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The International Herald Tribune, France
March 6, 2010 Saturday
Giving Turkey a hard second look
by JOSEPH O'NEILL
ABSTRACT
In "Rebel Land. Unraveling the Riddle of History in a Turkish Town,"
Christopher de Bellaigue makes a courageous reappraisal of Turkey.
FULL TEXT
Rebel Land. Unraveling the Riddle of History in a Turkish Town. By
Christopher de Bellaigue. Illustrated. 270 pages. The Penguin Press.
$25.95; £20.
In 2005, Christopher de Bellaigue, a British journalist, installed
himself in a remote, forbidding Turkish town and, by so doing,
acquired an anguished intimacy with the region's peoples and their
secret and mythic pasts. This extraordinary intervention - which can
be read as old-fashioned Orientalism or, more generously, as a
globalized conscience courageously at work or, most accurately, as a
bit of both - has a reflexive subplot, namely Mr. de Bellaigue's own
intellectual and moral odyssey, which is of an unusually vulnerable
and romantic character.
As Mr. de Bellaigue freely explains in ''Rebel Land,'' a love affair
drew him to Turkey in 1995, whereupon ''the love affair ended but
Turkey captivated me.'' He stayed (in Ankara and Istanbul, writing for
The Economist), learned to speak Turkish fluently and, immersed in a
Westernized environment, more or less unwittingly became a Kemalist,
which is to say, a subscriber to the ''foundation myths'' promulgated
by Kemal Ataturk and holding sway in Turkey ever since.
Notable among these are the notions that the Turkish republic is a
nation-state containing no subgroups with valid claims to ethnic or
political differentiation, let alone autonomy; that the country has a
European and secular essence and destiny; and, more emotionally, that
the achievement of Turkish nationhood was an enterprise reflective of
a righteous people who to this day remain victimized by the
self-interested incomprehension of the West.
Mr. de Bellaigue in 2001 wrote an article for The New York Review of
Books containing a blandly pro-Turkish account of the fate of the
Ottoman Armenians. To Mr. de Bellaigue's somewhat surprising surprise,
this excited a furious response. The controversy led the writer to a
searching, shameful examination of his sources and his soul: ''I had
been charmed by the Turks, and perhaps intimidated by their blocking
silence'' about the Armenians. ''I had helped to keep Turkey's past
hidden.''
It may strike some as odd that a leading authority on modern Turkey
should be capable of such a blunder; an honest scrutiny of the
plentiful and detailed accounts of the 1915 events provided by
(overwhelmingly Christian) bystanders and survivors makes the case for
an Armenian genocide hard to resist. On any view of the available
materials - the Ottoman archives remain largely forbidden to scholars
- the Armenians suffered a comprehensive and horrifying ethnic
cleansing from their ancient homeland.
But Mr. de Bellaigue had failed to scrutinize these materials, for the
simple reason that he had, more or less literally, gone native. It was
only after he left Istanbul for Tehran (prompted by another, happier
love affair, with an Iranian who is now his wife) that his Turkish
ties began to shrivel and he came to realize he was ''no longer a
Turk.'' By 2005, he was ready to make amends for his offenses against
history, even if he would thereby go behind Turkey's back ''and betray
it.''
The betrayal took the form of repeated visits to ''a little place in
the middle of nowhere'' named Varto, and in this way Mr. de Bellaigue
climbed ''down from the crow's nest of history'' to a place where
''the science of history has been so abused and neglected ... that it
barely exists.'' Varto, we learn, is an exceedingly complicated place.
Situated in Turkey's beautiful, mountainous far east, in the early
20th century it was controlled in short succession by the Ottomans,
Russian invaders, Armenian nationalists and Kurdish rebels. Nowadays
the town and surrounding district are populated by Kurds, a very few
vestigial Armenians and a small minority of Turks.
This ethnic complexity is aggravated by tribal divisions (among the
Kurds) and by an unruly spillage of religions. Most Varto Kurds are
Sunni Muslims, others are members of the oppressed Alevi sect; ditto
the Turks. The Armenians of Varto are Muslims (their Ottoman ancestors
having prudentially converted from Christianity). Local speech is also
a hodgepodge.
Mr. De Bellaigue responds with outstanding energy and courage. Lodging
at Varto's Teachers' Hostel, he is tailed by the police and military
intelligence and suspected of being a spy. Nonetheless, he perseveres,
talking to, on the one hand, the captain of the gendarmerie, the
police chief and the district governor and, on the other hand,
herdsmen and Kurdish guerrilla fighters. He tracks down descendants of
famous and infamous figures in Varto history, and in Germany, he
speaks to exiled Kurdish nationalists. He constructs an unflinching
and painstaking history of the local Armenian apocalypse and
deconstructs the Kurds' inevitably shaky versions of their past.
If one thing becomes clear, it's that the region, indeed Turkey
itself, is buried in a thick ethnographic and historical cloud that is
only deepened by its various inhabitants, who, in this regard, are
helpless particles of fog. The people of Varto are smothered by the
official narratives of the Turkish state, credulous of family and
tribal lore and guerrilla propaganda, subdued by censorship and
hypersensitized by inherited and actual grievances. Their sense of
themselves and their neighbors is built on vagueness, prejudice,
misconceptions, hearsay and, above all, fear. Fear is general all over
Turkey.
Mr. De Bellaigue investigates this mess brilliantly and evenhandedly
(if occasionally emotively). Analytically, however, he can be abrupt.
He describes Varto as ''a place under occupation'' before concluding,
a little too tersely, that the ''Kurdish movement in Turkey ... is a
mirage.''
With regard to that hottest of potatoes, the Armenians, he deplores as
''a travesty of history and memory'' the divisive obsession with the
question of genocide: ''What is needed is a vaguer description for the
events of 1915, avoiding the G-word but clearly connoting criminal
acts of slaughter, to which reasonable scholars can subscribe,''
thereby promoting ''a cultural and historical meeting between today's
Turks, Kurds and Armenians.'' This is an important and potentially
attractive suggestion, but Mr. de Bellaigue declines to elaborate its
moral and philosophical foundations; a pity, since he has earned the
reader's trust.
It's a sense of trust, though, that ''Rebel Land'' ultimately
bequeaths - a rare, remarkable feat, given the treacherousness of the
terrain. Mr. de Bellaigue concludes his personal story with the
information that, having wandered restlessly among ''the tall stalks
of identity,'' fatherhood has returned him to England and to a new
appreciation of his citizenship. That may be so; but whatever his
protestations to the contrary, his heart remains part Turkish. And
Turkey, however much it may not like it, is lucky to have Christopher
de Bellaigue. This book ought to be compulsory reading from Batman to
Bodrum.
March 6, 2010 Saturday
Giving Turkey a hard second look
by JOSEPH O'NEILL
ABSTRACT
In "Rebel Land. Unraveling the Riddle of History in a Turkish Town,"
Christopher de Bellaigue makes a courageous reappraisal of Turkey.
FULL TEXT
Rebel Land. Unraveling the Riddle of History in a Turkish Town. By
Christopher de Bellaigue. Illustrated. 270 pages. The Penguin Press.
$25.95; £20.
In 2005, Christopher de Bellaigue, a British journalist, installed
himself in a remote, forbidding Turkish town and, by so doing,
acquired an anguished intimacy with the region's peoples and their
secret and mythic pasts. This extraordinary intervention - which can
be read as old-fashioned Orientalism or, more generously, as a
globalized conscience courageously at work or, most accurately, as a
bit of both - has a reflexive subplot, namely Mr. de Bellaigue's own
intellectual and moral odyssey, which is of an unusually vulnerable
and romantic character.
As Mr. de Bellaigue freely explains in ''Rebel Land,'' a love affair
drew him to Turkey in 1995, whereupon ''the love affair ended but
Turkey captivated me.'' He stayed (in Ankara and Istanbul, writing for
The Economist), learned to speak Turkish fluently and, immersed in a
Westernized environment, more or less unwittingly became a Kemalist,
which is to say, a subscriber to the ''foundation myths'' promulgated
by Kemal Ataturk and holding sway in Turkey ever since.
Notable among these are the notions that the Turkish republic is a
nation-state containing no subgroups with valid claims to ethnic or
political differentiation, let alone autonomy; that the country has a
European and secular essence and destiny; and, more emotionally, that
the achievement of Turkish nationhood was an enterprise reflective of
a righteous people who to this day remain victimized by the
self-interested incomprehension of the West.
Mr. de Bellaigue in 2001 wrote an article for The New York Review of
Books containing a blandly pro-Turkish account of the fate of the
Ottoman Armenians. To Mr. de Bellaigue's somewhat surprising surprise,
this excited a furious response. The controversy led the writer to a
searching, shameful examination of his sources and his soul: ''I had
been charmed by the Turks, and perhaps intimidated by their blocking
silence'' about the Armenians. ''I had helped to keep Turkey's past
hidden.''
It may strike some as odd that a leading authority on modern Turkey
should be capable of such a blunder; an honest scrutiny of the
plentiful and detailed accounts of the 1915 events provided by
(overwhelmingly Christian) bystanders and survivors makes the case for
an Armenian genocide hard to resist. On any view of the available
materials - the Ottoman archives remain largely forbidden to scholars
- the Armenians suffered a comprehensive and horrifying ethnic
cleansing from their ancient homeland.
But Mr. de Bellaigue had failed to scrutinize these materials, for the
simple reason that he had, more or less literally, gone native. It was
only after he left Istanbul for Tehran (prompted by another, happier
love affair, with an Iranian who is now his wife) that his Turkish
ties began to shrivel and he came to realize he was ''no longer a
Turk.'' By 2005, he was ready to make amends for his offenses against
history, even if he would thereby go behind Turkey's back ''and betray
it.''
The betrayal took the form of repeated visits to ''a little place in
the middle of nowhere'' named Varto, and in this way Mr. de Bellaigue
climbed ''down from the crow's nest of history'' to a place where
''the science of history has been so abused and neglected ... that it
barely exists.'' Varto, we learn, is an exceedingly complicated place.
Situated in Turkey's beautiful, mountainous far east, in the early
20th century it was controlled in short succession by the Ottomans,
Russian invaders, Armenian nationalists and Kurdish rebels. Nowadays
the town and surrounding district are populated by Kurds, a very few
vestigial Armenians and a small minority of Turks.
This ethnic complexity is aggravated by tribal divisions (among the
Kurds) and by an unruly spillage of religions. Most Varto Kurds are
Sunni Muslims, others are members of the oppressed Alevi sect; ditto
the Turks. The Armenians of Varto are Muslims (their Ottoman ancestors
having prudentially converted from Christianity). Local speech is also
a hodgepodge.
Mr. De Bellaigue responds with outstanding energy and courage. Lodging
at Varto's Teachers' Hostel, he is tailed by the police and military
intelligence and suspected of being a spy. Nonetheless, he perseveres,
talking to, on the one hand, the captain of the gendarmerie, the
police chief and the district governor and, on the other hand,
herdsmen and Kurdish guerrilla fighters. He tracks down descendants of
famous and infamous figures in Varto history, and in Germany, he
speaks to exiled Kurdish nationalists. He constructs an unflinching
and painstaking history of the local Armenian apocalypse and
deconstructs the Kurds' inevitably shaky versions of their past.
If one thing becomes clear, it's that the region, indeed Turkey
itself, is buried in a thick ethnographic and historical cloud that is
only deepened by its various inhabitants, who, in this regard, are
helpless particles of fog. The people of Varto are smothered by the
official narratives of the Turkish state, credulous of family and
tribal lore and guerrilla propaganda, subdued by censorship and
hypersensitized by inherited and actual grievances. Their sense of
themselves and their neighbors is built on vagueness, prejudice,
misconceptions, hearsay and, above all, fear. Fear is general all over
Turkey.
Mr. De Bellaigue investigates this mess brilliantly and evenhandedly
(if occasionally emotively). Analytically, however, he can be abrupt.
He describes Varto as ''a place under occupation'' before concluding,
a little too tersely, that the ''Kurdish movement in Turkey ... is a
mirage.''
With regard to that hottest of potatoes, the Armenians, he deplores as
''a travesty of history and memory'' the divisive obsession with the
question of genocide: ''What is needed is a vaguer description for the
events of 1915, avoiding the G-word but clearly connoting criminal
acts of slaughter, to which reasonable scholars can subscribe,''
thereby promoting ''a cultural and historical meeting between today's
Turks, Kurds and Armenians.'' This is an important and potentially
attractive suggestion, but Mr. de Bellaigue declines to elaborate its
moral and philosophical foundations; a pity, since he has earned the
reader's trust.
It's a sense of trust, though, that ''Rebel Land'' ultimately
bequeaths - a rare, remarkable feat, given the treacherousness of the
terrain. Mr. de Bellaigue concludes his personal story with the
information that, having wandered restlessly among ''the tall stalks
of identity,'' fatherhood has returned him to England and to a new
appreciation of his citizenship. That may be so; but whatever his
protestations to the contrary, his heart remains part Turkish. And
Turkey, however much it may not like it, is lucky to have Christopher
de Bellaigue. This book ought to be compulsory reading from Batman to
Bodrum.