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REBEL LAND: AMONG TURKEY'S FORGOTTEN PEOPLES BY CHRISTOPHER DE BELLAIGUE; OUT OF STEPPE: THE LOST PEOPLES OF CENTRAL ASIA BY DANIEL METCALFE
The Times
April 4, 2009
The Times review by Maureen Freely
A young Englishman goes to Turkey to work as a correspondent. He
falls in love, picks up the language, and is caught up in the great
romance of East-West relations, imagining that his new home, Ankara,
is its hub. He becomes interested in Turkish history, noting, with
some puzzlement, that his Turkish friends want, for the most part, to
turn away from it. But they recommend a few books by eminent British
and American scholars. Having read them, he is inspired to write an
essay on the origins of the Turkish Republic for The New York Review
of Books, in which he refers in passing to the massacre of up to half
a million Armenians in 1915, suggesting that it is best understood
in the context of widespread ethnic conflicts that raged throughout
the Ottoman Empire after it entered the First World War on the losing
side and began to break apart.
When the scholars of the Armenian diaspora bombard The New York Review
of Books with furious letters (claiming a death toll three times
larger, and insisting that it was - because planned and orchestrated
from above - a genocide) our young correspondent is appalled. How could
he have got it so wrong? He does more reading, this time drawing o n
texts rarely found on the coffee tables of the Turkish secular elite,
slowly coming to see that he has blundered into one of the great
historical controversies of all time.
This is the story that Christopher de Bellaigue tells against himself
in the opening pages of Rebel Land. The chapters that follow chart
his attempt to make amends. The obvious way forward would have been
to track the history wars that were in full swing in and outside
Turkey in 2005 and that have led to the deniers of official history
being challenged for the first time by Turkish scholars on Turkish
soil. The trials of Orhan Pamuk and more than 100 others for insulting
Turkishness can be best understood in this context.
So can the assassination of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink
in 2007 and the still-unfolding Ergenekon trial, which links several
retired generals and almost a hundred others in the secular elite to
a state-sponsored terrorist organisation that had allegedly planned
to use a string of assassinations and false terrorist incidents to
silence those wishing to challenge official history, while at the
same time softening up the country for a coup.
One day, when it is all over, if it is ever all over, someone will
write a book about it. It is greatly to de Bellaigue's credit that he
decides to leave that poisoned chalice for someone else. Hoping to find
the human stories of love, longing and loss, he sets out for Varto,
a small town in the southeast that was "caught up in the fury of 1915"
and has, a knowledgeable friend assures him, continued to be "important
beyond its size". By that the friend means that it plays a significant
role in the Kurdish separatist movement, contributing not just heroes
but (the friend says with a smile) three of its most famous traitors.
On the last leg of his journey, de Bellaigue gets a lift with a group
of American Armenians making a pilgrimage to the monastery of Surp
Karapet. As he stands with the pilgrims before the ruins, trying to
pass himself off as one of them, he notes that they are ringed by a
not entirely friendly group of Kurdish peasants, who are surrounded
in turn by Turkish soldiers. All three circles, he notes, have claims
on this land. Coming down from the Serafettin mountains, and seeing
Varto from a distance, in a valley "hollowed and glassy where the
meltwaters had spread" and set against the great grey whale of the
Bingöl plateau, he is stunned by its beauty. He has "an impression
of water as landscape, masterful and unruly, swilling drunkenly and
breaking banks of its own making", seeing it as a landscape that
"inspires one not to recumbency, as the Aegean groves, nor to poetry,
as the oases of Iran, but to action". But the pace slows as he arrives
in town to be met by the two
policemen who will follow him throughout his travels in and around
Varto.
The more he sees of the district, the more he comes to understand
it as an occupied territory. As he wanders from village to village,
watched and mistrusted on all sides, there are echoes of Ka wandering
through the neighbouring city of Kars in Orhan Pamuk's Snow.
Soon de Bellaigue has met the mayor, whose party has links with Kurdish
separatists, and the district governor, whose masters are intent on
crushing not just the separatists, but all manifestations of Kurdish
culture. He rents a room in the hostel where the state houses its
teachers: one of their jobs is to crack down on all students heard
using one of the two Kurdish languages still spoken behind closed
doors. Later, there is the "captain" who sweeps in from points unknown
for a friendly chat at the police station, and who is in no doubt
that de Bellaigue is (like himself) a spy.
By now just about everyone else in Varto has reached the same
conclusion. If they do agree to talk about history, most of it
is lies. But he doggedly persists, reading whatever he can find
and visiting the Varto diaspora in Germany and northern Iraq. One
particular exile opens doors for him, and slowly he is able to pull
together a tangled century-long web of human tragedies in such a way
that no reader (even this one, who would like to believe in truth and
reconciliation) can close the book feeling anything other than despair.
There are no innocents in this story. Europe and Europeans (not
least the author) play their part. The book is sure to cause a new
skirmish in the history wars de Bellaigue so assiduously avoided,
but his critics should pause, at least, to admire the fineness of its
prose and the darkness of its heart. It is, in the end, a brilliant
literary thriller, an incursion into forbidden territory that is all
the more gripping for being true.
Daniel Metcalfe is, in many ways, a younger version of de
Bellaigue. In Out of Steppe, he recounts, sometimes guilelessly,
but always with a noble heart, his search for the forgotten peoples
of Central Asia. These include the Karakalpaks of Uzbekistan; the
last remaining Jews of Bukhara, said to be the descendents of the
Israelite tribes of Isaachar and Naphtali; the Germans who have lived
in Kazakhstan since Catherine the Great brought them over in the late
18th century; the Yaghnobis, said to descend from fire-worshippers;
the Hazaras of Afghanistan, whose giant Buddhas were destroyed by
the Taleban; and the Kalashas of the Hindu Kush, thought by some
to be the descendents of Alexander's army. Everywhere there is the
detritus of the Great Games that have been played out on this soil:
the environmental atrocities are, if anything, even more appalling. And
then there is the destruction of old buildings and old ways in the
name of modernity. The lost peoples of Central Asia are not so much
lost as heading for extinction, and it may be too late to save them.
Rebel Land: Among Turkey's Forgotten Peoples by Christopher de
Bellaigue Bloomsbury, £20; 288pp
Out of Steppe: The Lost Peoples of Central Asia by Daniel Metcalfe
Hutchinson, £18.99; 352pp
The Times
April 4, 2009
The Times review by Maureen Freely
A young Englishman goes to Turkey to work as a correspondent. He
falls in love, picks up the language, and is caught up in the great
romance of East-West relations, imagining that his new home, Ankara,
is its hub. He becomes interested in Turkish history, noting, with
some puzzlement, that his Turkish friends want, for the most part, to
turn away from it. But they recommend a few books by eminent British
and American scholars. Having read them, he is inspired to write an
essay on the origins of the Turkish Republic for The New York Review
of Books, in which he refers in passing to the massacre of up to half
a million Armenians in 1915, suggesting that it is best understood
in the context of widespread ethnic conflicts that raged throughout
the Ottoman Empire after it entered the First World War on the losing
side and began to break apart.
When the scholars of the Armenian diaspora bombard The New York Review
of Books with furious letters (claiming a death toll three times
larger, and insisting that it was - because planned and orchestrated
from above - a genocide) our young correspondent is appalled. How could
he have got it so wrong? He does more reading, this time drawing o n
texts rarely found on the coffee tables of the Turkish secular elite,
slowly coming to see that he has blundered into one of the great
historical controversies of all time.
This is the story that Christopher de Bellaigue tells against himself
in the opening pages of Rebel Land. The chapters that follow chart
his attempt to make amends. The obvious way forward would have been
to track the history wars that were in full swing in and outside
Turkey in 2005 and that have led to the deniers of official history
being challenged for the first time by Turkish scholars on Turkish
soil. The trials of Orhan Pamuk and more than 100 others for insulting
Turkishness can be best understood in this context.
So can the assassination of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink
in 2007 and the still-unfolding Ergenekon trial, which links several
retired generals and almost a hundred others in the secular elite to
a state-sponsored terrorist organisation that had allegedly planned
to use a string of assassinations and false terrorist incidents to
silence those wishing to challenge official history, while at the
same time softening up the country for a coup.
One day, when it is all over, if it is ever all over, someone will
write a book about it. It is greatly to de Bellaigue's credit that he
decides to leave that poisoned chalice for someone else. Hoping to find
the human stories of love, longing and loss, he sets out for Varto,
a small town in the southeast that was "caught up in the fury of 1915"
and has, a knowledgeable friend assures him, continued to be "important
beyond its size". By that the friend means that it plays a significant
role in the Kurdish separatist movement, contributing not just heroes
but (the friend says with a smile) three of its most famous traitors.
On the last leg of his journey, de Bellaigue gets a lift with a group
of American Armenians making a pilgrimage to the monastery of Surp
Karapet. As he stands with the pilgrims before the ruins, trying to
pass himself off as one of them, he notes that they are ringed by a
not entirely friendly group of Kurdish peasants, who are surrounded
in turn by Turkish soldiers. All three circles, he notes, have claims
on this land. Coming down from the Serafettin mountains, and seeing
Varto from a distance, in a valley "hollowed and glassy where the
meltwaters had spread" and set against the great grey whale of the
Bingöl plateau, he is stunned by its beauty. He has "an impression
of water as landscape, masterful and unruly, swilling drunkenly and
breaking banks of its own making", seeing it as a landscape that
"inspires one not to recumbency, as the Aegean groves, nor to poetry,
as the oases of Iran, but to action". But the pace slows as he arrives
in town to be met by the two
policemen who will follow him throughout his travels in and around
Varto.
The more he sees of the district, the more he comes to understand
it as an occupied territory. As he wanders from village to village,
watched and mistrusted on all sides, there are echoes of Ka wandering
through the neighbouring city of Kars in Orhan Pamuk's Snow.
Soon de Bellaigue has met the mayor, whose party has links with Kurdish
separatists, and the district governor, whose masters are intent on
crushing not just the separatists, but all manifestations of Kurdish
culture. He rents a room in the hostel where the state houses its
teachers: one of their jobs is to crack down on all students heard
using one of the two Kurdish languages still spoken behind closed
doors. Later, there is the "captain" who sweeps in from points unknown
for a friendly chat at the police station, and who is in no doubt
that de Bellaigue is (like himself) a spy.
By now just about everyone else in Varto has reached the same
conclusion. If they do agree to talk about history, most of it
is lies. But he doggedly persists, reading whatever he can find
and visiting the Varto diaspora in Germany and northern Iraq. One
particular exile opens doors for him, and slowly he is able to pull
together a tangled century-long web of human tragedies in such a way
that no reader (even this one, who would like to believe in truth and
reconciliation) can close the book feeling anything other than despair.
There are no innocents in this story. Europe and Europeans (not
least the author) play their part. The book is sure to cause a new
skirmish in the history wars de Bellaigue so assiduously avoided,
but his critics should pause, at least, to admire the fineness of its
prose and the darkness of its heart. It is, in the end, a brilliant
literary thriller, an incursion into forbidden territory that is all
the more gripping for being true.
Daniel Metcalfe is, in many ways, a younger version of de
Bellaigue. In Out of Steppe, he recounts, sometimes guilelessly,
but always with a noble heart, his search for the forgotten peoples
of Central Asia. These include the Karakalpaks of Uzbekistan; the
last remaining Jews of Bukhara, said to be the descendents of the
Israelite tribes of Isaachar and Naphtali; the Germans who have lived
in Kazakhstan since Catherine the Great brought them over in the late
18th century; the Yaghnobis, said to descend from fire-worshippers;
the Hazaras of Afghanistan, whose giant Buddhas were destroyed by
the Taleban; and the Kalashas of the Hindu Kush, thought by some
to be the descendents of Alexander's army. Everywhere there is the
detritus of the Great Games that have been played out on this soil:
the environmental atrocities are, if anything, even more appalling. And
then there is the destruction of old buildings and old ways in the
name of modernity. The lost peoples of Central Asia are not so much
lost as heading for extinction, and it may be too late to save them.
Rebel Land: Among Turkey's Forgotten Peoples by Christopher de
Bellaigue Bloomsbury, £20; 288pp
Out of Steppe: The Lost Peoples of Central Asia by Daniel Metcalfe
Hutchinson, £18.99; 352pp