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Erbal and Suciyan: One Hundred Years of Abandonment
hetq
23:22, May 7, 2011
By Ayda Erbal and Talin Suciyan
The Armenian Weekly
April 2011 Magazine
The history of the Ottoman Armenians in the 19th century[1] is a
history of great promises but also of greater abandonment. More than
200 Ottoman-Armenian intellectuals who were arrested the night of
April 24, 1915 and the two weeks that followed possessed the damning
knowledge that they were left alone. Zohrab's Unionist friends, with
whom he had dined and played cards, would choose not to stop his
assassination. But abandonment will not abandon the Armenians. The
survivors in the camps of Mesopotamia were alone, as were those hiding
in the secluded mountains or villages of Anatolia. And those who
survived through conversion or forced concubinage were left alone not
only in the summer of 1915, but also in the hundred years that have
followed.
The surviving Istanbul-Armenians who staged a book-burning ceremony
were on their own too.[2] Compelled to imitate the Nazi party's
book-burning campaigns, they would gather in the backyard of Pangalti
Armenian Church, build a book-burning altar, put Franz Werfel'sThe
Forty Days of Musa Dagh, along with his picture on the altar, and burn
it to the ground. As a last act of symbolic perversion forced upon
them, they would not only denounce the author, but also denounce the
book's content, hence denouncing themselves and denying their own
history.
Hayganus Mark, Hagop Mintzuri, Aram Pehlivanyan, Zaven Biberyan,
Vartan and Jak Ihmalyan, and the less famous all shared a similar
fate, which happened to be that of Hrant Dink too: abandonment.[3]
Likewise, when Armenians around the world gathered to commemorate the
50th anniversary of the genocide, the Istanbul Armenians found
themselves in the middle of Taksim Square delivering wreaths to the
Republican Statue in protest. The continuous and almost non-changing
price of their survival would be their compulsory self-alienation from
all other Armenians.[4]
Indeed, the community in Istanbul was attempting to distance itself
from the diasporan communities. Moreover, there was hardly any
communication between the communities of Anatolia and of Istanbul at
the time. Soon the mythical Anatolia, which is vainly romanticized and
widely hailed today in Turkey,[5] would become an open-air prison of
leftover Armenians during the Republican years. For, a handful of
communities scattered around the country would not be able to
perpetuate their identity as Armenians and would leave their
birthplaces yet another time. Their offspring would become Istanbul
Armenians.
Meanwhile in Istanbul, the remnants of a fading intellectual life
Armenian journalists and writers, along with schools, churches, and
foundations, would all be left to struggle alone against a myriad of
verbal, physical, and legal attacks from both the government and
Turkish intellectuals of their time.[6] The price levied on the
Armenians was extremely high and included not only a clear
disengagement from a quest of justice for themselves, but also a
clear'albeit forced'disengagement from their relatives in the
diaspora. The never-spoken cost for Istanbul Armenians was the
complete negation of their political identity and history.
One can argue that this survival strategy was the direct result of
Republican nationalist policies regarding Turkey's minorities. Thus
the contemporary Turkish practice of demonizing the assertive and
politically demanding segments of the Armenian Diaspora falls squarely
within the same Republican nationalist framework that Istanbul
Armenians historically embraced as a survival strategy. It's rather
puzzling to see why otherwise completely equal non-Armenian Turkish
citizens would appropriate this predominantly Turkish-Armenian
strategy without questioning it. Additionally, the recent privileging
of certain Diasporan Armenians as legitimate interlocutors in the
Turkish-Armenian divide is a continuity of the same Republican
nationalist mentality, because more often than not these privileged
diaspora Armenians happen to be the ones who have chosen not to
articulate any political demands.[7] A subtle, premeditated silencing
of Armenians' legal and political demands, therefore, permeates both
relations and the discourse, and leads to a further evasion from the
issue that is, in essence, political.[8] Today, 103 years after 1908,
the Armenian `Question' revolves around the same problem of legal,
political, and social equality before the law, and equality also means
that those involved in this quest should not be ostracized or
demonized as a fifth column. Unfortunately, even the progressive
segments of the Turkish society feel more comfortable when they are
able to establish relationships with Armenians from a position of
power, that is, when the Armenian interlocutor is speaking from a
position of structural weakness.[9] Even though nowhere can diaspora
Armenians match the kind of international power intellectuals from
Turkey or the Turkish state can muster, these Armenians are perceived
and represented as powerful. Furthermore, they are demonized as
radicals and nationalists, and not necessarily represented as a people
enjoying equal political rights in the polities to which they belong.
To a great extent, then, solitude, although experienced differently,
remains the most prominent characteristic of Armenian society both in
Turkey and in the diaspora.
In this light, the contemporary discourse among intellectuals from
Turkey is far from being able to fully confront the institutional and
societal history of hostility and discrimination against both domestic
and Diasporan Armenians.[10] Although the scholarship over the past 15
years, stemming from a critical need to face recent history, is a
welcome addition to the literature, it mostly concentrates on
crystallized instances of institutional discrimination, such as the
1942 wealth tax, compulsory second military service for minorities (20
kura askerlik),[11] the events of Sept. 6-7, 1955, or the Dersim
Massacres.[12] These discussions have often fallen short of grasping
the issue of normalized discourses of essentialist patriotism and
racism in their day-to-day representations.[13] To a certain extent,
approaching these issues as isolated cases, as opposed to a deeply
embedded systemic and ideological problem, contributed to the
practices of discourse normalization.[14] Indeed, until the
assassination of Hrant Dink, racism was a taboo word in Turkey. If
anything, racism was either an American or European problem; certainly
not one that intellectuals from Turkey should take seriously. Thus,
conscious efforts to keep racism far away from public awareness
resulted in the domestication and cherry picking of issues, and the
creation of pseudo-rival discourses'their nationalists vs.
ournationalists[15] (a false parity)'in dealing with the dark history
of racism in Turkey.
In a similar vein, the complete avoidance of the Holocaust in public
discourse, for example, or in rare instances its use to refute the
Armenian case among leftist circles, is indicative of a political
culture of either obscurantist or viciously pragmatic nature. For
example, the year 2011 marked the first Holocaust commemoration in
Turkey during which the state message oscillated between emphasizing
the uniqueness of the Jewish case and highlighting the Ottoman
Imperial, and then Turkish Republican, tolerance and acceptance of
Iberian, then European, Jews, instead of engaging in serious soul
searching on the meaning of the Holocaust or the dark chapters of
minority history in Turkey, including several waves of hostility
against Turkish-Jews.
ENTITLEMENT, ETHNICISM, RACISM
The debate over the term racism has come a long way since the
Holocaust and the American civil rights movement. Theoretically
speaking, American, continental, and Australian approaches to racism
are not as much interested in dominative (old-fashioned) racism as
they are in modern, normalized, ambivalent, aversive, laissez-faire,
differential, and institutional forms of racism operating
throughlinguistic discursive tools of othering or subordinating within
an asymmetrical relationship of power.[16] Yet, it's hard to claim
these academic and/or popular debates with all their contextual and
non-contextual theoretical subtleties had any profound effect on
intellectual life in Turkey.
Of relevance to this discussion in Turkey is the lack of proper
problematization and of consciousness regarding everyday normalized
racism[17] as the root cause of attitudes when dealing with Armenians
in general, and minority history and personalities in particular. This
general problem is exacerbated by the wide-scale ignorance of majority
Ottoman Armenians' living conditions during the long 19th century and
1915 itself, and Turkish-Armenians' living conditions and survival
strategies during Republican history. There has been neither an
institutional nor societal acknowledgement of the racism[18]ingrained
in the mainstream mindset, nor any wide-scale institutional measures
to combat everyday racism manifesting itself in all its different
sub-types. Yet, somehow, the intellectuals from the majority think
they are, by definition, devoid of such bias.[19] Even if they admit
the existence of racism in Turkey, they conceive it to be a problem of
the right and centrist ideologies and not theirs.[20]
These everyday attitudes manifest themselves in four major
distinguishable forms of majority entitlement. The first concerns the
screening, choosing, and separating of the `good Armenians' (Turkish
Armenians plus a small number of Diasporan Armenians who don't
prioritize genocide recognition) from the `bad Armenians' (who push
for keeping the recognition issue on the international agenda). In
other words, interlocutors from Turkey still think that dialogue as
such is a matter of finding either the apolitical or non-organized
Armenians, or those Armenians who operate only from a position of
weakness'either stemming from being a minority in Turkey or from a
position of geographic dependency, such as Armenians from Armenia.
Besides being an imperial practice akin to choosing to deal with the
`house negroes,' so to speak'a post-modern loyal millet, a
reincarnated millet-i sadika'its regressive character is not limited
to this. Implicit in this approach is the perception of politically
assertive Armenians as the problem. Also it implies a wishful thinking
that if all politically assertive Armenians were gotten rid of, then
the political problem of institutional discrimination and inequality
that is still haunting Turkey would evaporate on its own. Yet, even if
there were no significant Armenian political activity for recognition,
the overall institutional commitment problem in post-1915 Turkey would
have been the same.[21] It's highly improbable that such mock
deliberation geared towards avoiding the legal and political nature of
the issue could deliver the sorely needed institutional outcomes in
transitional political settings. As a matter of fact, aside from their
non-identical religious characteristics, Turkey's Kurdish Question and
Armenian Question have had similar trajectories because of Turkey's
Turkish `Question,' which either does not understand or does not care
to solve the institutional problem of equality that has existed for
over 200 years now. What Armenians think of other Armenians is
completely irrelevant to the issue of Turkish state's much needed
institutional commitments. Moreover, this practice reproduces a
divide-and-rule colonial/imperial mindset, antithetical to the legal
frameworks of human rights and equality. Trying to build a politics
based on the instrumentalization of the inter-Armenian differences to
delay justice cannot solve Turkey's problem of 1915. With or without
the presence of these inter-Armenian differences, the necessity of
implementing institutional changes and complying with human rights
standards will remain the same. If anything, Kurdish political
trajectory should be a grim reminder for those avoiding the core
issues at hand.
The second problematic entitlement concerns the blurring of the
difference between the perpetrator and the victim in order to water
down the majority state and societal responsibility. This is done with
two different, but interconnected, arguments: one concerning the past,
the other concerning the present. The first is reminiscent of the late
1980's Historikerstreit discussion in Germany,[22] although the depth
of the argument and counter-argument does not compare. A number of
intellectuals, including Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, emphasize
that Turks also suffered greatly in World War I, in general, and in
1915, in particular, especially in the case of the Gallipoli campaign.
No one trained in comparative history denies the fact that the Ottoman
Army and non-Armenian Ottoman citizens experienced tremendous losses
during World War I; however, the argument misses the point by
establishing a false parity, equating war to a state-sponsored
campaign of killing its own citizens, and a false causality as if
Ottoman Armenian citizens were responsible either for the war itself
or a major episodic campaign. The second argument, again mostly
originating in conservative quarters in Turkey, but not limited to
them alone, blurs the distinction between the victim and the
perpetrator, and the subsequent generations' responsibilities by
resorting to an `our common pain' argument'as in you suffered but we
suffered, too, because of your suffering. Apart from being a recent
creation, this discourse of common pain reduces the perpetrators',
bystanders', deniers' and their institutions' responsibility to `feel
the pain.' A symbolically violent appropriation of pain of an
unimaginable magnitude, which even survivor generations are reluctant
to own, the `feeling the pain'[23] discourse more often than not
becomes a tool to absolve the institutional and societal inheritors
from ethical and political consequences. We should recall Martin
Luther King, Jr.'s `Letter from a Birmingham Jail,' in which he
writes: `Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are
surely caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single
garment of destiny. Whatever affects one, affects all indirectly.'
Nowhere does King argue that one is entitled to own the other's pain
as a substitute for, or as a means of diluting, political
responsibility.
Thirdly, in rare cases where the victims' historical suffering is
granted, a rather obscene sense of entitlement surfaces. The victims'
interlocutor, itself the institutional and social inheritor of a
generation of perpetrators, bystanders, or deniers, expects the
descendants of the victims to speak in a way that will not make them
feel bad. Despite placing an emphasis on empathy (itself a problematic
term) and openness, the willingness to listen to Armenians is mostly
conditional and carries the implied threat of `If you don't speak
properly we won't listen to you.' The burden of responsibility, thus,
rather perversely falls on the shoulders of the historically
victimized and structurally powerless; and the interlocutor, whose
power and posture is the opposite result of the same history of gross
human rights violations, comes to the discussion not as a truly
interested party but as if doing a favor to the Armenians.
There is an additional relative silencing effect in the sense that the
victim has to temper its discursive tone to suit and prioritize the
emotional needs of its interlocutor at large'in this case, the
emotional needs of the majority Turkish citizens, as decided upon by
these same intellectuals. The entire discussion surrounding the usage
of the term genocide, or the avoidance thereof, is a prime example.
The mentality behind this `dialogue' is where the unequal and
sometimes supremacist thrust of the equation becomes the most visible
in the conditionality of the listening and the absolute power to shut
down the dialogue if Armenians fail to find a proper language (and
tone) to explain their pain. This power dynamic is not unique to the
intellectuals' relationship to Armenians, as it also applies to their
relationship with others, including their historically ambivalent
relationship with the Kurdish citizens of Turkey.[24]
Finally, as a further frame of entitlement, a discourse of sameness is
imposed upon Turkey's minorities.[25] By discourse of sameness, we
mean a reductionist tendency whereby a supposed cultural similarity
between Turks and Armenians, via food and music, is assumed and
presented as a better alternative to rights and equality before law.
This particular discourse, which may have a phenotypic (we look
alike), cultural (our food and music are similar), and geographic
(Anatolia) similarity argument, has a dangerous tint to it. It
involves a pseudo-inclusion of Armenians in an imagined community in
Anatolia where the dominant trait is a potentially exclusionary
narcissism, which is able to love and respect only that which is
similar to itself, and glorifies cultural similarity as a political
solution. The regressive quality of the argument is more evident when
turned upside down, since it's not very clear how it will treat
difference, or what it will do if the minority party does not take the
offer of similarity, or if it simply wants to insist on its
difference. After all, during those limited times when conversion was
an option between 1895 and 1915, the majority of Armenians did not
want to convert, and the whole history leading to 1915, and 1915
itself, can also be read as a history in which Ottoman authorities did
not want to deal seriously with the issue of difference and
inferiority stemming from a dual legal framework of Sharia and Dhimmi
Law. In a similar vein, the sameness argument indirectly hints at the
suppression of differences for the sake of social harmony.[26]
All in all, especially the 19th century land romanticism of the
sameness argument that takes Anatolia[27] as a common mythic location
with ahistorical references to a peaceful, equal co-existence is
totally outdated, and cannot provide a solution to serious political
issues. It can only be a conversation starter where it belongs'at the
raki/arak/dolma table. Rarely does one encounter such problematic
self-orientalization[28] elsewhere. Hummus, as far as we know, does
not have problem-solving powers nor does it have a place in serious
academic or journalistic discussions within the
Arab-Israeli-Palestinian divide. If the same cuisine and music has not
been able to provide any tangible solution to the much lesser
Kurdish-Turkish divide, one wonders how this untenable discourse of
sameness will solve anything among Armenians and Turks. If one is to
take this sameness argument seriously then one has to also explain how
sameness was able to kill sameness.
HISTORY AS CIRCULAR NIGHTMARE
To a certain extent, the history of Ottoman and Ottoman Armenian, and
Turkish ` Armenian and Turkish ` Turkish-Armenian is trapped in the
same pre-1908 conundrum of difference and equality before the law. On
one side of the equation are those who are, still in this day and age,
either totally unwilling or reluctant to accept that Armenians have a
right to political agency and equality before the law (then domestic
Ottoman, now several international polities).[29] On the other side of
the equation are those who understand what political equality and
political action mean in order to secure justice and equality. Neither
side is made solely of Turks or solely of Armenians. Although the
latter is mostly made of Armenians, there are a few scholars and human
rights activists from Turkey, both in the U.S., Europe, and Turkey,
who do not shy away from politics of recognition. These people know
recognition is not just a onetime deal, some sort of ticket to
oblivion, but only the first step in a long struggle of institutional
commitments affecting the human rights and history curricula in all
countries where there is a substantial political debate on
recognitions and denials.
The inability to get out of the circularity of a pre-1908 mentality
sets the boundaries of Turkish-Armenian citizens as well,
unfortunately. Since there is not any real coming to terms with the
past, Turkish-Armenian citizens are still perceived as a fifth column
in general, and still have to distance themselves from the diaspora in
order to be heard. Instead of dealing with institutional barriers,
there is a novel but archaic tendency where the state looks mostly
concerned with window-dressing solutions. Efforts are being made to
appoint Turkish-Armenian citizens to state positions in order to
partially counter the critics of structural inequality. At this point,
one has to remember that there were more than two-dozen Armenians who
worked as high-level Ottoman officials before the genocide; that alone
was not indicative of a commitment to equality and human rights. If
anything, the same pre-1908 mentality conditioned, and still to a
certain extent conditions, the set of political choices for
Turkish-Armenians briefly touched upon at the beginning of this
article. So coming to terms with history is the only way for
Turkish-Armenians to cease to be perceived as a fifth column and to
become fully equal citizens.
In light of the discussion above, the fact that Hrant Dink was
assassinated for, among other things, calling a spade a spade, and
that he continued to be tried in absentia even after his assassination
for daring to describe his experience, shows that it's impossible to
be a Turkish-Armenian freely able to describe his/her experience
publicly. The victim has been further victimized while trying to
qualify the legal and political magnitude of his victimhood. The
intellectuals from Turkey cannot pretend that January 19, 2007 does
not signify a major rupture. This rupture requires a reevaluation and
deeper understanding of the Republican history of Turkish-Armenian
strategies of survival.
If ever Turkey could approach the issue of 1915 from the perspective
of justice, a justice frame that also includes calling a spade a spade
just as Hrant did, on that day, justice will prevail in the case of
assassination of Hrant Dink as well. Further, by doing so, Turkey
would be able to approach and perhaps even lighten the heavy burden of
loneliness of Armenians in her own country and in the diaspora.
[1] For an elaborate and foretelling socio-political analysis written
during the 19th century and recently translated to English, see Raffi
(Hagop Melik Hagopian)'s Tajkahayk: The Armenian Question(Taderon
Press, 2007).
[2] See Bali, Rifat (2001), Musa's Children, The Republic's Citizens,
p. 133, for the burning of The Forty Day of Musa Dagh. Not
surprisingly as an author Franz Werfel was also on the Nazi
book-burning list.
[3] Armenian writers and intellectuals were obstructed some way or
another during the republican period; they either had to leave the
country and/or their newspapers were closed down. HayganuÅ? Mark's Hay
Gin (Armenian Woman), which was published for 14 years, was closed by
the state. The reasons remain unknown. Avedis Aleksanyan, S.K. Zanku
(Sarkis Keçyan), Aram Pehlivanyan (Å?avarÅ?), Zaven Biberyan, Ihmalyan
Brothers who were publishing Nor Or faced various assaults.
Pehlivanyan was jailed because of his articles in Nor Or and his
membership of Turkish Communist Party (TKP). After getting out of
prison, he left Turkey. Hagop Demirciyan (Mıntzuri) who came to
Istanbul for a tonsillectomy, could not go back and remained in
Istanbul until the end of his life as an exile. He lost all his
family, back in Armıdan, Erzincan in 1915.
[4] Aharonyan, Kersam (1966), Khoher Hisnamyagi Avardin (`Thoughts on
the 50thCommemoration'), p. 149.
[5] Most writers and journalists from Turkey refer to an imagined
idyllic Anatolia when addressing diaspora Armenians to emphasize their
supposedly shared background. This imagined Anatolia is a mostly
Republican-leftist ideological construct that does not even correspond
to the contemporary Anatolia that predominantly votes to the right and
far-right of the political spectrum. If anything, in domestic
discourse not involving Armenians, this same Anatolia is loathed by
the proponents of the heavenly Anatolia construct. They romanticize an
Anatolia populated by Armenian artists, musicians, and architects,
whom they would prefer over what they perceive as the current
primitive inhabitants. However historically speaking, neither all
Armenian life was artistic and modern (see Matossian and Villa's
Armenian Village Life before 1914), nor Anatolia has ever been an
idyllic place of peaceful `co-existence' in the century and a half
preceding 1915.
[6] The history of the Turkish press in the Republican era is full of
such episodic outbursts against Armenians in general and prominent
intellectual figures in particular.
[7] Before 2006, the only good Armenians were Turkish-Armenians.
Later, a number of mostly European diaspora Armenians were embraced as
legitimate interlocutors. This attempt at game changing through
instrumentalizing ethnic identity is a textbook example of
colonial/imperial regressive policy. Nonetheless, it is embraced by a
number of progressives in Turkey.
[8] We do not deny nor neglect that the equation has other dimensions
as well; however, those dimensions are framed by politics and even in
the case of supposedly non-political arguments, a politics of either
denial or negation or complete avoidance continues to permeate the
discourse.
[9] Or when the Armenian interlocutor is ready to equally criticize
Armenians seeking genocide recognition, or in some cases even treat
them as sick and obsessed people. Even if it's politically incorrect,
indeed racist, to frame justice-seeking people as psychologically
disturbed, somehow it has so far been acceptable by some Turkish
intellectuals, especially if the maker of the sickness claim is
Armenian. One needs to think seriously what all this means from a
politico-philosophical and social psychological perspective. What does
it mean to see the ethnicity before the argument, to validatean
otherwise very problematic argument just because an Armenian is making
it. How seeing ethnicity before the argument is different than seeing
like a perpetrator state that reduced human being to their ethnic
identity?
[10] Although one may be inclined to think so, the ASALA attacks are
not the starting point for open hostility against Diasporan Armenians.
Also, the earlier indifference towards Diasporan Armenians is rather
strange given the fact that Kemal Tahir was a widely read novelist in
the early 1970's; Tahir published not one but two novels dealing with
1915, neither of which has been translated into Armenian or English.
So the rather common argument `We did not know' does not hold, at
least for anybody who was above 18 and reading novels in the early
1970's.
[11] 20 Kura Askerlik was the compulsory second or third time military
conscription of non-Muslim citizens of Turkey during World War II.
Non-Muslim citizens between the ages of 25 and 45 were kept away from
workforce for over 14 months and the subsequent wealth tax levied on
the minorities with outrageous rates (232 percent for Armenians, 179
percent for Jews, 156 percent for Greeks and 10 percent for the Donme
(converts)) impoverished them further.
[12] In February 2011, the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) submitted a
petition to the Turkish Parliament to recognize the massacres and
deportations that took place between 1937-38 as genocide.
[13] Seyhan Bayraktar's Politik und Erinnerung: Der Diskurs über den
Armeniermord in der Türkeizwischen Nationalismus und Europäisierung,
published in 2010, is the only exception. She vigilantly examines how
discourse frames of the state and intellectuals can sometimes
partially overlap or serve to reproduce nationalist discourse frames.
[14] By discourse normalization we mean all those discursive practices
that unproblematically reproduce bias against politically active
diaspora Armenians. The leftist/liberal discourse is where
demonization of political activity is overtly normalized.
[15] The fact that there are also Armenian nationalists within the
recognition camp does not make the entire recognition endeavor
nationalist. This issue can be thought of more as a larger class
action lawsuit in which individuals (including Turkish citizens and
others) who are for universal human rights standards and for a form of
justice can take part in the same class. In that sense the issue of
genocide recognition per se is much larger than narrow parochial
agendas.
[16] For an extended debate on the evolution of the term
racism/ethnicism and comparative contexts, see Martha Augoustinos and
Katherine J. Reynolds (2001), Understanding Prejudice, Racism, and
Social Conflict; Jennifer Lynn Eberhardt and Susan T. Fiske (1998),
Confronting Racism: the Problem and the Response; Arthur P. Brief
(2008), Diversity at Work; John Nagle (2009),Multiculturalism's Double
Bind: Creating Inclusivity, Cosmopolitanism and Difference; Robert
Miles and Malcolm Brown (2003), Racism (2nd edition); Martin Bulmer
and John Solomos (2004),Researching Race and Racism;Pierre-Andre
Taguieff and Hassan Melehy (2001), Force of Prejudice: On Racism and
its Doubles; Ruth Wodak and Martin Reisigl (2000), Discourse &
Discrimination: Rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism.
[17] According to Wodak and Reisgl, racist, anti-Semitic, and
ethnicist discrimination as a social practice, and as an ideology,
manifests itself discursively and is orientated to five simple
questions revolving around referential strategies (how are persons
named and referred to linguistically?), predicational strategies (what
traits, characteristics, qualities and features are attributed to
them?), argumentation strategies (by means of what arguments and
argumentation schemes do specific persons or social groups try to
justify and legitimate the exclusion, discrimination, suppression, and
exploitation of others?), perspectivation and framing strategies (from
what perspective or point of view are these attributions and arguments
expressed?), mitigation and intensification strategies (are the
respective discriminating utterances articulated overtly, are they
even intensified or are they mitigated?), Discourse and
Discrimination: Rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism, p. xiii.
[18] `The concept of `everyday racism' is intended to integrate, by
definition, macro and microsociological dimensions of racism (Essed
1991: 16). After having criticised the dichotomic distinction between
`institutional' and `individual racism' as erroneously placing the
individual outside the institutional (even though `structures of
racism do not exist external to agents'they are made by agents'but
specific practices are by definition racist only when they activate
existing structural racial inequality in the system' [36]), Essed
explains her understanding of the term `everyday': [...] the
`everyday' can be tentatively defined as socialised meanings making
practices immediately definable and uncontested so that, in principle,
these practices can be managed according to (sub)cultural norms and
expectations. These practices and meanings belong to our familiar
world and usually involve routine or repetitive practices (48-9).'
Essed in Wodak and Reisgl, p. 7.
[19] This is not to say that minorities are devoid of such bias
against the majority themselves; yet these biases are structurally and
causally not identical and need a separate discussion.
[20] It should not surprise us that several websites and reports on
discriminatory and essentialist speech only deal with mainstream
right/conservative press while completely neglecting the faux pas of
those columnists who are self-avowedly liberals or leftists.
[21] Institutions do not become post-genocidal on their own,
especially when denial persists. The Armenian and the Kurdish issues
are deeply related because of the lack of institutional commitment on
the part of the Turkish state and the society to a post-genocidal
normative order. However, institutional commitments are not an end in
themselves, as anti-Muslim sentiment and persisting anti-semitism in
Europe show. The struggle against all forms of open and subtle racism
is a day-to-day pedagogical problem that can't be resolved only on
paper.
[22] Historikerstreit was a debate central to the late 1980's
intellectual scene in Germany revolving around left-wing and
right-wing interpretations of the Holocaust, particularly about its
centrality in modern German history. The right-wingers tried to
downplay the long trajectory of anti-semitism embedded in German
society and institutions in the century leading to the Holocaust.
[23] Not surprisingly, the discourse of `feeling the pain' as an end
in itself is reserved for Armenians and in no way is central to the
Turkish-Kurdish conflict, because Kurds present Turkey with a real
political challenge that Turkish intellectuals cannot evade anymore.
[24] For years majority Turkish intellectuals demanded the complete
denunciation of the armed struggle first before engaging Kurdish
intellectuals. This changed only very recently.
[25] This discourse has been also echoed from both Turkish-Armenian
and a few Diasporan Armenian quarters.
[26] In domestic politics, AKP proponents and secularists are not `all
the same,' but somehow when it comes to essentialist categories of
Turks and Armenians, they `become' the `same.'
[27] This 19th-century land romanticism is what ties some mainstream
leftist Turks to the mainstream Armenian perceptions of land. However,
what is perceived as bad for Armenians (as a `nationalist' longing for
a mythical Anatolia) is good and desirable for Turkish `patriots.' At
their core, Turkish `patriotic' and Armenian `nationalist' Anatolia/
Western Armenia are non-identical but equally nationalistic-romantic
mythical constructions. No Anatolianist Turkish leftist lives in
Anatolia or has ever spent a considerable amount of time actually
living in this mythical Anatolia. As for the Kurds, they do not refer
to the partially overlapping geography as Anatolia and have
practically lived in dire conditions of armed conflict and internal
displacement.
[28] Orientalism is not just about what the West thought of the East
and how it constructed representations of the East. It also has
several self-orientalizing dimensions in which the East tends to
perfectly reflect the stereotype of being `Eastern'`hence lesser. So,
westerners have institutions and law, and there is always raki and
dolma for Turks and Armenians.
[29] One major emphasis when talking about 1915 revolves around the
`but the Armenians revolted' argument. Historically speaking, this is
true, although its magnitude and prevalence is grossly exaggerated.
However, framing the history of violence starting from the Armenian
revolts misses several important points: The terrible living
conditions of Armenians in the 19th century, the episodic violence
that Armenians experienced, the fact that they also tried parallel
tracks of petitioning but their appeals fell on deaf ears, and
finally, the fact that the Ittihadists themselves were trying to get
rid of the same absolutist regime. In a way, those Turkish
intellectuals who are themselves active in domestic politics but who
are not happy with Armenian political activity challenging the
status-quo are still arguing in the same utterly discriminatory way:
`We can do it, but you cannot.'
Ayda Erbal is writing her dissertation in the department of politics
at New York University. She teaches two advanced undergraduate
classes, `International Politics of the Middle East' and `Democracy
and Dictatorship,' as adjunct professor of politics. Her work focuses
on the politics of changing historiographies in Turkey and Israel. She
is interested in democratic theory, democratic deliberation, the
politics of `post-nationalist' historiographies in transitional
settings, and the politics of apology. She is a published short-story
writer and worked as a columnist for the Turkish-Armenian newspaper
Agos from 2000-03.
Talin Suciyan is an Istanbul Armenian journalist who lived in Armenia
from 2007-09. She is currently based in Munich, Germany, where she is
pursuing her graduate studies. She was a contributor to Agos (from
2007-2010) and writes regularly for newspapers in Turkey.
http://www.armenianweekly.com/
From: A. Papazian
hetq
23:22, May 7, 2011
By Ayda Erbal and Talin Suciyan
The Armenian Weekly
April 2011 Magazine
The history of the Ottoman Armenians in the 19th century[1] is a
history of great promises but also of greater abandonment. More than
200 Ottoman-Armenian intellectuals who were arrested the night of
April 24, 1915 and the two weeks that followed possessed the damning
knowledge that they were left alone. Zohrab's Unionist friends, with
whom he had dined and played cards, would choose not to stop his
assassination. But abandonment will not abandon the Armenians. The
survivors in the camps of Mesopotamia were alone, as were those hiding
in the secluded mountains or villages of Anatolia. And those who
survived through conversion or forced concubinage were left alone not
only in the summer of 1915, but also in the hundred years that have
followed.
The surviving Istanbul-Armenians who staged a book-burning ceremony
were on their own too.[2] Compelled to imitate the Nazi party's
book-burning campaigns, they would gather in the backyard of Pangalti
Armenian Church, build a book-burning altar, put Franz Werfel'sThe
Forty Days of Musa Dagh, along with his picture on the altar, and burn
it to the ground. As a last act of symbolic perversion forced upon
them, they would not only denounce the author, but also denounce the
book's content, hence denouncing themselves and denying their own
history.
Hayganus Mark, Hagop Mintzuri, Aram Pehlivanyan, Zaven Biberyan,
Vartan and Jak Ihmalyan, and the less famous all shared a similar
fate, which happened to be that of Hrant Dink too: abandonment.[3]
Likewise, when Armenians around the world gathered to commemorate the
50th anniversary of the genocide, the Istanbul Armenians found
themselves in the middle of Taksim Square delivering wreaths to the
Republican Statue in protest. The continuous and almost non-changing
price of their survival would be their compulsory self-alienation from
all other Armenians.[4]
Indeed, the community in Istanbul was attempting to distance itself
from the diasporan communities. Moreover, there was hardly any
communication between the communities of Anatolia and of Istanbul at
the time. Soon the mythical Anatolia, which is vainly romanticized and
widely hailed today in Turkey,[5] would become an open-air prison of
leftover Armenians during the Republican years. For, a handful of
communities scattered around the country would not be able to
perpetuate their identity as Armenians and would leave their
birthplaces yet another time. Their offspring would become Istanbul
Armenians.
Meanwhile in Istanbul, the remnants of a fading intellectual life
Armenian journalists and writers, along with schools, churches, and
foundations, would all be left to struggle alone against a myriad of
verbal, physical, and legal attacks from both the government and
Turkish intellectuals of their time.[6] The price levied on the
Armenians was extremely high and included not only a clear
disengagement from a quest of justice for themselves, but also a
clear'albeit forced'disengagement from their relatives in the
diaspora. The never-spoken cost for Istanbul Armenians was the
complete negation of their political identity and history.
One can argue that this survival strategy was the direct result of
Republican nationalist policies regarding Turkey's minorities. Thus
the contemporary Turkish practice of demonizing the assertive and
politically demanding segments of the Armenian Diaspora falls squarely
within the same Republican nationalist framework that Istanbul
Armenians historically embraced as a survival strategy. It's rather
puzzling to see why otherwise completely equal non-Armenian Turkish
citizens would appropriate this predominantly Turkish-Armenian
strategy without questioning it. Additionally, the recent privileging
of certain Diasporan Armenians as legitimate interlocutors in the
Turkish-Armenian divide is a continuity of the same Republican
nationalist mentality, because more often than not these privileged
diaspora Armenians happen to be the ones who have chosen not to
articulate any political demands.[7] A subtle, premeditated silencing
of Armenians' legal and political demands, therefore, permeates both
relations and the discourse, and leads to a further evasion from the
issue that is, in essence, political.[8] Today, 103 years after 1908,
the Armenian `Question' revolves around the same problem of legal,
political, and social equality before the law, and equality also means
that those involved in this quest should not be ostracized or
demonized as a fifth column. Unfortunately, even the progressive
segments of the Turkish society feel more comfortable when they are
able to establish relationships with Armenians from a position of
power, that is, when the Armenian interlocutor is speaking from a
position of structural weakness.[9] Even though nowhere can diaspora
Armenians match the kind of international power intellectuals from
Turkey or the Turkish state can muster, these Armenians are perceived
and represented as powerful. Furthermore, they are demonized as
radicals and nationalists, and not necessarily represented as a people
enjoying equal political rights in the polities to which they belong.
To a great extent, then, solitude, although experienced differently,
remains the most prominent characteristic of Armenian society both in
Turkey and in the diaspora.
In this light, the contemporary discourse among intellectuals from
Turkey is far from being able to fully confront the institutional and
societal history of hostility and discrimination against both domestic
and Diasporan Armenians.[10] Although the scholarship over the past 15
years, stemming from a critical need to face recent history, is a
welcome addition to the literature, it mostly concentrates on
crystallized instances of institutional discrimination, such as the
1942 wealth tax, compulsory second military service for minorities (20
kura askerlik),[11] the events of Sept. 6-7, 1955, or the Dersim
Massacres.[12] These discussions have often fallen short of grasping
the issue of normalized discourses of essentialist patriotism and
racism in their day-to-day representations.[13] To a certain extent,
approaching these issues as isolated cases, as opposed to a deeply
embedded systemic and ideological problem, contributed to the
practices of discourse normalization.[14] Indeed, until the
assassination of Hrant Dink, racism was a taboo word in Turkey. If
anything, racism was either an American or European problem; certainly
not one that intellectuals from Turkey should take seriously. Thus,
conscious efforts to keep racism far away from public awareness
resulted in the domestication and cherry picking of issues, and the
creation of pseudo-rival discourses'their nationalists vs.
ournationalists[15] (a false parity)'in dealing with the dark history
of racism in Turkey.
In a similar vein, the complete avoidance of the Holocaust in public
discourse, for example, or in rare instances its use to refute the
Armenian case among leftist circles, is indicative of a political
culture of either obscurantist or viciously pragmatic nature. For
example, the year 2011 marked the first Holocaust commemoration in
Turkey during which the state message oscillated between emphasizing
the uniqueness of the Jewish case and highlighting the Ottoman
Imperial, and then Turkish Republican, tolerance and acceptance of
Iberian, then European, Jews, instead of engaging in serious soul
searching on the meaning of the Holocaust or the dark chapters of
minority history in Turkey, including several waves of hostility
against Turkish-Jews.
ENTITLEMENT, ETHNICISM, RACISM
The debate over the term racism has come a long way since the
Holocaust and the American civil rights movement. Theoretically
speaking, American, continental, and Australian approaches to racism
are not as much interested in dominative (old-fashioned) racism as
they are in modern, normalized, ambivalent, aversive, laissez-faire,
differential, and institutional forms of racism operating
throughlinguistic discursive tools of othering or subordinating within
an asymmetrical relationship of power.[16] Yet, it's hard to claim
these academic and/or popular debates with all their contextual and
non-contextual theoretical subtleties had any profound effect on
intellectual life in Turkey.
Of relevance to this discussion in Turkey is the lack of proper
problematization and of consciousness regarding everyday normalized
racism[17] as the root cause of attitudes when dealing with Armenians
in general, and minority history and personalities in particular. This
general problem is exacerbated by the wide-scale ignorance of majority
Ottoman Armenians' living conditions during the long 19th century and
1915 itself, and Turkish-Armenians' living conditions and survival
strategies during Republican history. There has been neither an
institutional nor societal acknowledgement of the racism[18]ingrained
in the mainstream mindset, nor any wide-scale institutional measures
to combat everyday racism manifesting itself in all its different
sub-types. Yet, somehow, the intellectuals from the majority think
they are, by definition, devoid of such bias.[19] Even if they admit
the existence of racism in Turkey, they conceive it to be a problem of
the right and centrist ideologies and not theirs.[20]
These everyday attitudes manifest themselves in four major
distinguishable forms of majority entitlement. The first concerns the
screening, choosing, and separating of the `good Armenians' (Turkish
Armenians plus a small number of Diasporan Armenians who don't
prioritize genocide recognition) from the `bad Armenians' (who push
for keeping the recognition issue on the international agenda). In
other words, interlocutors from Turkey still think that dialogue as
such is a matter of finding either the apolitical or non-organized
Armenians, or those Armenians who operate only from a position of
weakness'either stemming from being a minority in Turkey or from a
position of geographic dependency, such as Armenians from Armenia.
Besides being an imperial practice akin to choosing to deal with the
`house negroes,' so to speak'a post-modern loyal millet, a
reincarnated millet-i sadika'its regressive character is not limited
to this. Implicit in this approach is the perception of politically
assertive Armenians as the problem. Also it implies a wishful thinking
that if all politically assertive Armenians were gotten rid of, then
the political problem of institutional discrimination and inequality
that is still haunting Turkey would evaporate on its own. Yet, even if
there were no significant Armenian political activity for recognition,
the overall institutional commitment problem in post-1915 Turkey would
have been the same.[21] It's highly improbable that such mock
deliberation geared towards avoiding the legal and political nature of
the issue could deliver the sorely needed institutional outcomes in
transitional political settings. As a matter of fact, aside from their
non-identical religious characteristics, Turkey's Kurdish Question and
Armenian Question have had similar trajectories because of Turkey's
Turkish `Question,' which either does not understand or does not care
to solve the institutional problem of equality that has existed for
over 200 years now. What Armenians think of other Armenians is
completely irrelevant to the issue of Turkish state's much needed
institutional commitments. Moreover, this practice reproduces a
divide-and-rule colonial/imperial mindset, antithetical to the legal
frameworks of human rights and equality. Trying to build a politics
based on the instrumentalization of the inter-Armenian differences to
delay justice cannot solve Turkey's problem of 1915. With or without
the presence of these inter-Armenian differences, the necessity of
implementing institutional changes and complying with human rights
standards will remain the same. If anything, Kurdish political
trajectory should be a grim reminder for those avoiding the core
issues at hand.
The second problematic entitlement concerns the blurring of the
difference between the perpetrator and the victim in order to water
down the majority state and societal responsibility. This is done with
two different, but interconnected, arguments: one concerning the past,
the other concerning the present. The first is reminiscent of the late
1980's Historikerstreit discussion in Germany,[22] although the depth
of the argument and counter-argument does not compare. A number of
intellectuals, including Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, emphasize
that Turks also suffered greatly in World War I, in general, and in
1915, in particular, especially in the case of the Gallipoli campaign.
No one trained in comparative history denies the fact that the Ottoman
Army and non-Armenian Ottoman citizens experienced tremendous losses
during World War I; however, the argument misses the point by
establishing a false parity, equating war to a state-sponsored
campaign of killing its own citizens, and a false causality as if
Ottoman Armenian citizens were responsible either for the war itself
or a major episodic campaign. The second argument, again mostly
originating in conservative quarters in Turkey, but not limited to
them alone, blurs the distinction between the victim and the
perpetrator, and the subsequent generations' responsibilities by
resorting to an `our common pain' argument'as in you suffered but we
suffered, too, because of your suffering. Apart from being a recent
creation, this discourse of common pain reduces the perpetrators',
bystanders', deniers' and their institutions' responsibility to `feel
the pain.' A symbolically violent appropriation of pain of an
unimaginable magnitude, which even survivor generations are reluctant
to own, the `feeling the pain'[23] discourse more often than not
becomes a tool to absolve the institutional and societal inheritors
from ethical and political consequences. We should recall Martin
Luther King, Jr.'s `Letter from a Birmingham Jail,' in which he
writes: `Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are
surely caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single
garment of destiny. Whatever affects one, affects all indirectly.'
Nowhere does King argue that one is entitled to own the other's pain
as a substitute for, or as a means of diluting, political
responsibility.
Thirdly, in rare cases where the victims' historical suffering is
granted, a rather obscene sense of entitlement surfaces. The victims'
interlocutor, itself the institutional and social inheritor of a
generation of perpetrators, bystanders, or deniers, expects the
descendants of the victims to speak in a way that will not make them
feel bad. Despite placing an emphasis on empathy (itself a problematic
term) and openness, the willingness to listen to Armenians is mostly
conditional and carries the implied threat of `If you don't speak
properly we won't listen to you.' The burden of responsibility, thus,
rather perversely falls on the shoulders of the historically
victimized and structurally powerless; and the interlocutor, whose
power and posture is the opposite result of the same history of gross
human rights violations, comes to the discussion not as a truly
interested party but as if doing a favor to the Armenians.
There is an additional relative silencing effect in the sense that the
victim has to temper its discursive tone to suit and prioritize the
emotional needs of its interlocutor at large'in this case, the
emotional needs of the majority Turkish citizens, as decided upon by
these same intellectuals. The entire discussion surrounding the usage
of the term genocide, or the avoidance thereof, is a prime example.
The mentality behind this `dialogue' is where the unequal and
sometimes supremacist thrust of the equation becomes the most visible
in the conditionality of the listening and the absolute power to shut
down the dialogue if Armenians fail to find a proper language (and
tone) to explain their pain. This power dynamic is not unique to the
intellectuals' relationship to Armenians, as it also applies to their
relationship with others, including their historically ambivalent
relationship with the Kurdish citizens of Turkey.[24]
Finally, as a further frame of entitlement, a discourse of sameness is
imposed upon Turkey's minorities.[25] By discourse of sameness, we
mean a reductionist tendency whereby a supposed cultural similarity
between Turks and Armenians, via food and music, is assumed and
presented as a better alternative to rights and equality before law.
This particular discourse, which may have a phenotypic (we look
alike), cultural (our food and music are similar), and geographic
(Anatolia) similarity argument, has a dangerous tint to it. It
involves a pseudo-inclusion of Armenians in an imagined community in
Anatolia where the dominant trait is a potentially exclusionary
narcissism, which is able to love and respect only that which is
similar to itself, and glorifies cultural similarity as a political
solution. The regressive quality of the argument is more evident when
turned upside down, since it's not very clear how it will treat
difference, or what it will do if the minority party does not take the
offer of similarity, or if it simply wants to insist on its
difference. After all, during those limited times when conversion was
an option between 1895 and 1915, the majority of Armenians did not
want to convert, and the whole history leading to 1915, and 1915
itself, can also be read as a history in which Ottoman authorities did
not want to deal seriously with the issue of difference and
inferiority stemming from a dual legal framework of Sharia and Dhimmi
Law. In a similar vein, the sameness argument indirectly hints at the
suppression of differences for the sake of social harmony.[26]
All in all, especially the 19th century land romanticism of the
sameness argument that takes Anatolia[27] as a common mythic location
with ahistorical references to a peaceful, equal co-existence is
totally outdated, and cannot provide a solution to serious political
issues. It can only be a conversation starter where it belongs'at the
raki/arak/dolma table. Rarely does one encounter such problematic
self-orientalization[28] elsewhere. Hummus, as far as we know, does
not have problem-solving powers nor does it have a place in serious
academic or journalistic discussions within the
Arab-Israeli-Palestinian divide. If the same cuisine and music has not
been able to provide any tangible solution to the much lesser
Kurdish-Turkish divide, one wonders how this untenable discourse of
sameness will solve anything among Armenians and Turks. If one is to
take this sameness argument seriously then one has to also explain how
sameness was able to kill sameness.
HISTORY AS CIRCULAR NIGHTMARE
To a certain extent, the history of Ottoman and Ottoman Armenian, and
Turkish ` Armenian and Turkish ` Turkish-Armenian is trapped in the
same pre-1908 conundrum of difference and equality before the law. On
one side of the equation are those who are, still in this day and age,
either totally unwilling or reluctant to accept that Armenians have a
right to political agency and equality before the law (then domestic
Ottoman, now several international polities).[29] On the other side of
the equation are those who understand what political equality and
political action mean in order to secure justice and equality. Neither
side is made solely of Turks or solely of Armenians. Although the
latter is mostly made of Armenians, there are a few scholars and human
rights activists from Turkey, both in the U.S., Europe, and Turkey,
who do not shy away from politics of recognition. These people know
recognition is not just a onetime deal, some sort of ticket to
oblivion, but only the first step in a long struggle of institutional
commitments affecting the human rights and history curricula in all
countries where there is a substantial political debate on
recognitions and denials.
The inability to get out of the circularity of a pre-1908 mentality
sets the boundaries of Turkish-Armenian citizens as well,
unfortunately. Since there is not any real coming to terms with the
past, Turkish-Armenian citizens are still perceived as a fifth column
in general, and still have to distance themselves from the diaspora in
order to be heard. Instead of dealing with institutional barriers,
there is a novel but archaic tendency where the state looks mostly
concerned with window-dressing solutions. Efforts are being made to
appoint Turkish-Armenian citizens to state positions in order to
partially counter the critics of structural inequality. At this point,
one has to remember that there were more than two-dozen Armenians who
worked as high-level Ottoman officials before the genocide; that alone
was not indicative of a commitment to equality and human rights. If
anything, the same pre-1908 mentality conditioned, and still to a
certain extent conditions, the set of political choices for
Turkish-Armenians briefly touched upon at the beginning of this
article. So coming to terms with history is the only way for
Turkish-Armenians to cease to be perceived as a fifth column and to
become fully equal citizens.
In light of the discussion above, the fact that Hrant Dink was
assassinated for, among other things, calling a spade a spade, and
that he continued to be tried in absentia even after his assassination
for daring to describe his experience, shows that it's impossible to
be a Turkish-Armenian freely able to describe his/her experience
publicly. The victim has been further victimized while trying to
qualify the legal and political magnitude of his victimhood. The
intellectuals from Turkey cannot pretend that January 19, 2007 does
not signify a major rupture. This rupture requires a reevaluation and
deeper understanding of the Republican history of Turkish-Armenian
strategies of survival.
If ever Turkey could approach the issue of 1915 from the perspective
of justice, a justice frame that also includes calling a spade a spade
just as Hrant did, on that day, justice will prevail in the case of
assassination of Hrant Dink as well. Further, by doing so, Turkey
would be able to approach and perhaps even lighten the heavy burden of
loneliness of Armenians in her own country and in the diaspora.
[1] For an elaborate and foretelling socio-political analysis written
during the 19th century and recently translated to English, see Raffi
(Hagop Melik Hagopian)'s Tajkahayk: The Armenian Question(Taderon
Press, 2007).
[2] See Bali, Rifat (2001), Musa's Children, The Republic's Citizens,
p. 133, for the burning of The Forty Day of Musa Dagh. Not
surprisingly as an author Franz Werfel was also on the Nazi
book-burning list.
[3] Armenian writers and intellectuals were obstructed some way or
another during the republican period; they either had to leave the
country and/or their newspapers were closed down. HayganuÅ? Mark's Hay
Gin (Armenian Woman), which was published for 14 years, was closed by
the state. The reasons remain unknown. Avedis Aleksanyan, S.K. Zanku
(Sarkis Keçyan), Aram Pehlivanyan (Å?avarÅ?), Zaven Biberyan, Ihmalyan
Brothers who were publishing Nor Or faced various assaults.
Pehlivanyan was jailed because of his articles in Nor Or and his
membership of Turkish Communist Party (TKP). After getting out of
prison, he left Turkey. Hagop Demirciyan (Mıntzuri) who came to
Istanbul for a tonsillectomy, could not go back and remained in
Istanbul until the end of his life as an exile. He lost all his
family, back in Armıdan, Erzincan in 1915.
[4] Aharonyan, Kersam (1966), Khoher Hisnamyagi Avardin (`Thoughts on
the 50thCommemoration'), p. 149.
[5] Most writers and journalists from Turkey refer to an imagined
idyllic Anatolia when addressing diaspora Armenians to emphasize their
supposedly shared background. This imagined Anatolia is a mostly
Republican-leftist ideological construct that does not even correspond
to the contemporary Anatolia that predominantly votes to the right and
far-right of the political spectrum. If anything, in domestic
discourse not involving Armenians, this same Anatolia is loathed by
the proponents of the heavenly Anatolia construct. They romanticize an
Anatolia populated by Armenian artists, musicians, and architects,
whom they would prefer over what they perceive as the current
primitive inhabitants. However historically speaking, neither all
Armenian life was artistic and modern (see Matossian and Villa's
Armenian Village Life before 1914), nor Anatolia has ever been an
idyllic place of peaceful `co-existence' in the century and a half
preceding 1915.
[6] The history of the Turkish press in the Republican era is full of
such episodic outbursts against Armenians in general and prominent
intellectual figures in particular.
[7] Before 2006, the only good Armenians were Turkish-Armenians.
Later, a number of mostly European diaspora Armenians were embraced as
legitimate interlocutors. This attempt at game changing through
instrumentalizing ethnic identity is a textbook example of
colonial/imperial regressive policy. Nonetheless, it is embraced by a
number of progressives in Turkey.
[8] We do not deny nor neglect that the equation has other dimensions
as well; however, those dimensions are framed by politics and even in
the case of supposedly non-political arguments, a politics of either
denial or negation or complete avoidance continues to permeate the
discourse.
[9] Or when the Armenian interlocutor is ready to equally criticize
Armenians seeking genocide recognition, or in some cases even treat
them as sick and obsessed people. Even if it's politically incorrect,
indeed racist, to frame justice-seeking people as psychologically
disturbed, somehow it has so far been acceptable by some Turkish
intellectuals, especially if the maker of the sickness claim is
Armenian. One needs to think seriously what all this means from a
politico-philosophical and social psychological perspective. What does
it mean to see the ethnicity before the argument, to validatean
otherwise very problematic argument just because an Armenian is making
it. How seeing ethnicity before the argument is different than seeing
like a perpetrator state that reduced human being to their ethnic
identity?
[10] Although one may be inclined to think so, the ASALA attacks are
not the starting point for open hostility against Diasporan Armenians.
Also, the earlier indifference towards Diasporan Armenians is rather
strange given the fact that Kemal Tahir was a widely read novelist in
the early 1970's; Tahir published not one but two novels dealing with
1915, neither of which has been translated into Armenian or English.
So the rather common argument `We did not know' does not hold, at
least for anybody who was above 18 and reading novels in the early
1970's.
[11] 20 Kura Askerlik was the compulsory second or third time military
conscription of non-Muslim citizens of Turkey during World War II.
Non-Muslim citizens between the ages of 25 and 45 were kept away from
workforce for over 14 months and the subsequent wealth tax levied on
the minorities with outrageous rates (232 percent for Armenians, 179
percent for Jews, 156 percent for Greeks and 10 percent for the Donme
(converts)) impoverished them further.
[12] In February 2011, the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) submitted a
petition to the Turkish Parliament to recognize the massacres and
deportations that took place between 1937-38 as genocide.
[13] Seyhan Bayraktar's Politik und Erinnerung: Der Diskurs über den
Armeniermord in der Türkeizwischen Nationalismus und Europäisierung,
published in 2010, is the only exception. She vigilantly examines how
discourse frames of the state and intellectuals can sometimes
partially overlap or serve to reproduce nationalist discourse frames.
[14] By discourse normalization we mean all those discursive practices
that unproblematically reproduce bias against politically active
diaspora Armenians. The leftist/liberal discourse is where
demonization of political activity is overtly normalized.
[15] The fact that there are also Armenian nationalists within the
recognition camp does not make the entire recognition endeavor
nationalist. This issue can be thought of more as a larger class
action lawsuit in which individuals (including Turkish citizens and
others) who are for universal human rights standards and for a form of
justice can take part in the same class. In that sense the issue of
genocide recognition per se is much larger than narrow parochial
agendas.
[16] For an extended debate on the evolution of the term
racism/ethnicism and comparative contexts, see Martha Augoustinos and
Katherine J. Reynolds (2001), Understanding Prejudice, Racism, and
Social Conflict; Jennifer Lynn Eberhardt and Susan T. Fiske (1998),
Confronting Racism: the Problem and the Response; Arthur P. Brief
(2008), Diversity at Work; John Nagle (2009),Multiculturalism's Double
Bind: Creating Inclusivity, Cosmopolitanism and Difference; Robert
Miles and Malcolm Brown (2003), Racism (2nd edition); Martin Bulmer
and John Solomos (2004),Researching Race and Racism;Pierre-Andre
Taguieff and Hassan Melehy (2001), Force of Prejudice: On Racism and
its Doubles; Ruth Wodak and Martin Reisigl (2000), Discourse &
Discrimination: Rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism.
[17] According to Wodak and Reisgl, racist, anti-Semitic, and
ethnicist discrimination as a social practice, and as an ideology,
manifests itself discursively and is orientated to five simple
questions revolving around referential strategies (how are persons
named and referred to linguistically?), predicational strategies (what
traits, characteristics, qualities and features are attributed to
them?), argumentation strategies (by means of what arguments and
argumentation schemes do specific persons or social groups try to
justify and legitimate the exclusion, discrimination, suppression, and
exploitation of others?), perspectivation and framing strategies (from
what perspective or point of view are these attributions and arguments
expressed?), mitigation and intensification strategies (are the
respective discriminating utterances articulated overtly, are they
even intensified or are they mitigated?), Discourse and
Discrimination: Rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism, p. xiii.
[18] `The concept of `everyday racism' is intended to integrate, by
definition, macro and microsociological dimensions of racism (Essed
1991: 16). After having criticised the dichotomic distinction between
`institutional' and `individual racism' as erroneously placing the
individual outside the institutional (even though `structures of
racism do not exist external to agents'they are made by agents'but
specific practices are by definition racist only when they activate
existing structural racial inequality in the system' [36]), Essed
explains her understanding of the term `everyday': [...] the
`everyday' can be tentatively defined as socialised meanings making
practices immediately definable and uncontested so that, in principle,
these practices can be managed according to (sub)cultural norms and
expectations. These practices and meanings belong to our familiar
world and usually involve routine or repetitive practices (48-9).'
Essed in Wodak and Reisgl, p. 7.
[19] This is not to say that minorities are devoid of such bias
against the majority themselves; yet these biases are structurally and
causally not identical and need a separate discussion.
[20] It should not surprise us that several websites and reports on
discriminatory and essentialist speech only deal with mainstream
right/conservative press while completely neglecting the faux pas of
those columnists who are self-avowedly liberals or leftists.
[21] Institutions do not become post-genocidal on their own,
especially when denial persists. The Armenian and the Kurdish issues
are deeply related because of the lack of institutional commitment on
the part of the Turkish state and the society to a post-genocidal
normative order. However, institutional commitments are not an end in
themselves, as anti-Muslim sentiment and persisting anti-semitism in
Europe show. The struggle against all forms of open and subtle racism
is a day-to-day pedagogical problem that can't be resolved only on
paper.
[22] Historikerstreit was a debate central to the late 1980's
intellectual scene in Germany revolving around left-wing and
right-wing interpretations of the Holocaust, particularly about its
centrality in modern German history. The right-wingers tried to
downplay the long trajectory of anti-semitism embedded in German
society and institutions in the century leading to the Holocaust.
[23] Not surprisingly, the discourse of `feeling the pain' as an end
in itself is reserved for Armenians and in no way is central to the
Turkish-Kurdish conflict, because Kurds present Turkey with a real
political challenge that Turkish intellectuals cannot evade anymore.
[24] For years majority Turkish intellectuals demanded the complete
denunciation of the armed struggle first before engaging Kurdish
intellectuals. This changed only very recently.
[25] This discourse has been also echoed from both Turkish-Armenian
and a few Diasporan Armenian quarters.
[26] In domestic politics, AKP proponents and secularists are not `all
the same,' but somehow when it comes to essentialist categories of
Turks and Armenians, they `become' the `same.'
[27] This 19th-century land romanticism is what ties some mainstream
leftist Turks to the mainstream Armenian perceptions of land. However,
what is perceived as bad for Armenians (as a `nationalist' longing for
a mythical Anatolia) is good and desirable for Turkish `patriots.' At
their core, Turkish `patriotic' and Armenian `nationalist' Anatolia/
Western Armenia are non-identical but equally nationalistic-romantic
mythical constructions. No Anatolianist Turkish leftist lives in
Anatolia or has ever spent a considerable amount of time actually
living in this mythical Anatolia. As for the Kurds, they do not refer
to the partially overlapping geography as Anatolia and have
practically lived in dire conditions of armed conflict and internal
displacement.
[28] Orientalism is not just about what the West thought of the East
and how it constructed representations of the East. It also has
several self-orientalizing dimensions in which the East tends to
perfectly reflect the stereotype of being `Eastern'`hence lesser. So,
westerners have institutions and law, and there is always raki and
dolma for Turks and Armenians.
[29] One major emphasis when talking about 1915 revolves around the
`but the Armenians revolted' argument. Historically speaking, this is
true, although its magnitude and prevalence is grossly exaggerated.
However, framing the history of violence starting from the Armenian
revolts misses several important points: The terrible living
conditions of Armenians in the 19th century, the episodic violence
that Armenians experienced, the fact that they also tried parallel
tracks of petitioning but their appeals fell on deaf ears, and
finally, the fact that the Ittihadists themselves were trying to get
rid of the same absolutist regime. In a way, those Turkish
intellectuals who are themselves active in domestic politics but who
are not happy with Armenian political activity challenging the
status-quo are still arguing in the same utterly discriminatory way:
`We can do it, but you cannot.'
Ayda Erbal is writing her dissertation in the department of politics
at New York University. She teaches two advanced undergraduate
classes, `International Politics of the Middle East' and `Democracy
and Dictatorship,' as adjunct professor of politics. Her work focuses
on the politics of changing historiographies in Turkey and Israel. She
is interested in democratic theory, democratic deliberation, the
politics of `post-nationalist' historiographies in transitional
settings, and the politics of apology. She is a published short-story
writer and worked as a columnist for the Turkish-Armenian newspaper
Agos from 2000-03.
Talin Suciyan is an Istanbul Armenian journalist who lived in Armenia
from 2007-09. She is currently based in Munich, Germany, where she is
pursuing her graduate studies. She was a contributor to Agos (from
2007-2010) and writes regularly for newspapers in Turkey.
http://www.armenianweekly.com/
From: A. Papazian