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Regarding Dersim: What About 1915?

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  • Regarding Dersim: What About 1915?

    REGARDING DERSIM: WHAT ABOUT 1915?

    http://www.keghart.com/Cengiz-Dersim
    24 November 2011

    There is a question I have heard countless times from Westerners and
    other foreign diplomats visiting Turkey: "Why is it so difficult for
    Turks to discuss the Armenian situation?"

    Some would query in a more sophisticated manner: "All nation states
    have histories marked with a variety of wrongdoings; why are the Turks
    still unable to talk about this topic, despite all the time that has
    passed?" And really, why is it that we are unable to talk about this?

    This is a question about which I have spent much time thinking.

    America, France, England, the Netherlands and other countries all
    carried out their "massacres," not only in the lands they occupied,
    but at other locations as well. As for us, we killed our neighbors.

    For those people who came to North America, the Native Americans
    seemed very "primitive" and alien people. To the British, Indians were
    a people who lived all the way over on the other side of the world.

    But for us, the Armenians were our next door neighbors. I believe it
    is for this that the massacre of the Armenians has left much deeper
    scars on our society than the massacres carried out by the Europeans
    and Americans.

    Another factor that prevents us from discussing this issue is the
    fact that "modern Turkey" and the "Turkish identity" are founded upon
    a sort of "exclusiveness." Those who founded Turkey actually defined
    Turks as those who were not the non-Muslims. And there are even more
    painful factors, some of which have been pointed out by Taner Akcam and
    other writers. Some of those who played active roles in the massacres
    of the Armenians were also part of the founding cadres of the Turkish
    Republic. Thus, facing up to the past also means that we may lose our
    founding "heroes," and have them turned into a series of "murderers"
    to be embarrassed about instead.

    It is now clear that we in Turkey have constructed an identity on
    top of this whole denial mechanism. Looking at this situation from
    this perspective, many things suddenly become clear.

    The Canakkale War was a very painful time in history for Turkey. It
    was a war that saw us bury tens of thousands of the nation's youth.

    Despite the pain that Turkey experienced at this time, we can tolerate
    monuments to the Anzacs (New Zealand or Australian soldiers who
    tried to invade Turkish lands) that stand on our soil, as well as
    the descendents of these soldiers who come to Turkey every year to
    have "sunrise services" in commemoration of the Anzacs. So why is
    it that while we manage to pull this all off successfully, we are
    unable to shed a single tear for our Armenian neighbors, or build a
    single monument in their memory? When people face up to their pasts,
    and reckon with what has happened, they contribute to the evolution
    of their societies. But when we deny what has happened, mistakes from
    the past become greater than just those mistakes, they actually turn
    into a part of the society's identity.

    These days, the Turkish agenda is dominated by another missed
    opportunity for us to face up to the past. There is an open debate
    in the Turkish press at this point over documents that indicate that
    Ataturk and his military comrades gave the orders for the massacres
    in Dersim themselves. We may be talking about the Dersim massacre
    for some time to come. This is because the ruling party thinks that
    a certain political path in this country is responsible for Dersim,
    and that the "mud" that surrounds it will never splatter onto them. But
    this same government does not wish to discuss the events of 1915. They
    are unable to approach 1915 in the same manner. When the truth of the
    matter is that in fact Dersim is nothing other than a repetition of the
    same sort of "problem solving" mentality that we saw at work in 1915.

    At the time when the Dersim massacre took place, the Republican
    People's Party (CHP) was in power. If the CHP is actually able to
    face up to Dersim, there will be more to come. There is the "İzmir
    fire," the "İzmir assassination," the "İstiklal Courts," and many
    other events which our official history retellings have managed to
    skew. Of course, because the CHP was the "state founding" party its
    list of events to face up to is the longest. But as the people begin to
    face up to the past in Turkey, no doubt there are factions of society
    and political parties, which will encounter embarrassing and painful
    incidents from the past. The "ulkuculer" or "idealist" factions have
    never faced up to any of the many massacres that mark their pasts.

    Devout Muslims have never been able to face the fact that they
    were used by the deep state as forceps when it came to events such
    as the Sivas massacres, the killing of Alevis, and so on. The left
    refuses to look at its violence-filled past. And we in this country
    continue to live amongst unburied bodies and mourning periods that
    were never held. Will these debates, sparked by the Dersim topic,
    be a turning point for Turkey? Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
    has apologized for the Dersim massacre, and this is of course a very
    important development, but can we really speak of a genuine facing
    up to the past if we never touch on what happened in 1915, and simply
    cherry pick certain events from our history to focus on?

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