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Killing fields
Alev Adil explores a region still enraged by a 'crime on the sly'
Alev Adil
The Guardian, Saturday 20 June 2009
The wild landscapes of eastern Turkey are beautiful and unruly, never
entirely tamed by the Ottoman empire or the Turkish republic. They are
home to feudal clans of Kurmanji-speaking Kurds and Zaza-speaking
Kizilbas, and during the first world war this region was the locus for
the mass deportations and massacres of local Armenians. Christopher de
Bellaigue sets out to tell the story of the "strange, enchanting,
bloodstained" district of Varto, in the province of Mus - a place where
"modern history has not settled".
Sifting through propaganda, partisan accounts and evasive oral
histories, de Bellaigue delivers a comprehensive primer in Turkish
political history, told through a densely packed account of the shifting
allegiances of Varto's people for and against the Ottoman empire, the
republic established by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the Armenians and each
other, and among their own clans through the 20th century.
While these local stories both reflect and determine the wider history
of the nation state, they also have the quality of medieval epics;
rugged men on horses, fighters frozen in the snow, blood feuds which
sound centuries old but turn out to have taken place barely a generation
ago.
The fiercely contested histories of the region map a trail of blood from
the violent elimination of the Armenians in 1915, through the 1925
Sheikh Sait rebellion against Atatürk's new republic, to the
contemporary conflict between the Turkish military and the PKK. De
Bellaigue decries and deconstructs the official Turkish propagandist
historians, the "frauds or part-timers" who minimise and deny organised
atrocities against the Armenians and the political opportunists like
Varto's own historian, Mehmet Serif Firat, who denied the existence of
Kurdishness.
He also explores the genocide fixation of many Armenian lobbyists. "Two
sides have drawn themselves up, those who work day and night to prove
that this was a genocide, and those that strive equally hard to prove
that it was not. This is a travesty of history and memory. What is
needed is a vaguer designation for the events of 1915, avoiding the
G-word but clearly connoting criminal acts of slaughter, to which
reasonable scholars can subscribe and which a child might be taught."
An extended, eclectic and erudite bibliography confirms de Bellaigue's
scholarly thoroughness, yet his instincts are robustly journalistic: to
"go to the back in steerage with the forgotten peoples. From them I
would get the story, gritty and unfiltered, of their loves, their losses
and their sins." During his four extended stays in Varto he interviews
the mayor, an unnamed Turkish army captain who declares that Turkey has
no minorities, Nilufer Akbal, a multilingual pop star, the descendants
of feudal aristocracies and of Armenian survivors, as well as current
and former members of the PKK. He also travels to Germany to meet
Armenian and Kurdish exiles and emigrants from Varto.
Rebel Land is pervaded by an atmosphere of suspicion, loneliness, anger
and guilt. Fatigue and frustration are brought on by petty discomforts
such as the constant unwelcome company of a plainclothes policeman, the
intermittent hot water and chilly bathrooms, and the persistent aroma of
cigarette smoke and smelly feet at a dismal hotel.
The question of identity is one that personally haunts the author. He
tells us of his own cosmopolitan origins and how he has been motivated
by "the spirit of flight" after his mother's suicide when he was 13. In
his 20s a love affair with a Turkish woman led him to Turkey, which
captivated him. He became fluent in Turkish and settled in Istanbul. Now
in his late 30s, married and a father of two, living between Tehran and
London, his sense of paternal responsibility, distance and change in
perspective make his old adopted secular Turkishness problematic.
De Bellaigue is appalled by the enormity of the "crime on the sly"
perpetrated against the Armenians in 1915, and the lies that continue to
shroud the massacres. He condemns Turkish state repression of the Kurds
but can't envisage a happy future for an autonomous region of Turkish
Kurdistan run by the PKK. "If the Turks were wiped off the map, and the
field left to the Armenians and the Kurds, the killing would start all
over again." Rather than celebrating the new fluid and hybrid identities
he describes as induced by emigration to Istanbul, Izmir and Europe, de
Bellaigue mourns the "death of the local imagination", characterising
Varto's diasporic German communities as drifting away in the
"featureless ocean" of the global village.
At the close of the book a courteous Armenian architect incredulously
asks the author: "Do you think we will exchange one and a half million
murdered ancestors for an apology? That's our land the Turks are sitting
on." Regrettably, de Bellaigue's conclusion is more concerned with
"insatiable rage" than with providing any illumination as to how we
might nurture cultural transformation and reconciliation in the face of
legacies of violence and silence.
¢ To order Rebel Land for £18 with free UK p&p call Guardian book
service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop
http://www.guardian.co.u k/books/2009/jun/20/rebel-land-christopher-de-bell aigue
Alev Adil explores a region still enraged by a 'crime on the sly'
Alev Adil
The Guardian, Saturday 20 June 2009
The wild landscapes of eastern Turkey are beautiful and unruly, never
entirely tamed by the Ottoman empire or the Turkish republic. They are
home to feudal clans of Kurmanji-speaking Kurds and Zaza-speaking
Kizilbas, and during the first world war this region was the locus for
the mass deportations and massacres of local Armenians. Christopher de
Bellaigue sets out to tell the story of the "strange, enchanting,
bloodstained" district of Varto, in the province of Mus - a place where
"modern history has not settled".
Sifting through propaganda, partisan accounts and evasive oral
histories, de Bellaigue delivers a comprehensive primer in Turkish
political history, told through a densely packed account of the shifting
allegiances of Varto's people for and against the Ottoman empire, the
republic established by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the Armenians and each
other, and among their own clans through the 20th century.
While these local stories both reflect and determine the wider history
of the nation state, they also have the quality of medieval epics;
rugged men on horses, fighters frozen in the snow, blood feuds which
sound centuries old but turn out to have taken place barely a generation
ago.
The fiercely contested histories of the region map a trail of blood from
the violent elimination of the Armenians in 1915, through the 1925
Sheikh Sait rebellion against Atatürk's new republic, to the
contemporary conflict between the Turkish military and the PKK. De
Bellaigue decries and deconstructs the official Turkish propagandist
historians, the "frauds or part-timers" who minimise and deny organised
atrocities against the Armenians and the political opportunists like
Varto's own historian, Mehmet Serif Firat, who denied the existence of
Kurdishness.
He also explores the genocide fixation of many Armenian lobbyists. "Two
sides have drawn themselves up, those who work day and night to prove
that this was a genocide, and those that strive equally hard to prove
that it was not. This is a travesty of history and memory. What is
needed is a vaguer designation for the events of 1915, avoiding the
G-word but clearly connoting criminal acts of slaughter, to which
reasonable scholars can subscribe and which a child might be taught."
An extended, eclectic and erudite bibliography confirms de Bellaigue's
scholarly thoroughness, yet his instincts are robustly journalistic: to
"go to the back in steerage with the forgotten peoples. From them I
would get the story, gritty and unfiltered, of their loves, their losses
and their sins." During his four extended stays in Varto he interviews
the mayor, an unnamed Turkish army captain who declares that Turkey has
no minorities, Nilufer Akbal, a multilingual pop star, the descendants
of feudal aristocracies and of Armenian survivors, as well as current
and former members of the PKK. He also travels to Germany to meet
Armenian and Kurdish exiles and emigrants from Varto.
Rebel Land is pervaded by an atmosphere of suspicion, loneliness, anger
and guilt. Fatigue and frustration are brought on by petty discomforts
such as the constant unwelcome company of a plainclothes policeman, the
intermittent hot water and chilly bathrooms, and the persistent aroma of
cigarette smoke and smelly feet at a dismal hotel.
The question of identity is one that personally haunts the author. He
tells us of his own cosmopolitan origins and how he has been motivated
by "the spirit of flight" after his mother's suicide when he was 13. In
his 20s a love affair with a Turkish woman led him to Turkey, which
captivated him. He became fluent in Turkish and settled in Istanbul. Now
in his late 30s, married and a father of two, living between Tehran and
London, his sense of paternal responsibility, distance and change in
perspective make his old adopted secular Turkishness problematic.
De Bellaigue is appalled by the enormity of the "crime on the sly"
perpetrated against the Armenians in 1915, and the lies that continue to
shroud the massacres. He condemns Turkish state repression of the Kurds
but can't envisage a happy future for an autonomous region of Turkish
Kurdistan run by the PKK. "If the Turks were wiped off the map, and the
field left to the Armenians and the Kurds, the killing would start all
over again." Rather than celebrating the new fluid and hybrid identities
he describes as induced by emigration to Istanbul, Izmir and Europe, de
Bellaigue mourns the "death of the local imagination", characterising
Varto's diasporic German communities as drifting away in the
"featureless ocean" of the global village.
At the close of the book a courteous Armenian architect incredulously
asks the author: "Do you think we will exchange one and a half million
murdered ancestors for an apology? That's our land the Turks are sitting
on." Regrettably, de Bellaigue's conclusion is more concerned with
"insatiable rage" than with providing any illumination as to how we
might nurture cultural transformation and reconciliation in the face of
legacies of violence and silence.
¢ To order Rebel Land for £18 with free UK p&p call Guardian book
service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop
http://www.guardian.co.u k/books/2009/jun/20/rebel-land-christopher-de-bell aigue