A Society Crippled by Forgetting

After it was clear that the Ottoman Empire lost World War I, and until 1920, it was not as hard as it is today to talk about “what happened between 1915 and 1917,” which we, for one reason or another, cannot decide whether to call “deportation” or “mutual murder” or “massacre” or “decimation” or “genocide.” In those years even the perpetrators accepted that it was a “massacre” or a “calamity.” But the nature of the discussion started to change after 1920. Policies were implemented to erase what was done to the Armenians from the collective memory. At first, this act of “forgetting” was a “precondition” for Turkish identity; in time it became an element of its “continuation.” Today it is its “constitutive element.” What is more, it was not only what happened in 1915–17 that was forgotten, but the whole republican history.

The first stage of this process of forgetting was the adoption of the Latin alphabet in place of the Arabic alphabet. Consequently, later generations were prevented from reading the documents written before 1930. In this way, the connections with the past were at the hands of “historians” who followed the state line. In some ways, this became the objective cause of not remembering. The second stage was the introduction of the Turkish Historical Thesis, which was one of the parameters of the common ideal that the “Turkish nation” (something the state was trying to create) was to circle around. This odd thesis, according to which all societies in the world had Turkish origins, was aimed at both restoring the pride that was damaged by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and blocking the “non-Turkish” elements (such as the Armenians, Greeks, and Kurds) that could claim “historical rights” on Anatolia. In 1936, the Sun-Language Theory, according to which all human languages were derived from Turkish, stated in the super-text that the “Turkish race is the founder of all the civilizations in the world, therefore it is superior,” and in the subtext that “all people in Anatolia are Turkish, but because of ‘perversions’ regarding language and religion they forgot that they were Turkish.”

Hostages: Turkish Armenians

News that the novel Forty Days in Musa Dagh, by the Prague-born Jewish intellectual Franz Werfel, was going to be turned into a film gave the Kemalist establishment the idea that other countries could give Turkey a hard time by “provoking Armenians.”

The novel attracted much attention when it was published in Vienna in March 1933, but Turkey grasped the situation nine months later. On Dec. 25, 1934, an article by Falih Rifki, the leading Kemalist ideologue, that warned the German authorities of the book appeared in Hakimiyet-i Milliye, which was regarded as the official newspaper of the government. On Dec. 27–28 in the same paper, journalist Burhan Asaf (Belge) spoke sarcastically of Werfel, saying that “it is obvious from the book that he drinks too much Armenian coffee,” and blaming him for “wanting to rear up the Armenian horse standing on the eroded and leveled Christian morality, with a Faustian roar.” Shortly after, the warnings led the Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels to announce that the book was banned. But it was too late, for the book had already become very popular among German Jews. When Werfel’s publisher convinced him to sell the rights of his book to Metro Goldwyn-Mayer, one of the giants at the time, and when 35,000 copies of the book sold in two weeks and broke the record in 1934, Turkey was alarmed. The newspapers, especially Cumhuriyet and Ulus, which expressed the views of the leading party (RPP), emphasized that MGM was “a Jewish company” and suggested that this event was an “Armenian-Jewish conspiracy.” When this was happening, the Armenian Community Temporal Committee, which was kept as almost a hostage in Istanbul, was forced to condemn the event. On Dec. 15, 1935, a group of Armenians gathered in the Pangalti Armenian Church and burned copies of the book—because it was “full of slander against the Turkish nation”—while singing the Turkish national anthem. In 1936, after the French edition of the book was published in France, MGM announced that they would not be making the film. It looked as if Turkey had won a war against the Armenians. This event resulted in Turkey’s having a more cautious, more suspicious, more defensive attitude against the international community. The fear that the smallest loosening could lead to the loss of Anatolia, which was held on to with great difficulty, was implemented deep in the hearts of the Kemalist elite(1).

When Moscow accepted (with the help of Yakov Zorobian, who was the secretary of the Central Committee of Armenian Supreme Soviet) the demand from a group of Armenian scientists to erect a monument on the 50th anniversary of the genocide, the Armenian community in Turkey became a target. The evaluation report by Philip Clock of the U.S. Embassy described the situation as follows: “Lately, an issue that is rarely mentioned in modern Turkey, and almost never in the media, started to become a subject of discussion in public: the question of the Armenian minority in Turkey. The word ‘Armenian’ usually doesn’t even occur in the media in long periods of time. The curriculum of state schools is inclined to ignore this subject entirely. The people keep saying that the structures in Central and East Anatolia, which any foreign observer can tell that they are Armenian-made, are made by Turks or by some other group. The issue of the Armenian minority, which is thus ignored and apparently forgotten, was revived by the prospects of the conference on the fiftieth anniversary (of 1915), which will be held on April 24th in Beirut.”

Indeed, Cuneyd Arcayurek, the Ankara correspondent of Hurriyet—the “amiral ship” of the mainstream media—wrote on April 8, 1965: “It is known that in the years of World War I, during various domestic activities, Armenians rebelled in various regions and provinces, and even committed atrocities against Turks. Since various major problems were being faced at the time, and with the influence of Russia on the one hand, and the ally Germany on the other, attempts were made to put an end to it. Turks were killed by Armenians, and Armenians were killed during the suppression of the rebellion. Some of them left or were made to leave the country. But the fact today is this: We have around 80,000 Armenian citizens in Turkey now and every single one of them is a member of the Turkish nation. It is impossible for hardworking, knowledgeable, dutiful Turkish Armenians not to regret such a campaign.” In short, a handful of Armenians who could somehow manage to stay in the country were reminded of the fact that they were hostages to the state.

That must have worked, for the next day Hurriyet would state, under the heading “It’s our Armenian citizens’ turn,” that “Tens of thousands of Armenian citizens living in our city detest the Greek-fueled commemorations on April 24th under the name ‘Armenian massacre,’ which is the exploitation of an old event. Armenians in Istanbul said, ‘This can only be a trick of the Greek Cypriot Foreign Minister Kipriyanu. Some Armenians may be exploited unintentionally. We, Armenians of Turkey, have forgotten the past and are living in absolute peace and happiness.’”

What is noteworthy is that an appeal to anti-Greek sentiments related to the Cyprus issue was needed for activating the masses against Armenian nationalism. This was understandable; due to the systematic policies erasing the memories and in the absence of the catalyzing effect of current problems, the people might not have remembered what Armenians wanted from Turks, and thus might not have understood why Armenians were to be stopped. The Spiritual Leader of Armenians, Catholicos Bogos Kirecyan; a former member of the Republican Senate, Berc Turan; the Patriarch of Armenians in Turkey, Snork Kalustyan; and Nubar Gulbenkyan, the son of Kalust Sarkis Gulbenkyan, also known as “Mr. Five Percent,” realized the extent of the danger and had to declare their loyalty once again. After these declarations, Refii Cevat Ulunay, the editor-in-chief of Milliyet, another mainstream newspaper, wrote: “As the late Ahmet Refik [Altinay] said, [what is at issue is] the two massacres of the two committees, one Union and Progress, the other Tashnag. Even history would not want this argument again.” So the memories brought to life by the Armenian diaspora were being forced into dark drawers again(2).

The ASALA Effect

The activities of ASALA (Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia; in Armenian, Hayastani Azatagrutyan Hay Gaghtni Banak) between 1975 and 1984 caused the media to be fully involved in the ideological struggle. Thousands of articles were published along the lines of the offical theses of the state. These articles shared the feature of connecting ASALA’s activities to the activities of the Kurdish PKK movement. The intelligence circles, in particular, often claimed that in 1979–80 in Lebanon, an alliance between the PKK and ASALA was established with the leadership of Greece and Syria to sabotage Turkey’s Cyprus policies; the ultimate aim of that alliance was to found the “Armenian-Kurdish Federal State.” In this way, both the Kurdish and the Armenian demands were made illegitimate.

Since the majority of the people were in such a severe state of forgetfulness that they had difficulty understanding the reason behind these attacks, facing the Armenian issue in this way had a very “negative” effect. More precisely, with a retrospective reading of history, it helped the idea that “the Unionists were right to do away with this dangerous group” to settle into the unconscious of Turkish society. Offical politicians and the media engraved the equation “Armenian = ASALA = terror” in the memory of the society. The association of the notion of terror with Armenians was so successful that in later years, the equation “Abdullah Ocalan = terror = Armenian seed” was easily adopted by the public.

Parliamentary Resolutions

Starting from 1980’s, when various countries designated April 24th as “Armenian Genocide Commemoration Day,” and when parliaments started to pass “genocide recognition resolutions,” the Turkish state decided to broaden the ideological fight against the Armenian theses. This primarily meant a more effective use of the “national education” system.

As we mentioned earlier, since the beginning of the republic, history production was equated with the production of national identity, and the authoritarian state model was presented as something that was “naturally” related to the national identity, and was an extension of this national identity. The first rule was to make Turkish history “clean and honorable.” The aim was to create the myth of a “Turkish” race that had stayed the same for almost 10,000 years on Anatolian lands, while all other races faded away. However, there were two periods. Before Turkey was pressed by ASALA and the parliamentary resolutions about the genocide, Armenians were sometimes mentioned as subjects of a distant past, and in general the language was not so negative. The capture of Ani, the capital of the Armenian Kingdom of Bagrati, by the Seljuks in 1064, or the battles between the Seljuks and the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia between the 12th and 14th centuries, were sometimes belittled, sometimes ignored, and sometimes presented as if there had been no battles. In some cases, these kingdoms were presented as “small,” and in some cases their borders were made indistinct. Sometimes they were located outside of Anatolia, and other times it was said that the “Oguz, Pecenek, Kipcak tribes had arrived earlier” in the lands where Armenians lived. In this way, it was suggested that Armenians had no historical rights over Anatolia.

In the 1960’s and 1970’s, another development that showed that the Armenian taboo was a strong adhesive among the intellectuals was the movement known as “Blue Anatolia.” With the help of this fresh movement, according to which Anatolia was “ours not because we conquered it, but because it is ours,” the pagan, Christian, and Muslim histories of Anatolia were presented as the evolution of a single unit, while Turkish was presented as the successor of the 72 languages spoken before, and “Turkishness” was presented as a version of the humanist thought. But among these societies or civilizations that constituted “us,” Armenians were not mentioned.

Textbooks

Starting from the 1980’s, a radical change occurred and the subject of the “Armenian issue” was introduced into the textbooks. This part was prepared in accordance with the 1953 book The Armenian Problem: Nine Questions, Nine Answers by Ahmet Esat Uras, who came from the Unionist movement and who even played a role in the deportations. The Turkish Foreign Ministry showed great interest in this book from the day it was published, and it was printed over and over again, and translated into foreign languages. According to it, Armenians, who were happily living in the Ottoman times and were being “assimilated in the Turkish culture,” suddenly adopted a hostile attitude towards Turks. In these narratives, the 1894–96 Sasun events and 1909 Adana events were presented as examples of Armenian hostility, and the 1915–17 deportations were shown as a response to these events.

The following excerpts from various secondary and high school textbooks(3) may give an idea about what the young generations in Turkey have been told:

“Forced migration was for the security of the state. It was never used as an instrument of genocide, threat, or oppression against Armenians.”

“During this migration, due to the harsh climate, diseases, attacks by the bandits, some Armenians died. These are the events that Armenians claim to be “genocide.”...During this period, the number of Turks who lost their lives for the same reasons was much greater than that of Armenians. By the deportation law, the state secured the safety of the defenseless civilian Turks and of its army that was in a state of war. Thus, Armenians who were not near the front-lines were not moved. ...When Armenians started killing Turks, due to the provocation of the Western states, we had to defend ourselves.”

“Thus, from the middle of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, those Armenians who were deceived and tricked by the provocations of certain European states, and believed in the existence of an Armenian Problem, betrayed their country and their state, casting suspicion and blame on all Armenians, and thereby causing great pain and suffering for decent and good-willed Armenian citizens.”

On June 14, 2002, the Committee of Education that chooses the textbooks to be used in schools decreed that the teachers, too, were to be educated along the lines of the new curriculum. Newspapers reported the decree with the heading: “The state’s position on the claims of the Armenian Genocide, the Founding of the Pontic State, and the Syriac Christian Genocide, will be laid out in the textbooks.” This decree came into effect in 2002.

What was striking in that curriculum was that all secondary school students throughout the country were told to write essays on “The Armenian Rebellion in World War I and Armenian Activities,” which would then be evaluated in an essay competition. The apparent aim of this competition was to make the students narrate the atrocities committed by the Armenians against the Turks. What was most deplorable was the fact that Armenian students living in Turkey were also made to write these essays. Just like during the 50th anniversary events, the Armenian citizens were treated as “hostages.”

Conclusion

These are just a few examples chosen from a history of 90 years. There are hundreds of other events that need to be discovered, described, examined, and interpreted. But even this much helps us have a grasp on the state’s policies of erasing memories. We know that “remembering” and “forgetting” have been important elements of the Turkish national identity. What was peculiar to these stages of the Turkish identity was that forgetting the 1915–17 Armenian Massacres was a constitutive element. The Turkish identity could create itself only by refusing to remember what had happened in 1915–17 because, for the Turkish society, Armenians symbolized the most traumatic event in their history—the collapse of the Ottoman Empire—and Armenians continuously reminded the Turks of this horrible collapse.

As is well known, the Ottoman Empire was spread over three continents until it entered a period of disintegration during its last 150 years. Unending wars, defeats, and great losses of human life gave rise to deep anxieties about the fate of the empire. In this period, while every attempt to prevent the empire from collapsing failed, the ruling elite tended to blame the imperialist forces and the “minorities” that collaborated with them. In those years, the ruling class of the empire thought that they were excluded from the historical narrative told by the West, that they were now “nobody,” and that they faced a complete destruction of the state. But they found consolation in the thought that it was essentially “the betrayal of the people that they were the masters of” that had caused this situation.

In this atmosphere, the ruling cadres of the new state believed that they could heal their wounds by leaving these dark pages of history behind. The year 1923 was a new beginning for them. The Turkish society saw itself as a Phoenix that was reborn from the ashes. And it was as if Armenians symbolized the “ashes” that they were reborn from. One other reason for not being willing to confront historical reality is the fear of punishment. Many Turks know that if they acknowledge the genocide, Turkey would have to pay compensation in the form of land and money for the compensation/reparation of the plundered wealth of the Armenian who were deported. That was probably why Armenians had to be completely forgotten.

However, one must keep in mind that it is not only the Armenian Genocide but also the very recent past is almost forgotten. And because the Turkish society prefers to move forward without adequately addressing underlying conflicts, social tensions accumulate to the point where they become explosive.

Endnotes:

1.- From Rıfat N. Bali, Musa’nin Evlatları Cumhuriyet’in Yurttaslari, Iletisim Yayinlari, 2003, s. 109-140, “The Forty Years of Musa Dagh: The Film That Was Denied,” Journal of Armenian Studies, Vol. III. Nos. 1-2, 1986-87, p.121-131.

2.- From Rıfat N. Bali, “Turk Basininda ve Turk-Ermeni Toplumunda Ermeni Kiyiminin 50. yildonumunun Yansimalari,” Toplumsal Tarih, March 2007, No.159, p. 62-65.

3.- By order of Emin Aksit, Ortaokul II, 1985, p. 135; Sumer and Others, Lise II, 1993, p.214 , Yildiz and Others, Lise III, 1991, p. 182 and Ugurlu-Balci, Lise III, 1992, p. 229, quoted by Etienne Capeaux, Turk Tarih Tezinden Turk Islam Tezine, Tarih Vakfi Yurt Yayinlari, Istanbul, 2000, p. 301.