Talk given at the Armenians and the Left Symposium on March 31.(1)

Thank you for inviting me to this special occasion. Over the past seven or eight years, I have become accustomed to talking about (various aspects of) the Armenian question mostly in Turkey, to Turkish audiences. Of course, there have also been some international conferences.

Notable in this regard was the first-ever Turkish-Armenian historians’ workshop in spring 2000 in Chicago, organized by professors Muge Gocek and Ron Grigor Suny, which will probably come to be assessed in future histories as a crucial turning point. About a year later, in spring 2001, there was another conference in Muhlheim, which in contrast was marred by too much shouting and yay- or nay-saying (not surprising, perhaps, given that the audience was tensely polarized between a German-Turkish half and a German-Armenian Diaspora half). Over October 28-30, 2004, there was a conference in Venice organized by professor (Father) Levon Boghos Zekiyan, as well as an October 2005 NATO Rose-Roth Seminar in Yerevan. But apart from these, I cannot really say that I have had that much contact with Armenian (or Armenian Diasporan) audiences.

Now in the U.S. over the last two months or more, however, all that has been changing rather quickly, both by force of location and the tragic events enveloping us. While I was teaching for a month at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, first there was, there had to be, a major tribute meeting for Hrant Dink; and then there was also an evening that Murat Belge and I spent talking to and with an audience from the Armenian community of Detroit and its suburbs. Here, now, is this one-day symposium, which again I feel privileged to be a part of—though not for the purposes of a nebulous or ill-defined notion of “dialogue.” For example, in the two presentations by Henry Theriault and Peter Balakian, my perception is that there have been too many different concepts of “dialogue” floating around. Thus, so-called “dialogue” with Turkey or Turkish officialdom has been mentioned, and reference has been made to the ill-born, state-stacked, and therefore unsurprisingly abortive TARC as one of its second-track channels or avenues. All these are vertically embedded in, and a reflection of, institutionalized power relations. And therefore what they make out to be “dialogue” is actually bargaining in the narrow marketplace or diplomacy sense, for which I have no taste whatsoever.(2) On the other hand, there can also be genuine multi-lateral conversations aimed at insuring an autonomous efflorescence of information flow, opening more and more space for mutual un-learning and re-learning processes, and ultimately changing both “our” and “their” mentalities, between Turkish and Armenian civil society elments, groups, leaderships or individuals. As far as I am concerned, it is only this kind of lateral activity which really merits being addressed as dialogue.

A Habitus of the Left

This is especially so, I would submit, at a conference under the broad title of “Armenians and the Left,” where I might have preferred to take part not as a dialogue-bringer but as a comrade, if only history had been otherwise. I have various reasons for saying this, not the least being that I feel I have belonged to the Left, and not just a Turkish Left but a more international Left, from time immemorial. Well, not really from time immemorial, of course, but from my childhood onward, having been born into a rare Turkish Communist family and household (and a very intellectual one at that), since my father (Erdogan Berktay) was a member of the old clandestine Communist Party of Turkey (TKP) that was the subject of a massive crackdown in 1951-52, at the height of the Korea-related tidal wave of McCarthyism that then hit Turkey. So inevitably, I grew up with memories of his being taken away when I was four, and being away for a long time, first in prison and then in “internal exile,” eventually returning with a more finely-lined face, emerging into the limelight (though all too briefly) as a leading public intellectual in the 1960s. Meanwhile, I myself was growing up, through adolescence to youth and young adulthood, in this dense atmosphere where one talked all the time of the French and Russian revolutions, and of the Soviet Union, and the International Communist Movement, and of China, and Cuba, and new Third World struggles—and precisely as part of that revolutionist culture, also of non-Marxist, non-Communist revolutions and revolutionaries, past and present, including most emphatically national-revolutionaries of an entire historical period when nationalism was (or was regarded as) a revolutionary ideology in close affinity with both liberal democracy and socialism, and was therefore contraposing itself to an entire generation of oppressive, defunct (Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman) empires.

This was why and how I became devoted to Chopin (persecuted by the Tsarist police), and not just for his Nocturnes but also for his Etude Revolutionnaire; and also to Byron not just for his ineffable love poetry but also for the heroic spirit which took him to fight and die at Missolonghi in the ranks of the Greek Revolution (not because he was “anti-Turkish,” as today Turkish nationalism makes him out to be, but because he was against “Ottoman despotism” as a Romantic revolutionary democrat.) Now this is pretty much what I am likely to have thought of the ARF or the Dashnaksoutiun, too, if I had known of it (or them) in those days when I was still in my mid-teens, though I did not, because—and here is the point—although my household was very unusual for Turkey in the 1950s and 60s (imbued with this “proletarian internationalism” also fed by Enlightenment ideals, as well as this radical Left dislike of Turkish hard-nationalists, which led us to cherish a liberated, conscientious refusal to regard the Greeks and other Balkan peoples or indeed the Armenians as “the enemies of the Turks”), nevertheless, despite all these ethical attitudes and positions:

1) nationalism as such, as an ideology, was hardly ever discussed, dissected, criticized;

2) in particular, not much was ever said about all those “national disputes” attending the breakup of empire, which national-revolutionaries of different countries had once fought over, and which continued to pit, now, various CPs against one another, other than that those bloody, disgraceful incidents could all be put down to imperialist, colonialist “divide and rule” conspiracies against our “good peoples”;

3) even more specifically, nothing was said of the Armenian Genocide, which of course was the greatest horror of all.(3)

This probably explains why, while growing up as an enlightened internationalist, and also as part of an isolated, persecuted, marginalized milieu, thereby coming to sympathize with other cases of marginalization, exclusion or persecution, I had no sense of the Armenian national-revolutionaries of the early 20th century, because it was not part of the Left intellectualism and discourse that had become my habitus.

On top of this there came my own Left activism, first here in the U.S. in the context of the civil rights and the anti-war movements of the 1960s (when I became part of a circle that eventually initiated the founding of the Yale chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society), and then back in Turkey, where my reaction to the defeat of both the Paris and Prague Springs of 1968 led further and further away from a libertarian spirit into a more and more rigid and dogmatic utopian platform. In brief, out of an extreme quest for purity, for a fundamentalist Marxism supposedly untainted by any human frailty or impurity, I became and remained a Maoist for two decades, going through all the travails of an entire Turkish generation under the two successive military coups of March 12, 1971 and September 12, 1980, when tens of thousands went through cycles of arrest, torture and harsh conditions of imprisonment. The mid- or late-80s, however, became a time of more seriously critical self-questioning. It was then that, taking my distances vis-à-vis any espousal, however “scientifically” theorized, of a violent revolution or of revolutionary violence, I sought to re-commit myself, now as a critical democrat and an independent Left-intellectual, to a less directly power-oriented and more cultural-educational vision of social change. In the wake of the collapse of the USSR and Yugoslavia, and the emergence of a new generation of national(ist) bloodshed in the Balkans and in the Caucasus, as well as in south-eastern Turkey (not to speak of Africa or elsewhere in what used to be called the Third World), I also started moving to a much deeper and comprehensive critical engagement with nationalism, and therefore also to a new universalism of Turkish, Greek, Balkan, Armenian and other scholars or intellectuals, all of us standing in opposition to “our own” nationalism, nationalist education, mythistories, textbooks and conflict-inciting media—or simply, in W. H. Auden’s words, to all the various sorts of “elderly rubbish that dictators talk / to an apathetic grave.”

Nevertheless, while all this has been happening, and my notions and many others’ notions of future utopias and “long-distance” aims and objectives have all been changing, out of my four decades or so on the Left, I have still retained, I think, certain notions of strategy and tactics, and building alliances or even united fronts in pursuit of admittedly different and much more peaceful, much more democratic goals. So it is with this kind of background, experience and political culture that I would like to address the two or three big questions of 1) the historical reality of 1915; 2) what to call it; and 3) how to go about getting it recognized today. Before I go further, however, I should like to make a brief statement about one paper in particular that has been given before me. I am against virtually everything that Henry Theriault has said and argued for in his presentation—against his pseudo-philosophical, ahistorical absolutes and essentialisms, against his self-righteous moralizing about an eternal Turkish “dominance” versus an equally eternal Armenian “victimhood,” and also against the frightfully patronizing, condescending “advice” that he has volunteered at various points, such as his remarks about why dissident Turks should quickly move on from debating what to call 1915 to discussing reparations. But I suppose I should be thankful for this sort of discourse and position, since it so usefully represents all that I find problematic about certain Armenian attitudes.

The Historical Reality of 1915

“The 90th anniversary of the expulsion and extermination of the Armenians” (Zum 90. Jahrestag der Vertreibung und Vernichtung der Armenier) was part of the title used for a one-day symposium held in Berlin on April 18, 2005. It was organized by the Heinrich Boll Foundation, and from Turkey it was Hrant Dink, Etyen Mahcupyan and I myself that had been invited and participated. If you look at it, it is a pretty strong statement—”expulsion and extermination”—in itself, is it not? So, does this fit the definition of genocide? And if it does, as a verbal expression or statement does it become weaker or stronger, does it lose force or gather force because the “g-word” is not present ? Is the term “genocide” absolutely necessary, at all times and under all circumstances, for any and all conversations regarding the events of 1915? Does it, in other words, happen to be an absolutely indispensable norm for all such conversations to conform to? Should its absence in the Berlin title be construed as denialism, and therefore a victory for (Turkish) nationalism or a defeat for the cause of historical truth? And if we start thinking always in this way, what are some of the possible consequences?

First things first. Whether we say the “massacring” or “the expulsion and extermination” or “the uprooting and annihilation” of Ottoman-Armenians, or utilize any one of such long descriptions, does this fit the definition of genocide at least as understood by (or in terms of) the 1948 UN Convention? My answer is that it does, and that furthermore, we have to understand why. My understanding of what happened in 1915 comprises the following key elements. During and in the wake of the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, the CUP (Unionist or Ittihatci) leadership moved with great haste and alacrity to a new ideological position of regarding the remaining non-Muslim, non-Turkish populations of the Empire as intrinsically suspect. Already in 1913-14, this led to an initial ethnic cleansing of a large Greek population, estimated at around 100,000 to 150,000, from parts of Thrace and western Anatolia—an expulsion achieved through methods of bullying and intimidation (short of outright bloodshed) that in retrospect appears very much like an unarmed dress rehearsal for what would happen in 1915. In between, the outbreak of World War I and various events on the Eastern front led to a further targeting of Armenians as unreliable and potentially treacherous. The war also put even greater power in the hands of the military triumvirate of Enver, Talaat and Cemal, rendering their dictatorship even less accountable both to the Ottoman parliament and to world public opinion, simultaneously isolating Ottoman-Armenians from Europe and the Great Powers. Under these circumstances, the Unionist leadership got parliament to pass a law legalizing tehcir or forced (internal) deportation and re-settlement. On that basis, when it came to implementation, Talaat Pasha as Interior Minister sent out (and kept sending out) not one but two sets of orders from Istanbul to the provinces. The first set of orders, delivered through normal channels to all governors, sub-governors or military garrison commanders, asked for all Armenians to be immediately rounded up and forcibly moved to pre-set destinations. This had to be done within 48 hours, and inevitably entailed forcing Armenians to leave all their immovable wealth and propeties behind, as well as a good deal of their movable wealth (all of which were to be put at the disposal of special government commissions which were expected to channel this new wealth into the war effort). Hence among other things, this set of orders entailed not just a deracination but also a massive, drastic and irreversible expropriation of virtually the entire Ottoman-Armenian community, effectively destroying its conditions of existence. Furthermore, let me emphasize that no distinctions were made between, for example, loyal and law-abiding citizens (in the eyes of the state) and those involved in or suspected of criminal activities; no evidence was sought and given of Dashnak or Hnchak or other sympathies or affiliations. In other words, both the law and this first set of executive orders relative to its implementation targeted (all) Armenians for no other reason than that they were Armenians. In themselves, the orders could be construed as formally legal (in the sense of being based at least partially on a previous act of legislation), but were certainly not lawful (in the sense of conforming to any “spirit of the laws” as commonly understood since Montesquieu, or in other words to the basic requirements of a state of law). In effect, what they did was to remove the Ottoman-Armenian population from protection by and under that state of law.(4) Just this much, therefore, is roughly comparable to all the anti-Jewish persecution unchained by the Nazis from 1933 to around 1941-42, that is to say prior to the launching of the Final Solution. Hence, too, just this much is enough to satisfy Article C of the current UN definition, which has to do with “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”—even if additional killings had not been involved.

But actually, such acts of mass murder were also involved, and systematically and on an enormous scale; for Talaat, the Nietzschean amoral “evil genius” of the Unionist leadership, did not rest content with just this first set of orders, horrible as they were. In addition to his official Interior Ministry headquarters, he also set up a second and paralel “deep state” command center in his own apartment, replete with telephones and telegraphs, which he started using to control his Special Organization (literally Teskilat-y Mahsusa, henceforth TM) field operatives. This Special Organization was the secret armed wing of the CUP, thus a forerunner of many such “armed wings” that would become familiar in the course of the 20th century, standing to the party in roughly the same relationship as the IRA to Sinn Fein, or for that matter the SA’s to NASDAP—though Hitler’s Brown Shirts were much more numerous and public, while the Special Organization was narrow, elite and covert, comprising hard-bitten secret agents receiving their orders only from Enver and Talaat, and cloaked in totally non-accountable anonymity. Ahead of the late April roundups that marked the beginning of the end, Talaat had already sent some of his top TM men into the region, and as convoys of uprooted and destitute Armenian deportees began to move into central, eastern and south-eastern Anatolia, the latter came under attack from death squads of indeterminate mixture as well as tribal groups that had themselves been forced out of the Caucasus by the Tsarist expansion southward, and had therefore acquired a vindictive hatred for all things Christian, Armenian, or otherwise smacking of complicity with Russia. Such primary massacres (in the sense of being directly masterminded by the state(5)) would then seem to have conveyed to the general public the message that the Armenians were “fair game,” as a result of which a more general “shooting season” appears to have opened; in an extreme situation of the sort that brings out the best and the worst in humanity, such worst elements of the local population, too, came forth in a series of secondary massacres to claim their share.6 On long marches in the desert or over other difficult terrain, the cold and the heat, as well as hunger, thirst, lack of sanitation and the resulting outbursts of typhus or dysentery also took their toll(7), as well as sheer brutalization at the hands of the gendarmes that were ostensibly there to guard and protect them. In the end, huge numbers died or were killed, frequently right in front of their parents or children, or their siblings, or other beloveds.

How many? No more than 250 to 400,000, as official or semi-official Turkish authors have claimed? Around 600,000 (or perhaps 800,000), as given by most 20th century editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica? As many as 1 or even 1.5 million, to which ceiling Armenian statements on the subject have been tending to escalate over the last decade? I rather doubt the first and last figures, though that is not so important in itself. What really matters is that an entire people were subjected to sudden, drastic and comprehensive ethnic cleansing, most of which was compressed into a single year, and which, unfortunately, was rather comprehensively successful, so that basically the large and significant Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire came to an end.(8)

Secondly, there is the question of intent. “Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group…” goes the 1948 definition (italics mine). A lot of denialist time and energy is invested on just this point, trying to demonstrate that there was no such intent with regard to the Armenians.(9) It is at this point, too, that the Ottoman archives are brought in. On a very general level, what this reflects is the rather ethnocentric belief that the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is to be found only in the Ottoman archives—and that by implication, all else, anywhere else in the world, must be unreliable. More specifically, it is thereby argued that if there was any such intent of partial or total group destruction, it must be embodied in written directives; conversely, if we cannot find any such statement of purpose in the archives, the case for genocide must be thrown out. But of course, even the most powerful dictators hardly ever commit such things to paper, which is why we do not have written orders for the Holocaust either. Fortunately, such evil discretion notwithstanding, intent also becomes something deducible from the overall context and march of events, and from the total picture—and it is here that the targeting of all Armenians qua Armenians becomes its own proof. Last but not least, there is the question of ideological motivation. Not only politicians and journalists, but even some respectable scholars in Turkey have carelessly repeated clichés to the effect that given the late-developing nature of Turkish nationalism, there can have been no such nationalist ethnic cleansing logic behind the 1915 deportations and massacres.(10) What this overlooks is, yes, the late but also the extraordinarily rapid development of Turkish nationalism under the impact of Italy’s invasion of Tripoli in 1911 and then the Balkan Wars of 1912-13. Recent research by both Taner Akcam and Fuat Dundar clearly demonstrates the following two points: 1) the CUP leadership, and Talaat in particular, had actually come up with a new policy for the Turkification of Anatolia; 2) it was in this context that over 1913-15, the Armenians (along with the Greeks and others) were coming to be eyed and targeted as a suspect population. It is further supported by new light shed (notably by Sukru Hanioglu) on the increasingly strident Social Darwinistic strain in Young Turk thought. It is also supported by large numbers of memoirs, reminiscences or recollections dating from the 1920s and 30s—when, as I shall later note, denialist ideology did not yet exist, and everybody knew and could be un-selfconsciously frank about what had happened. It is also supported by my own ongoing research into Turkish literature of the period, where one can find ample evidence of the shaping of an anxious and fearful, and therefore also vindictively murderous nationalism, replete with all the Social Darwinistic justifications for its own malevolence.

Hence, thirdly, the horrors of 1915 also fit into a broader historical pattern. At the end of the day, I am not a lawyer but a historian. And for historians, frequently it is not an event by and in itself, but the overall context, if any, that that event can be fitted into, and from which it might perhaps derive a further meaning, that becomes important. Descartes and Newton both argued, let us remember, that science should strive to achieve a “complete” explanation of any given phenomenon, or at least as complete as possible. In terms of modern European history, 1915 fits into a pattern of nationalist, Social Darwinistically fed ideologies of mobilization and violence, and accompanying agendas of national purification and ethnic cleansing, extending increasingly harshly from the late 19th century to the 1942-45 Holocaust. With or without the extraneous help of Hitler’s apocryphical words (“Who remembers the Armenians?”), 1915 is indeed such a crucial link in this chain of expansion and escalation that, in its absence, the Holocaust, too, would be much more difficult to understand. In terms of my historical sensibilities and holistic aesthetics, this, too, is crucial.

So then, this was the genocide, and why it was genocide. The next question is what to do about it. (Part II will appear in the Weekly in May.)

Endnotes

(1) This is the full and expanded text of what I originally prepared for the Armenians and the Left conference on March 31, 2007. It is considerably longer even than what was probably an insufferably long talk on the day, since I have incorporated both what I had already written but did not read, and also some subsequent additions.

(2) In fact, liberated scholarship and civil society dissidence, on the one hand, and second-track diplomacy, on the other, can be perceived by some people to be contrary to each other. In spring 2000, there was the Chicago conference, as I have already noted. Later that year, I spoke out on the Armenian Genocide in the mainstream Turkish press, when, on October 9, 2000, the daily Radikal published a full-page interview with me done by Ms. Nese Duzel. There was a furore, and many more subsequently. I felt I had contributed to the cause of recognition and reconciliation. Not so, I was told by one of the organizers of the TARC enterprise. For some reason, his view was that I had ruined what they were trying to do. It is this same TARC that, in the Turkish Daily News article that I have just seen online (April 19, 2007), David Phillips credits with breaking “the taboo on discussing Armenian issues.” He writes: “The taboo on discussing Armenian issues was broken by the Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation Commission, which was established in 2001.”

(3) In retrospect, I would put this down not only to considerations about the USSR and Soviet Armenia in a Cold War context, but also to Marxism’s, and especially Comintern and Third World Marxism’s unhappy marriage with nationalism at both a tactical-political and also a theoretical level. It was this entire edifice that resulted in the Turkish Left’s protracted unwillingness to challenge Kemalism over its two most sacrosanct taboos: the Kurdish question and the Armenian Genocide. Why, after all, does even Nazim Hikmet have so little to say about the Armenians?

(4) So unlawful were these orders in a broad sense, that numerous members of the Ottoman-Turkish bureaucracy either refused to believe them (thinking that they were being tested by the center), or else did not want to implement them. In many cases, these orders could therefore be implemented only after repeated commands and dire warnings from Istanbul, and in some cases after the removal and replacement of the reluctant functionaries.

(5) Do we have direct proof of these secret orders? No, we do not. That is to say, we do not have a single telegram or two that we can point to as actually ordering state functionaries or operatives to slaughter this or that group of Armenians. But we do have an enormous amount of indirect evidence, of circumstantial evidence, so that in fact whether things that surface from illegality or extra legality, it is fairly clear what happened. We have something very close to a smoking gun, in terms of present American political idioms.

(6) Turkish nationalist discourse typically obliterates this distinction between primary and secondary in a causal sense, trying to make it seem as if whatever massacres that took place were purely the work of “bandits” which were both unpremeditated and could somehow not be prevented, though clearly it was the signals emitted by the TM-organized primary massacres that emboldened the worst elements of the local population for the rest.

(7) Once more, in Turkish nationalist apologetics there is the pretense that this was all that happened—and that it was basically an unforeseen, unfortunate accident. Even supposing for a moment that there were no massacres, by what logic might the death of tens of thousands of detainees supposedly under state protection due to hunger, thirst or disease be regarded as not coming under the responsibility of that state?

(8) From a population of around 1.5 million or more, only a few tens of thousands have been left. Such decimation notwithstanding, the latest “wisdom” from some varieties of denialism is that “even if there is a single survivor, it cannot be called genocide.”

(9) Many of the retired diplomat Gunduz Aktan’s newspaper columns, for example, are devoted to legalistic hair-splitting around just this point.

(10) In an article published in the immediate aftermath of the September 24-25, 2005 “Ottoman Armenians” conference, professor Zafer Toprak, for example, has gone so far as to call the notion of the CUP’s Turkification policy “a fabrication.”