itself with deep state intransigence, raising a hue and cry
about “sell-out” or “betrayal” in attempts, together with
President Sezer and the entire military-bureaucratic
complex, to blackmail the AKP into abandoning all
impasse-breaking initiatives.
In contrast, on all these points the AKP leadership has
always given signs of wanting to liberate itself at least
partially from the shackles of official ideology and the
quasi-military “national security” line. This was most
marked in their first two years in power, when they had
caught everybody by surprise, and the deep state had not had
time to organize a concerted reaction. For example, this was
when they were emitting their strongest signals about a
peaceful solution in Cyprus. This was also when they were
refraining from saying anything on the Armenian question
that was a repetition of the old rhetoric. They were
obviously trying to avoid being dragged back into toeing the
traditional state-line, and to reserve for themselves a
certain room for maneuver. At one point, Tayyip Erdogan went
so far as to say that he was not fully familiar with the
historical realities of this sad or tragic period, eliciting
an uproar from unofficial media spokesmen for the deep
state, who promptly started warning him and his Foreign
Minister not to stray from the fold.13 Subsequently, the CHP
leadership moved in parliament, under a plan hatched by
Sukru Elekdag, to lay siege to the AKP, to lock it into a
non-partisan national coalition mentality, and thus to
prevent it from achieving any significant breakthrough on
the Armenian question. By the way, this was when the AKP
leadership came up with a proposal to establish a bilateral
commission of Turkish and Armenian historians to investigate
the events of 1915. This has been only reviled by most vocal
Armenians, who, I think, have not perceived the possibility
that the AKP might have been trying to create an escape
clause for itself—to formulate and retain, in the face of
deep state encirclement, at least one dialogue avenue,
however narrow, maybe in the hope that in better times it
might be enlarged and improved upon. Interestingly, through
many tense months in 2005, both Erdogan and Gul also
repeatedly deplored the various efforts to obstruct or ban
the “Ottoman Armenians” conference, speaking up again and
again in defense of academic freedom. Eventually this even
led to Abdullah Gul sending a key “good wishes” message, as
moderate as possible, to the opening session of the
conference. The Erdogan-Gul duo’s approach to the Hrant Dink
murder, too, has been distinctively different from that of
the state establishment as well of the nationalist media.
Erdogan went in person to offer his condolences to Mrs. Dink
(has any other major party leader done so?), and also spoke
favorably of the massive funeral, undertaking only mild and
restrained criticism of its central slogan (“We are all
Armenians”). Finally, this recent editorial by Abdullah Gul
in the Washington Times also merits a careful reading.
Halfway down, the Turkish Foreign Minister (soon to become
president) specifies what he is objecting to: “With regard
to the Armenian allegation describing the tragedy that
befell them as genocide, the question, from the point of
view of international law, is whether the Ottoman government
systematically pursued a calculated act of state policy....”
Otherwise put, at least here he limits himself not to a
historical but to an entirely legal/istic position—while
also admitting that it was a “tragedy that befell them [the
Armenians].”
Do not dismiss this out of hand, for in terms of Turkish
realities this is neither Elekdag nor four-star language.
Simultaneously, Mr. Gul also opens the door, for the very
first time, not to a purely bilateral but now a multilateral
historians’ commission. He says: “I hereby extend an
invitation to any third country, including the United
States, to contribute to this commission by appointing
scholars...” Furthermore, this offer has now been repeated
in the April 24th paid advertisement placed by the Turkish
embassy in the New York Times. Do not dismiss this, too, out
of hand: This is tantamount to a promise that Turkey would
abide by the findings of any such international history
commission. Back in October 2005, soon after the Istanbul
“Ottoman Armenians” conference, I myself said something
similar in Yerevan when I was attending a NATO Rose-Roth
seminar. As repeated in the lengthy interview that Khatchig
Mouradian then did with me (for his Beirut paper), I was
looking for and suggesting ways to transform a bilateral
commission that could be stacked with state-appointed
lawyer-historians into a more multilateral one. I was
suggesting that Armenia could pick up this challenge and
respond with a broadening counter-proposal. At the time, I
was attacked by nationalist parliamentarians and columnists
for such suggestions “to the enemy.” A year or more later,
suddenly, we have Abdullah Gul accepting and inviting
multilateralization. Is this or is this not a new departure?
Could this be the enlargement of an initially narrow escape
clause that I was referring to above? Depends on who makes
what use of it. Wouldn’t it be nice if the U.S., the UK,
France, Italy, Germany or Holland were to say yes—and to
nominate some of these countries’ greatest experts on 1915
to this commission? Do Armenians have any reason to fear the
outcome? I do not; I have laid out my analysis of the 1915
genocide; I am willing to submit it to the scrutiny of any
group of knowledgeable and critical historians; I believe
there is enough evidence to persuade any genuinely
international, multilateral, objective counterpart of South
Africa’s Truth Commission(s). A lot would depend, of course,
on the compositional and procedural rules to be adopted. But
Mr Gul and the New York Times ad do not say anything about
Turkey vetoing third country appointees. And of course, all
that would be taking place under the watchful eye of the
international public. Frankly, I do not see how all such
weights and safeguards could be easily tricked or
manipulated.14
But I do not want to belabor this point. My main argument
here is not about the pros and cons of a historians’
commission, however defined. It is about the distinction
between “state” and “government” in Turkey, about how a vein
and party of moderate Islam has ended up as much more
pro-European than the Ataturkist establishment, and also
about how it is likely to continue in that way—not least
because it perceives European democracy as necessary for its
own chances of survival. It is also about the potential that
is thereby implied for historical recognition and
reconciliation. Provided, of course, that especially
diaspora Armenians learn to read, understand and act upon
such signs of Turkish developments.
Armenian Strengths and Weaknesses
This brings me to my last chapter: about the strengths and
weaknesses of my second constituency, that is to say
Armenians of the diaspora, and even more specifically
American Armenians. The way I see it, what are
their—your—strengths and weaknesses? In dealing with Turkish
civil society, I first addressed the weaknesses and then the
strength. Here, however, I am going to do it the other way
round: first the strengths and then the weaknesses, because
it is not with platitudes but with a critique that I want to
conclude.
With regard to our common problem, the main source of
strength for Armenia and diaspora Armenians is very basic:
It is their immense historical knowledge, resting on their
life-experience. Simply put, they (you) know what happened
over 1915-16 better than anybody else—through personal and
family memories; through piles of archival and other
documentary wealth; through innumerable publications. I do
not mean that this whole body of genocide scholarship is
above criticism. Some of it has too narrow a focus on just
Armenian “national history” (in the tradition of 19th
century German historiography). A lot of
self-particularization creeps in, as well as an
essentialistic approach to your “other(s).” There is not
enough critical analysis of the aims, programs or practices
of Armenian nationalism in history, leading in some cases to
a total identification with the Armenian actors of the late
19th and early 20th century, to the point of eliminating the
distance between now and then, and coming to see things
entirely through their eyes (whereas one would expect modern
historical methodology to be more distanced). At the same
time, too much is ascribed to “Islamic fanaticism,” or else
too much criminal intent and design is ascribed to the Young
Turks from the outset, who are frequently regarded as rabid
nationalists already in 1908, only practising dissimulation
in order to realize their evil plans under favorable
circumstances. This quasi-Hegelian vision of an inevitable
“unfolding” allows too little scope for the accidentalities
of history (and is unfortunately a common failing of many
Balkan nationalist historiographies, too, as well as Turkish
nationalist historiography). But in the end, the historical
knowledge accumulated and put at the disposal of the whole
world through decades of work by Armenian genocide scholars
is both quantitatively and qualitatively immense. There is
no way that this can be rendered null and void by any talk
about “baseless Armenian propaganda.” If knowledge, science
and scholarship count for anything in this world, it is the
ultimate guarantee that in the long run, it is denialism
that will have to give way. For the sake of sanity and
democracy in my own country, I do hope that more and more of
Turkish society, eventually Turkish parties and politicians,
and ultimately Turkish governance, also come to realize
this.
But to that end, what is more serious is that most
present-day diaspora Armenians do not know or understand
Turkey, as a result of which they do not know what to make
of and how to talk with contemporary Turks. This includes
the Turkish Left-dissidents and the new generation of
critical Turkish scholarship that I have mentioned; most of
you do not know what to make of and how to talk with even
these “new Turks.” Look, here in this auditorium, or here
now in these sentences that I am writing to be published and
read, I am keenly aware that many of you do not know what to
make of me and how to talk to me or with me (other than to
tell us/me that we are “very brave,” or else to suspect and
challenge us/me as possibly yet another Fifth Column sent to
disrupt Armenian unity). Between such extremes of hostile
doubts and platitudes, it is as yet very rare for us to be
able to talk as individuals, in our personal voices, trading
knowledge and analysis, forgetting that one of us happens to
be a Turk and the other happens to be an Armenian.
More broadly put, what many diaspora Armenians and Armenian
leaderships do not have is the up-to-date political
experience and expertise to deal properly with the emergence
into human form of this new, dynamic, non-monolithic,
non-homogenous Turkey that with all its oppositional
intellectuals and critical scholars, its pro-European
business community and reforming moderate Islamists, is
going through such a vital struggle for democracy. I think
this is mostly because Armenians have been closed off (and
have closed themselves off) for far too long; they have
tended to perceive Turkey as “one big enemy,” against which
they have come to hold on to “one big fact” (of the genocide
as the most common identity denominator), pursued through a
certain notion of genocide recognition as “one big policy.”
There is a lot in this that is very understandable.
Confronting intransigence can be a hard (and hardening)
experience. Such stubborn denialism in the face of the truth
can drive the whole world to sheer exasperation—and to a
desire to batter down that resistance through forceful
means, whatever the cost. Of course, it is very possible for
such methods to turn counter-productive. It was in Yerevan
that I first told an anecdote about coming home one day to
find that my child had “experimented” with mixing cough
medicine and other kitchen ingredients into a foul-smelling
brew which she had then abandoned on the counter. When
asked, although there was nobody else around, she
unthinkingly said “No, I didn’t do it”—and just could not
get out of the trap of sticking by that first statement,
however ludicrous that might be in the face of all the
evidence. After a huge blowup, and then after hours of
calming down and making peace, admission came only in the
course of a return to normal conversation.
The parallel here is that in their reactiveness to denialism,
many Armenian leaderships appear to have locked themselves
into a single strategy of forcing recognition on Turkey
through external, international pressure. A discourse about
how “Armenians are the eternal victims in the face of an
eternal Turkish dominance” (here exemplified by Henry
Theriault), revolving around both self-pity and a false
belief in the inescapable tyranny of history, helps sustain
the conviction that there is no other recourse. For
Armenians, one consequence has been a certain lack of
political sophistication and flexibility, reflected by an
increasingly stunted, simplistic vocabulary reduced to three
words: genocide, recognition, denial. The genocide is the
genocide; it is self-evident; it cannot be discussed.
Recognition is to recognize that it was genocide. Anything
that falls the slightest bit short of that is denial. Such
“falling short” can take various forms, only the most
obvious being failure to use the g-word, however complete
the description and however sincere the interlocutor might
otherwise be. But as I have found out, even if you say it
was genocide, any critique of Armenian nationalism, past or
present, or for that matter any critique of any other aspect
of Armenian culture or institutions, or any disagreement
with any dimension of an Armenian interpretation or
statement about history, regardless of whether it is
factually grounded or not, can result in aspersions of
denialism if you happen to be Turkish. There seems to be a
profound psychological, spiritual dichotomization underlying
that. It may have to do with the most absolutely maximalist
definition of denialism possible: any contravention of a
belief in all Turks (or Turkishness) as wrong or bad at all
times, and in all Armenians (or Armenicity) as right, good
and virtuous at all times.
Hrant Dink’s Fourth Constituency: The Promise Held Out by
Turkish Armenians
Leave aside how excessively harsh or unjust you may perceive
me to have been in these or other critical assessments. Is
it possible to arrive at a common acceptance of these or
other mutual strengths and weaknesses, and then also at a
common road-map for the future? In particular, without
mincing any words about the backwardness of many Turks’
historical knowledge or understanding, is it also possible
to engage in a constructive critique of the type of
“genocide recognition politics” presently pursued by many
Armenian groups (which almost invariably revolve around a
Turkish-state-vs-Armenians axis), in favor of prioritizing a
more horizontal or lateral, more civil society, more
Turks-and-Armenians-together type of education, information
and consciousness-raising approach to fostering
inter-communal, inter-constituency conversations?
Now and in the future, I would hope, for example, that it
becomes possible to talk intelligently not only about (the
real contents and meaning of) Turkish nationalist denialism,
but also about
1) why and how it is that “genocide” remains primarily a
lawyer’s as against a historian’s word or concept,
overloaded with forcefully legal-criminal implications;
2) how, therefore, if it is pushed too much or
over-utilized, it turns into a cliché or buzz-word that
becomes a substitute for, and actually ends up masking, a
concrete, on-hands type of historical understanding (such as
I have tried to provide in Part I of this article);
3) how such pushing or over-utilization is also very capable
of stimulating (and simulating) a courtroom atmosphere, a
juridical process bound to end in a verdict and a
sentencing, which seems to make many Armenians feel like
self-righteous prosecutors, with the further corollary that
most Turks start feeling as if they are (or Turkishness in
general is) on trial, and that a “collective guilt” verdict
is inevitable;
4) how, especially in the absence of adequate time and space
for re-educating Turkish civil society, this threatens to
drive most Turks or Turkish groups not only into
over-defensiveness but even into the arms of a denialist
deep state (as perhaps evidenced by what has been happening
to many Turkish communities in the U.S. especially over the
past decade);
5) how this effect is further reinforced by the very strict,
indeed maximalist definitions of denial/ism that go hand in
hand with single-minded pursuit of such “genocide
recognition politics” (as a result of which, huge grey zones
of Turkish civil society may be aprioristically written off
as “enemies” instead of being recognized as normal people
who stand to benefit from truth and reconciliation)15;
6) how a still further effect is to render Turkish politics
needlessly opaque, since one starts looking at all parties,
forces or dynamics according to the single criterion of
(direct and immediate) recognition versus shades and hues of
denial, making all the various detailed analyses undertaken
in this paper virtually impossible16;
7) why and how it is that therefore, all such multiplying
and concatenating effects do not weaken but actually
facilitate “genocide denial politics” as practised by the
deep state, which vastly prefers to have the question
reduced to one of “was it genocide or not?” (as evidenced by
all the deliberately obfuscating psychological warfare
carried out back in 2005 to persuade the public that what
was going to be done at the “Ottoman Armenians” conference
was to discuss and then pass a resolution recognizing 1915
as genocide—though that was emphatically not part of the
conference agenda);
8) why and how it is that in the end, it also has the effect
of making it that much more difficult (or dangerous) to work
for recognition and reconciliation inside Turkey (though I
would not regard this as a primary consideration).
Now, as a Turk, meaning a fully Turkish Turk, am I also
suspect for saying all this outright, and laying it on the
table? Could it be that I, too, am trying to divert the
Armenian diaspora from proper pursuit of its “national
cause”? In other words, could all this, too, be yet another
gimmick or smokescreen to delay genocide recognition by the
U.S. Congress and Senate, and then also the (next)
Administration? Given a past history of decades of isolation
between my first and second constituencies, on the one hand,
and the third constituency on the other, such doubts, too,
are not that difficult to comprehend.
Though they have to be surpassed at some point. And a key
role in surpassing them is very likely to devolve on Turkish
Armenians, that fourth constituency awakening and
activating, which may have been Hrant Dink’s greatest
historical contribution. Hrant himself was sui generis in a
peculiar way. Since January 19, 2007, he has frequently been
described as “an ethnic Armenian and a Turkish citizen.”
This does not do full justice to the extent to which he was
a mestizo, a product of métissage or hybridity in the
anthropological sense. For (citizenship aside) he was also
ethno-culturally, linguistically, emotionally and
intellectually both Turkish and Armenian. Consequently “his
people” were not just Armenians but also Turks, or perhaps
not just Turkish Armenians (and Armenian Armenians, and
diaspora Armenians) but also Turkish Turks. It was precisely
because of such internalized, naturalized hybridity that he
had (or developed) that extraordinary gift of his to
understand, deal with, inspire confidence in, and translate
between all “sides” to our common, connected, tragic
history.
Was this why he was killed ? I tend to think not—not in my
model of an ideologically deep state-inspired, but
organizationally and operationally not centrally commanded,
therefore autocephalous network of provincial
neo-nationalist vigilantes. I cannot see that orders were
relayed from high up all the way down to Ogun Samast to get
Hrant because in fact he was identified as “the most
dangerous of all.” Instead, I tend to see him as marked out
through the web of Article 301 prosecutions that enveloped
him simply as an active, vocal Armenian.
But intentionally or not, it is in fact the most uniquely
irreplaceable, irreproducible unifier of an entire new
resurgence that has been removed—that we have lost—through
this murder. Now it is up to his fourth constituency to try
and fill that vacuum.
Endnotes
1 This is the second part of an article that takes off from,
elaborates on, develops and adds to my preparatory notes
for, as well as what I actually said at, the March 31, 2007
Armenians and the Left conference. I am grateful to the
Armenian Weekly for agreeing to publish this in such an
expanded version, and in two parts.
2 I remember introducing this expression at the first
Chicago conference of Turkish and Armenian historians held
in spring 2000.
3 I should add: nationalism from above, nationalistic from
above. For during the “long 19th century” demise of the
Ottoman Empire, a whole range of proto-nationalistic
ideological searches and interim conceptualizations, ranging
from experiments with Ottomanism to the Turkism that finally
erupted out of the Balkan Wars, mostly originated with the
intellectual retinues gathering around the 19th century
civilian bureaucrats and then the early 20th century
professional soldiers and bureaucrats that actually held
power and were fighting both to reform and to save the
empire. Kemalism’s post-1923 attempt to partially redefine
early (or Unionist) Turkish nationalism was a further stage
along the same line of modern state-building and
nation-building from above. As a result, whereas, for
example, in Greece (with its early 19th century war of
independence sprouting from below, from a variety of local
resistances), nationalism has become and remained relatively
more of a popular ideology, in Turkey, in contrast, with its
war of independence led by officers in khaki, nationalism
has come intlo being as more of a state ideology—and despite
recent plebeianizations and state-street alliances, has
mostly remained a state ideology to this day.
4 Note that in this approach, religion (Muslims vs.
Christians) enters into the analysis at a secondary and
complementary level. Some of the most horrific levels of
cruelty and murderousness displayed during the genocide
might not have been possible without a peculiarly
faith-embedded de-humanization of the “other” as kafir,
gavur or infidel. Moreover, without that faith-embedded
de-humanization and demonization, that is to say if it had
been only a matter of two different Christian confessions
and communities, all the previous decades’ antagonisms
(class hatreds and national hatreds) might not have
developed to this level and extent, and therefore also, the
resulting crackdown and repression might not have assumed
such comprehensively genocidal proportions. Nevertheless,
together with all these ethnic-religious interactions and
overdeterminations, it was a fundamentally nationalist
affair.5 As Taner Akcam’s research has demonstrated again
and again, it is indeed their voices of conscience that keep
rising to the surface for example during the 1919 court
martial—without which, not even a quintessential monster
like the district governor of Bogazliyan (presently in the
process of being re-heroized by Turkish neo-nationalists)
could have been sentenced and executed.
6 See the daily Radikal, October 9, 2000.
7 In a recent (November 2006) interview published in the
daily Radikal, my Sabanci University colleague, Professor
Cemil Kocak, has drawn a wonderful portrait of Ataturk as a
political master-tactician operating within all these
constraints. In the same breath, Kocak also warns against
trying to over-theorize and over-homogenize this supremely
politic Ataturk.
8 At the Istanbul “Ottoman Armenians” conference of
September 2005 (publication forthcoming), there was a wealth
of such materials and analyses in papers submitted by Hulya
Adak, Erol Koroglu, Ahmet Kuyas and Ayhan Aktar.
9 During the March 31st panel, faced with my attempted
explanations about this information gap and the resulting
need for the Turkish public to be progressively educated
about the genocide, Henry Theriault made a show of great
incredulity, arguing, in effect, that a genocide is a
genocide and that everybody knows what it is; to bolster his
point, he picked up a microphone, turning it over and
showing it to the audience, remarking: It is a microphone,
everybody knows what it is, there is no need to debate what
it is, or whether we should think of not calling it a
microphone at the outset. Very poor simile. Let me try a
better one. a) Even in a country where microphones are used
all the time, you would still have to teach children
something about electricity and electromagnetism, as well as
about the inner parts of a microphone, in order to get them
not just to memorize that it is called a microphone but to
understand how a microphone works. b) In a country where
somehow all teaching about electricity and electromagnetism
has been prohibited, and furthermore the public has been
brought up on posters showing microphones but saying “beware
: these are shrapnel bombs,” you would have to be
considerably more sophisticated than saying “a microphone is
a microphone” in order to persuade anybody into using them.
c) As a socio-historical phenomenon, a genocide is
incomparably more complicated than a microphone, and much
more difficult to teach about under the best of
circumstances. That much, surely even a philosopher should
understand.
10 These attacks, which resulted in the wanton destruction
of some thousands of businesses, shops and other workplaces
as well as many residences belonging to Greek and some other
non-Muslim citizens of Turkey by rampaging mobs now known to
have been expressly brought into Istanbul from the outside
by group leaders receiving their instructions from the
military-intelligence establishment, constitute the biggest
single act of premeditated mass violence against
non-Turkish, non-Muslim populations in the Republican
era—and therefore also the closest thing in that Republican
era to the Armenian horrors of 1915. In fact, for critical,
dissenting intellectuals, scholars and journalists of
personal worth, the two have always been strongly (and
rightly) connected. It is therefore all the more significant
that in September 2005, that is to say on the 50th
anniversary of the pogrom, it should have been commemorated,
indeed mourned, by most mainstream national dailies as “a
black blot on the history of the Republic,” that it should
have been exposed, analyzed, taken apart in great detail—and
that very few voices should have emerged to defend it. All
this happened in early September 2005, i.e. just weeks
before the “Ottoman Armenians” conference. It was a great
liberating moment in the public sphere, and it was as if the
honest media were saying to the conference organizers: We
understand what you are doing, for we do know what happened
in history, but for the moment we can only say it by proxy,
vis-à-vis 1955, and directly vis-à-vis 1915 (my
interpretation). That is very significant. In fact, it is
perhaps the most important signal that a comparable act of
conscience will also eventually take place with respect to
the Armenian genocide. Provided, of course, that those on
the side of the historical truth know or learn how to
address Turkish society without pushing Turks back in
fearful defensiveness into the arms of an
authoritarian-nationalist establishment.
11 During some informal discussions after the conclusion of
the March 31st panel, there seemed to be a certain degree of
incredulity amongst some members of the (mostly
American-Armenian) audience that it might be possible to
teach honestly about Turkish nationalism, and in that
context also about 1915, in any Turkish academic
environment.
12 In a trenchant interview that I have already referred to,
Prof. Cemil Kocak may have been the first major historian
and observer of contemporary Turkey to state clearly that
full and genuine democracy is impossible on an Ataturkist
ideological basis.
13 What do you mean you do not know? Of course you know as
we all know. We all know that this is nothing but a bunch of
baseless slanders— wrote Emin Colasan.
14 Why, then, is the Turkish government taking this risk?
Could it be that, seeing no other way out of the hole into
which deep state denialism has dug Turkey over the last 40
years, they actually want to externalize and
internationalize the political responsibility for
recognition ? The reforming Tanzimat pashas of the 19th
century were famous for both grumbling against Great Power
demands as “interference in our internal affairs,” but also
using them to persuade the sultan of the necessity for
reform. On the EU road, it has become common for
contemporary reformers to justify everything by the need to
satisfy the Copenhagen criteria. Could something similar be
happening here, in Abdullah Gul’s WT editorial and then the
NYT ad? In politics and diplomacy, stranger things have
happened.
15 Crucial here is whether to opt for a legal, textbook
definition of “denialism” or a working, on-hands,
situationist understanding of the mental-emotional core of
denial.
16 Consider, for example, what I have already said regarding
Abdullah Gul’s recent WT editorial, and the NYT ad that has
followed. Here is fertile ground for rethinking a more
nuanced, flexible road map. If this option were to be taken,
maybe five years from now Gul’s editorial might be seen as
having constituted a new demarche. On the other hand, if
this option is not taken because of a belief that it is
nothing but a gimmick or a smokescreen for enduring
denialism, of course nothing will have come of it, and in
the end the gimmick or smokescreen verdict will in a sense
have been “proven.”
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