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ERDOGAN AND HIS ARMENIAN PROBLEM
Turkish Policy Quarterly
Spring 2013
Vol. 12 No: 1
pp. 43-64
by Gerard J. Libaridian
This article examines the history of how Turkish leaders - the
current Prime Minister Recep Tayyip ErdoÄ=9Fan in particular - have
tried to deal with the Armenian Question. ErdoÄ=9Fan, due to his own
political philosophy, rooted in Islamic conservatism had the chance to
recognize and denounce the mistreatment of the Armenians at the hands
of the Ittihadists, since the latter's policies had nothing to do with
religion, but rather with nationalist principals that were dominant in
the final years of the Ottoman Empire, and installed into the
Republican regime in its early years. However, ErdoÄ=9Fan, like his
predecessors, failed to make the right choice.
When the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and Recep Tayyip
ErdoÄ=9Fan came to power in Turkey in 2002, there were reasons to
think that they would correct the state policies for dealing with
history, particularly regarding the treatment of Armenians by the
Ottoman government during the First World War. It would have been too
much to expect, even then, that the new government would accept the
characterization of deportations and massacres of Armenians as
genocide. At the least, there was a chance that they would distance
themselves from the policies of the Committee of Union and Progress
(Ittihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti in Turkish, abbreviated as CUP in this
article) that produced that genocide during that war. There was also
reason to believe that the new Prime Minister and AKP would distance
themselves from the policies of previous governments in Republican
Turkey that minimized the scope of the tragedy, denied its
intentionality, and spent enormous amounts of time, energy, resources,
and international political capital over decades to campaign against
the characterization of these events as genocide.
There were reasons for my hope that AKP would change the official
approach of Turkey to dealing with Armenian history, despite my
equally eternal and hopeless intellectual bent to doubt my own
optimism. Though it now appears very possible that I was mistaken, I
still have some hope. Why I was optimistic and why I may have been
mistaken is the subject of this article.
Republican Turkey and its Arguments
Except for the brief interlude immediately following the end of the
First World War, when Ottoman military tribunals tried and convicted
the CUP leaders for their treatment of Armenians during the War, the
Turkish state has followed a problematic and largely failed policy in
its accounting of events. By now an overwhelming number of scholars of
the period and of genocide have determine that what happened to
Armenians during the War was indeed genocide. So have a significant
number of states and their legislative bodies internationally. To the
extent that Turkish official policy has been able to impact the
characterization of these events by the U.S. and some others, has
revealed that the reluctance of the latter is due to political and
geopolitical considerations and not on the historical evidence.
In different ways and at a variety of forums Republican Turkey - the
state and its official historians and scholars following the state
line - have argued that:
i) The intention was to deport the Armenians and subsequent deaths
resulted from unsanitary conditions for deportees, as well as from a
civil war-type of conflict between Armenians and Muslims;1
ii) Losses of Armenian lives did not exceed a number between 300,000
and 600,000, no more than Muslim losses;
iii) To the extent that the state had any involvement, deportations
were due to the fact that `Armenians' -all Armenians, the 90 year olds
and those yet to be born- presented a threat to the security of the
state. These policies were, therefore, justified;
iv) Thus the wholesale deportations and massacres of the Empire's
Armenian subjects did not amount to what would eventually be
characterized as a genocide, that these policies were not intended to
`exterminate a nation,' the latter being a common international
description of these policies at the time of their occurrence;
v) The term =80=9Cgenocide', having been coined in 1948, could not be
applied to events that took place during the First World War.2 In
other words, Turkey argued that what occurred in 1915 was hardly
unusual or extraordinary. The sentiment was along the lines of: `We
did not do it; besides, Armenians deserved it.'
Rather than the known facts of the case, what is being fought over is
in the realm of the politics of genocide recognition.3 The fact that
the campaign for recognition is colored by the role it plays in
Armenian communities -the organization and legitimation of power- does
not change the character of what happened; nor does the fact that
these campaigns are used on occasion by various countries and
international organizations to deride Turkey, fairly or unfairly, in
its attempts to join the EU or advance its interests regionally or
internationally.
Dealing with Official Turkish Arguments
The purpose of this article is not to counter the arguments of the
Turkish state and associated scholars. As far as scholarship is
concerned, historians, including sociologists, legal scholars,
genocide specialists, and myself have dealt with these arguments
extensively, in detail and adequately. While much work needs still to
be done in working out various dimensions, the position of the Turkish
state and its official historians has been eroding as scholarship -not
just by Armenian scholars- has left little doubt that what was done to
Armenians in the Ottoman Empire either was planned as an extermination
or amounted to one. In other words, that it was genocide as defined by
the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide.
Understanding the Position of Republican Turkey
There has been significant analysis by scholars who have explored the
relationship between genocide denial and the establishment of the
Turkish Republic. There were, obviously, critical and organic overlaps
of the personnel that were part of the CUP administration during the
First Word War and the establishment of the Republic itself. One can
also see that the deportations and massacres of Armenians and other
non- Muslims such as Assyrians and Greeks during the First World War
and the following interlude period between 1918-1923, were a
necessary, even if not sufficient, condition for the establishment of
a Turkish Republic as understood by its facilitators and founders.4
Throughout this process, Turkish leaders had come to see the Christian
minorities, particularly Armenians, as the main reason for the
intervention of foreign powers in the affairs of the Ottoman Empire
and for the loss of territory. The problem with this perspective and
the fatal consequences it engendered was, first, that by and large the
Great Powers used the real social and economic problems Armenians had
as excuses to extract concessions from the Ottoman state for
themselves; and, second, such an approach rationalized the inclination
of Ottoman rulers to ignore the real problems Armenians and others
had.
The Young Turks had come to power in 1908 with a quasi-liberal agenda
and had reinstated the Ottoman Constitution of 1876 that had been
rescinded in 1878. Armenians and other non-Muslims, just as liberal
Muslims, supported the Young Turk Revolution. They expected the
reinstated Ottoman Parliament to become the actual branch of
government that should and could effectuate political, social, and
economic reforms. These proposed reforms - agrarian, but also legal
and administrative - were not only intended to improve the lot of
Ottoman subjects -and not only non-Muslim subjects- but in doing so
also preempt the need for foreign intervention to bring about such
reforms and thus make the continuation of the Ottoman state possible.
For a complex set of reasons, the leaders of the Ottoman Empire
determined after 1908 that such a path as insisted upon by the more
liberal elements of the Ottoman political spectrum that included
Armenians toward the preservation of the Ottoman state was not the
desirable one. They opted for another way to save the Empire and to
ensure that power was held by a specific ethnic/religious group; and
they had a very different vision in mind for the state. The new
Turkish state i) had to have a centralized and unitary structure, with
a strong military as the final arbiter of state affairs, and ii) would
have to be immune to foreign intervention by their radical methods of
elimination of elements that were prone to make demands of the state;
it was assumed that the Empire's Muslims were the least vulnerable to
dangerous liberal ideas and that they would all become good Turks in
the state that would emerge from the First World War.
What the CUP did, made the new Republic possible. But the elimination
of the liberal political impulses -no matter where these came from,
Muslims or Christians- and the repression of any opposition had become
a necessary precondition for the survival of that vision.
The official Turkish narrative of the birth of the Republic has come
as close as historical interpretation allows in presenting that birth
as an immaculate conception that produced the modern Turkish
nation. According to this narrative, nothing more happened than a
valiant struggle against imperialists; the birth of the republic was
the victory of the nationalist ideal over the nationalism of
others. Thus the Republic had an interest in inducing amnesia of and
ignorance in many aspects of that genesis. Acceptance of the full
array of measures that made that Republic possible would have
diminished the useful myth of an immaculate conception. The Turkish
Republic could not have created and inspired citizens who were devoted
to a Turkish nationalist ideal and nationalist state if the birth of
the Republic was, somehow, connected to less than charitable
policies. Nor could Turkey project itself as a modern state, in the
view of such statesmen, in the international arena, if they owned up
to a questionable form of behavior.
Of course, it is possible to argue that a recognition of such an event
in one's past might have been a better strategy to gain acceptance in
the international community as a modern state. But the hubris of
statism and Kemalism prevented Turkish leaders from taking that
route. The concept mediating between the past and the present is the
persistent and omnipresent `Sèvres syndrome', which maintains that
major foreign powers are always looking for an opportunity to carve up
what became Turkey, as was last proposed in the Treaty of Sèvres in
1920.5 The recognition of a genocide in this context, has been
formulated as a prelude to such a partition, against which the War of
Independence (1920-22), the founding act of the Republic, had been
fought.
Turkey's leaders preceding ErdoÄ=9Fan all shared, subscribed or acted
according to this nationalistic and statist perspective.6 Often weak
and compromised, the Prime Ministers of Turkey in the second half of
the 20th century could not and would not have challenged the
conventional formulas dictated, above all, by the military and what
Turkish analysts have called the `deep state' in Turkey.
ErdoÄ=9Fan and His Armenian Problem
Considering the perspective proposed above, how has ErdoÄ=9Fan handled
this issue since his consolidation of power?
ErdoÄ=9Fan, the AKP, and the current president Abdullah Gül did not
come to power through the usual political machinery in Turkey; they
created a new one. More importantly, their political philosophy is
derived mainly from religious concepts rather than secular
nationalism. They were able to mobilize the traditionalist-voting base
on different principles, rather than strictly through conventional
party allegiances.
They even won the support of some liberal and left leaning segments of
Turkish society that were tired of the limits to democracy -including
the freedom to explore and question conventional history- which had
been placed in the name of state security and stability within the
framework of the nationalist state. ErdoÄ=9Fan did not need the
narrative of the nationalists to assert a modern Turkishness and
project a vision for a strong homeland.
Indeed, ErdoÄ=9Fan challenged the role assigned by the nationalist
project to the military in the construction of Republican Turkey,
including the arbitrary and debilitating break with the Ottoman past
promoted by the Kemalist orthodoxy. Having liberated themselves from
the shackles of a by now mechanically applied and stringent framework
for statehood, ErdoÄ=9Fan and his associates juxtaposed the democratic
ideal derived from their spiritual foundations to the authoritarian
system that had been developed.
Armenians, Turkish Democracy, and Turkishness
ErdoÄ=9Fan and his party offered an alternative definition of Turkish
society, of Turkishness and, therefore of the state. At its core, this
alternative had two characteristics:
i) modifying and, possibly, replacing the nationalist story that had
legitimized the Republic and aiming to create a new secular Turkish
society, with one that relied more on moral values of a community as
defined by Islam, and that is more in tune with the traditionalism and
conservatism of the majority of citizens. This dimension would also
allow the displaying a better understanding of the Ottoman Empire
where, for most of its existence, power was legitimized on religious
principles; and, as an integral part of that vision,
ii) establishing a more democratic society, and a statism inspired by
spiritual values rather than the `secular religion' of a nationalist
statism.
These two issues are at the heart of the Armenian issue in Ottoman and
Turkish history and historiography as well as of the Turkish
narrative.
It is, indeed, possible to argue that the Ottoman policies toward
Armenians veered toward massacres and eventually genocidal steps when:
i) imperial Istanbul moved away from the traditional tolerance of
Muslim states toward non-Muslims - which dates back to the time of the
Prophet himself;
ii) the CUP started relying on statist and nationalist thinking to
solve the `Armenian Question', as its leaders understood it; and,
iii) as a result, the CUP undertook the repression of
parliamentarianism, and liberal economic and political reforms that
were more commonly supported by Armenian political groups and the
Armenian Patriarchate, as well as other non-Turkic Muslims, such as
Albanians and Arabs.
There is one dimension that has been lost to most historians and
writers of our time but not to those who were observing and making
decisions prior to the onset of the First World War: Armenian
political parties of the time, both of a revolutionary and socialistic
bent, and constituting the left-wing of the Ottoman political
spectrum, welcomed the 1908 Young Turk Revolution. The Dashnaktsutiun
or ARF -that had not advocated an independent Armenia- had been part
of the Ottoman opposition in exile, allied itself with a variety of
Ottoman opposition groups. The Hnchakians had advocated independence
earlier but removed that demand in 1909; they too began to consider
themselves an Ottoman party, and aligned themselves with Prince
Sabahaddin in opposition to the CUP and the ARF.
By and large, Armenian parties with organizational capacity and grass
roots support were the last bastions of a parliamentary and
representative democracy in the Ottoman Empire. In 1908 the
socialistic and revolutionary Armenian parties, now banking on the
idea of a common and liberal Ottoman state, were joined by the
Armenian Liberal Democratic (Ramgavar, or ADL) Party, representing the
interests of the Armenian wealthy and upper-middle class. The visions
of these Armenian political parties differed somewhat but they all
supported a version of Ottomanism that engaged all ethnic and
religious groups, either through a centralized or federalized
structure, where issues could be resolved internally, thus voiding the
need for foreign intervention.
By 1912 the Armenian leadership concluded that the CUP was not ready
to sponsor serious reforms. Although the Armenian leadership returned
to the policy of asking for help from the Great Powers, they continued
to labor hard to extract reforms from the CUP for a while longer. The
CUP coup of 1913 more or less destroyed that option of saving the
Empire through reforms. More often than not, history books and
articles on the Armenian issue fail to recognize that at the end of
the last serious set of negotiations between the ARF and the CUP, the
bottom line for the Armenian side was the demand from the CUP for
agrarian reform in the Ottoman Empire and, if that was too ambitious,
only in the provinces where most Armenians lived.7
The Turkish nationalist project was not only about the liberation of
what the nationalists considered `the minimal expanse for the
homeland' for their yet vaguely defined Turkish nation -yet to be
created- a nation to be melded of Muslims from a variety of ethnic and
linguistic backgrounds. It was also important that the new state be
`strong' and `virile', i.e., dominated by a combination of a political
elite and the military. This combination, first crystallized in the
pre-War CUP triumvirate of Talat, Enver, and Cemal pashas, would not
only protect the new state against foreign intervention but also from
domestic enemies that might want to `weaken' the state through
liberalism and a parliamentary system.8
The CUP and its accolades thought that parliamentary `games' would
threaten the `cohesion' of society, i.e., that parliamentarianism
would make society resistant to the hierarchical structure that needed
to be established, or re-established from earlier Ottoman times. What
was needed, it was thought, was saving the state and reshaping society
that would have a hierarchical structure, where loyalty to the state
as defined by the powers that would replace religion as the primary
form of self-identification.
At the end, CUP policies produced two results: i) the cleansing of
elements that were strongly in favor of a representative and elected
government in the Ottoman Empire, elements that were, in this case
defined by their ethnicity as well as their religion; ii) the
engendering of a society that took for granted the loyalty of Muslim
groups but questioned that of the others;9 and, iii) the creation of a
national/political entity, which, in this case, turned out to be
Republican Turkey.
ErdoÄ=9Fan and the AKP could have denounced the past treatment of
Armenians outright. In fact they could have pointed out that it was
extreme nationalist ideology, rather than Islam, that was responsible
for the genocidal policies toward Armenians and for the absence of
democracy in the early years of Republican Turkey. By doing that, he
could have saved the legacy of Ottoman history and its policy of
tolerance -however exaggerated- by rejecting the extremist policies of
the wartime CUP government, as inimical to Islamic values; and if CUP
policies or their consequences can best be characterized as genocide,
so be it.
Foreign Minister Ahmet DavutoÄ=9Flu has given the best articulation to
ErdoÄ=9Fan's understanding of foreign policy and to the value the
Ottoman legacy has in that perspective, by increasing Turkey's direct
involvement in the Balkans and the Middle East, once part of the
Empire. ErdoÄ=9Fan and DavutoÄ=9Flu have justified Turkey's more
intimate involvement in the affairs of Turkey's neighbors on national
security concerns, which is quite understandable. But the larger
framework for their thinking suggests that for Turkey's involvement in
these regions is inspired by their religion-based idealization of the
Ottoman experience. What they are imagining is a Pax Ottomanica, this
conveniently imagined community that could be recreated as a Pax
Turkica.10
It should be clear, nonetheless, that such an imagined, of not
imaginary, program cannot succeed if the AKP, Prime Minister
ErdoÄ=9Fan, and Minister of Foreign Affairs DavutoÄ=9Flu cannot
distinguish between the two opposing legacies of the Ottoman Empire:
The tolerant one, however imperfect; and the later phase of the
Ottoman experience that produced a genocide.
The issue of the fate of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire is relevant
to today's quest for democracy in Turkey. Liberal democracy had to
wait decades before it became an issue for a large number of Turkish
citizens, before citizens questioned the authoritarianism and
hierarchical thinking of the early decades of Republican Turkey and
were ready to break through taboos imposed by that hierarchical
framework.
An Ottoman Empire, however reduced in size, or Republican Turkey would
have to have been a liberal and democratic state had Armenians and
other ethnic groups been part of its population.
Definitions and Interests
The two aspects of ErdoÄ=9Fan's initial program -a Turkish identity
that relies less on ethnicity than on religion and a more democratic
state- correspond to the two interrelated dimensions at the core of
the historical Armenian issue: ethnicity as the basis for massacres
and deportations followed by the denial of a democratic,
parliamentarian Ottoman Empire.
ErdoÄ=9Fan and AKP could have used the Armenian issue to highlight the
difference between the distant tolerant past of the Empire, which they
seem to cherish, and the more nationalist late-Ottoman period, which
produced the massacres and deportations. In other words, recognizing
what had happened, they could have found fault with the CUP as a
regime for what they could characterize as policies inspired from a
soulless nationalism, just as was done with the policies of the Nazi
regime as opposed to the German state and its people as such.
The Armenian issue could have been seen as a tailor-made case on which
basis AKP could have extricated Turkey from a problem that refuses to
dissipate, if not disappear: That he could not manage to display the
delicate dimensions of history and may have fallen back on the
nationalist trap constitutes his Armenian problem.
A radical revision of Turkish policy could have given ErdoÄ=9Fan a
most visible high platform for his vision for Turkey based on
religious morals. Such a position would have also the corollary impact
of weakening his internal adversaries, which he considered nefarious
to a healthy country: the military and the deep state. After all, the
leaders of the CUP, Mehmet Talat, Ä°smail Enver, Ahmed Cemal (the
triumvirate of pashas), Bahattin Å=9Eakir, and the others responsible
for the government's planning and execution of extermination policies
did not act as devout Muslims. They only tried to use Islam to garner
last minute support for their designs, first of all designs to remain
in power.
In the same sense, the perpetrators of the Holocaust were all
Christians but that is not why they perpetrated the Holocaust. In fact
they despised Christianity, just as the same feeling CUP and Kemalism
had for their own religion, Islam.11 The immediate goal of the CUP was
the maintenance of the Empire; or, in its absence, the securing of a
state that would help them maintain their power through the
manipulation of slogans such as Pan-Islamism, Pan-Turkism, or
rallying, at the end, with Turkism. ErdoÄ=9Fan's Tentative Steps
Interestingly enough, during their first few years and in some
respects even later, there were signs that ErdoÄ=9Fan, Gül, and the
AKP embarked on a new course, even if cautiously.
When ErdoÄ=9Fan came to power, he was much more open in his treatment
of the Armenian issue, as well as on other important items, such as
media freedom, independence of the judiciary, and gay rights. In the
case of the Armenian issue, he wanted to leave history to
historians. This was an opening, since the Turkish state had always
dictated historical narratives down to every schoolbook, and has
always treated scholars and journalists who thought differently as
threats to national security.
ErdoÄ=9Fan made statements indicating that it should be up to
historians to determine the exact nature of what happened to Armenians
in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War; he made sure that
the rules governing access to Ottoman archives were eased, even though
by now these are most likely cleansed of the most obviously damning
documents, and the military archives are still not fully open. Rules
governing the terminology used to describe those events were eased or
applied less stringently. While this was partially due to internal
processes, much of this openness can be explained by European
requirements during Turkey's negotiations for entry into the European
Union.
The two protocols signed by Turkey and Armenia in October 2009 that
aimed at the normalization of relations between the two countries had
an indirect but clear reference to the genocide issue. This provided
further evidence that ErdoÄ=9Fan, certainly with strong support from
Gül, wished to move forward. The second protocol, which provides for
the creation of an overarching interstate commission to tackle the
areas of future cooperation and discussion, refers to a joint
sub-commission of historians that would `implement a dialogue on the
historical dimension with the aim to restore mutual confidence between
the two nations, including an impartial scientific examination of the
historical records and archives to define existing problems and
formulate recommendations.' This provision has been universally
understood to be referring to the genocide issue.
The largely negative Armenian reaction to this provision of the
protocols has received much attention, with particular reference to
the Diasporan organizations' responses in the form of demonstrations
against the Armenian government's acquiescence to a demand for such a
sub-commission that clearly was imposed by the Turkish side. It was
argued by these organizations and some opposition parties in Armenia
that by accepting such a provision, the Armenian side had placed a
question mark on the certainty that what had happened was genocide.
A more detached analysis of the document would lead us to add another
client to the doubter's list that this provision produced. If the
provision in question indicated that the Armenian side is placing the
truth about the genocide in question, so is the Turkish state. If the
only interpretation of the language used is that the truth is as yet
to be established, then the truth as propagated by Ankara and by
official historians is also in question. By agreeing that the truth
has yet to be established, albeit by an ambiguous sub-commission, the
Turkish Republic was also recognizing, as tacitly as the Republic of
Armenia, that the official Turkish position of absolute denial, which
was maintained for so long and at such cost, was being challenged and
moderated - at least in principle.
There were a few isolated protests by Turkish writers in this
respect. But there is no doubt that ErdoÄ=9Fan had the political
muscle to have it ratified by the Turkey's Parliament, just as
Armenia's President Serzh Sargsyan had the muscle to have it ratified
by the Armenia's Parliament. What went wrong when neither Parliament
even brought up the documents for ratification had little to do with
this dimension of the protocols.12
Even more significantly, in 2011, ErdoÄ=9Fan apologized for the
massacre of civilian Kurdish subjects in 1938 and 1939 in
Dersim/Tunceli. The idea and gesture of an apology itself are more
important than the details. No Turkish leader had ever apologized for
an atrocious policy or crime that the Ottoman or Turkish state had
ever committed against its own subjects. Indeed, such gestures are
much more recent in general, even in the international arena. It is
true that Mustafa Kemal criticized the CUP for atrocities against
Ottoman Christians, while members of that party who shared
responsibility for those massacres and deportations later served the
nationalist cause under him. Even then, there had been no apology;
Mustafa Kemal was just finding a good cause to reduce the CUP as a
political force without denying the favor that party had done to make
a new Turkish state possible. By addressing the particular issue of
the Kurds, ErdoÄ=9Fan set a precedent of distancing himself and his
party from the early Kemalist period of the history of the Turkish
Republic.
ErdoÄ=9Fan and the Term Genocide
It would be difficult to argue that ErdoÄ=9Fan and DavutoÄ=9Flu are
not familiar with the concept of genocide. Setting aside all
international or otherwise accepted definitions of genocide, one may
look at the cases where Prime Minister ErdoÄ=9Fan and Foreign Minister
DavutoÄ=9Flu have used the term genocide.
On 10 July 2009, ErdoÄ=9Fan accused China of `a kind of genocide,'
referring to that country's policies toward the Muslim population in
Xinjiang.13
On 15 March 2012, ErdoÄ=9Fan accused Israel of genocide against
Palestinians in the Gaza.14
On 11 July 2012, the 17th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre of
8,000 Bosnians, DavutoÄ=9Flu stated: `We once again strongly condemn
this grave humanitarian crime, share the pain of the victims' families
and reject any attempt to underestimate or deny that the genocide
occurred in Srebrenica.'15
On 14 July 2012, Prime Minister ErdoÄ=9Fan characterized the events in
Syria as `an attempted genocide' by the government of Syria.
Additionally, ErdoÄ=9Fan or DavutoÄ=9Flu have not objected to the use
of the term genocide by others and by international tribunals, for
situations that are far less sinister than what happened to Armenians
in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire.
The use of the term by these two officials describing the actions of
the accused governments in cases where ethnic or religious groups are
resisting policies of their governments or even attempting secession
has three implications. First, numbers do not matter; 8,000 Bosnians
killed qualifies the massacre as genocide. Second, intentionality does
not matter: the said massacres need not be part of a plan to
exterminate the whole group. Third, revolting against the government
by the victim group does not disqualify the government reaction from
being characterized as genocide. After all, Bosnians were in revolt
against their central authority, just as Syrian rebels, Xinjiang
Uighurs, and Gaza Palestinians are.
By these standards, what happened to Armenians in the Ottoman Empire
during the First World War should have qualified as the maximal form
of genocide.
To understand ErdoÄ=9Fan's intriguing position we need to refer to yet
another use of the term genocide by him, this time to deny one, a case
other than the Armenian. On 9 November 2009 he reacted to the charge
of genocide against the Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for its
policies toward the South Sudanese in Darfur. He rejected the charge,
arguing that a Muslim could not commit genocide, by definition. As a
reporter of Today's Zaman has indicated, it would have been different
if the Prime Minister had said any Muslim who committed genocide can
no longer be considered a Muslim. That is not what he said, nor was it
what he meant. ErdoÄ=9Fan seems to be arguing that Muslims simply
cannot commit genocide by definition.16 It is possible that he does
not realize that such a position makes any investigation of the
policies of the CUP totally irrelevant; since according to that logic,
being Muslims, what the CUP leaders did could not be characterized as
genocide, by definition.
One could agree with him, if one can make the following
proviso. Muslim governments, when acting in accordance with the
principles established by the Prophet Muhammad as to how a Muslim
state must deal with its non-Muslim subjects, should not be committing
massacres and genocide.
Armenians have lived for centuries in Muslim dominated states -Iran,
Arab, and African countries- and there has not been a massacre of
Armenians in any of those countries at any time. In fact, it was
largely Muslim piety and tolerance that led Muslim societies in the
Near East -Iranians, Syrians, Lebanese, Palestinians, Iraqis, and
others- to welcome the survivors of the deportations and massacres.
Similarly, as memoirs and oral history reveal, it was mainly Muslim
piety that led many Muslims to reject -at their own peril- the state's
death decree and save a significant number of Armenians who would have
otherwise perished. This does not mean that they have been treated as
equals, far from it. But there is a difference between mistreatment,
inequality, discrimination, repression, and oppression, on the one
hand, and genocide and massacres on the other. Muslims do commit
genocide -just as Christians do- when they stray from the principles
of Islam. Governments that happened to be composed of Muslims also
commit genocide when they adopt policies that are inspired by
ideologies such as extreme statism and nationalism.
ErdoÄ=9Fan's argument assumes that governments act according to their
religions when, in fact, the basis of their behavior is that they are
the government and define state and national interests according to a
number of criteria that have little to do with the religion they
-formally or otherwise- adhere to. When ErdoÄ=9Fan is denying genocide
in specific cases -such as 1915 and Sudan- he thinks he is saving
Islam. That was one method to do so, but one that does not hold up to
any kind of critical examination.
ErdoÄ=9Fan could have opted for another method regarding the Armenian
genocide: The genocide of the Armenian people was committed by the CUP
in power. And in committing that crime, the CUP was not acting as a
Muslim government but rather as a group comprised of a primarily
nationalist clique that had taken over power illegally and used
religion only to help make their policies work and `seem' sanctioned
by the dominant religion, Islam. This is a perfectly legitimate
political argument as well as a historically valid one.
ErdoÄ=9Fan would have done a better service to Islam if he had
presented such an argument. Rather than denying what was happening in
Sudan, he could have argued, equally, that the policies of the
Sudanese government in the south of that country and in Darfur were
not inspired by Islam but motivated by greed and love of power,
policies that had strayed from the Koranic precepts of respecting the
right to life of non-Muslim `peoples of the Book.' Just because
Germans were Christians does not mean that the inspiration for the
Holocaust committed by the Nazi government constituted the
articulation of principles enunciated by Christ.
The Official Position of the Government: Blackmail and Manipulation?
Prime Minister ErdoÄ=9Fan could have made that argument and resolved
an extremely thorny issue, especially given his overwhelming political
capital. Not only would he not have lost much of this capital, but he
would also have gained international respect both from governments
-including those that come under official Turkish pressure not to
recognize the Armenian genocide and succumb to that pressure- and from
civil societies in countless countries. But that is not has happened,
not yet anyway.
Officially, Turkey continues its unabated international campaign
against the Armenian inspired international campaign for the
recognition of the genocide. Ambassadors, consuls, and other
officials as well as historians who support the official position of
Turkey on this subject - whether of ethnic Turkish origin or not -
propagate the official Turkish position in as many forums as
possible. The government of Turkey is ready to blackmail - when it can
- any other government that moves toward the recognition of the
genocide. It appears that, after all, the issue has not been left to
historians, after all.
However, this is not first time that blinders cover the eyes of a
Turkish leader - no matter how liberal or reformist. The Armenian
issue is, indeed, the blind spot of Turkish leaders' vision.
It is possible that the official Turkish position continues to reflect
a deeply rooted reflexive reaction on the subject, particularly
entrenched in the Foreign Ministry of the Turkish Republic. It is
possible that the Prime Minister's inclination has not been
articulated as a policy and, therefore, not yet permeated this
powerful institution.
This could be the case since the brilliant and visionary Minister of
Foreign Affairs, Ahmet DavutoÄ=9Flu has bigger issues to deal with;
the Armenian issue is one that slows things down. It may very well be
that the Minister has too much on his plate to pay serious attention
to the vulnerabilities of the Turkish official position on the
Armenian dossier.17
It is possible that both ErdoÄ=9Fan and DavutoÄ=9Flu have too many
battles to fight, domestically, regionally, and internationally, to
take on this issue head on. Maybe this is an issue on which ErdoÄ=9Fan
does not wish to spend any political capital. It is possible that
ErdoÄ=9Fan has been in power too long and is now concerned about his
legacy and that he is thinking of his legacy in conventional terms.
After all, it may not have been wise to take on the deep state, the
military included, while confronting the deepest of the known secrets
that lie within the birth of the modern state of Turkey and modern
Turkishness. It is very difficult to lead all the revolutions
necessary to revamp society and the state.
It is possible, too, that ErdoÄ=9Fan, DavutoÄ=9Flu, and the AKP could
not fully disengage themselves from the original narrative;
fundamental myths are not destroyed while sharing in their
assumptions.
As so many Turkish historians, sociologists, and journalists have
noted in recent years, the development of democracy in Turkey is
organically tied to Ankara's policies toward the Kurdish population,
its views on the treatment of Armenians during the First World War,
and the proper examination and appreciation of that history today.
It is not a coincidence that ErdoÄ=9Fan's attempt to democratize the
country by dismantling the military's grip and the domination of the
deep state over the country was accompanied by a certain
liberalization of the official Turkish policy on the Armenian
issue. It is also not a coincidence that signs are increasingly
pointing to the possible replacement of one kind of deep state with
another, which induces a return to the reflexive policies of previous
administrations regarding the question of the recognition of the
Armenian genocide.
It is possible that ErdoÄ=9Fan, DavutoÄ=9Flu, and the AKP could not
resist the temptation, so common to radically minded reformers, to use
the same, ready-made methods of repression against their antagonists
to achieve their vision, methods they opposed before they came to
power. At the end though, the use of assumptions and methods which you
had opposed, will bring you where your opponents were before you
resisted and replaced them.
Maybe they did not understand that systems and regimes are
characterized by how they treat the different, the other, the
marginal, and the weak. The treatment of peoples in these categories
tells at least as much about that society and system as what they say
about themselves. Having initially wooed the liberal segments of
Turkish society to come to power and tamed -for the time being- the
military, ErdoÄ=9Fan has undertaken a campaign to muzzle the press,
control the judiciary, and retreat from the liberal agenda he had
espoused earlier. We are witnessing more areas where Islamic religious
values - at least as defined generally - determine policy.
A Matter of Options
When CUP came to power after the Young Turk Revolution in 1908, it had
two options. The first was to resolve the Armenian Question as a
matter of domestic policy. Namely, dealing with the social and
economic issues raised by Armenians, who except for the minority urban
middle and upper classes, were peasants, artisans, and small
shopkeepers. By and large there had a been a few long decades during
which farmers were losing their lands and craftsmen were losing their
markets, creating favorable conditions for a willingness to join an
Armenian revolutionary movement.
The second option was to see the Armenian Question as a foreign plot,
much like the way during the Cold War, when right-wing governments in
the third world wanted to see all revolts and guerrilla movements as
strictly Moscow inspired, devoid of any local logic and, therefore,
subject to justifiable repression.
The Young Turks started with the first and ended up opting for the
second. A potentially more or less egalitarian and representative
Ottoman Empire that based its strength on actual social and economic
reforms was seen as a weak state. The result was what happened in
1915.
When ErdoÄ=9Fan came to power, he too had options: he could have seen
the Armenian issue as a matter integral to Ottoman/Turkish history, a
revision of history being necessary to better pursue the
democratization; or, to continue the state policies on this issue as
if it is a foreign inspired conspiracy fueled by imperialists designs
to break up Turkey, an issue that is otherwise alien to the essence of
what Turkey is and should be.
ErdoÄ=9Fan gave signals opting for the first; the question is, has he,
too, ended up with the second option?
Dealing with the Armenian issue requires humility, especially by those
who claim to function according to deeply held and religion inspired
principles of behavior, and particularly so, when the policies in
question - from genocide to its denial- were in defiance of those
principles. To expect that in such cases Turkey project humility may
sound paradoxical: after all, Turkey is the greater power in this
relationship. However, there are some issues that refuse to disappear
and, with all of its power, Turkey is unable to control Armenians in
the Diaspora - even if it can harm Armenians in Armenia by keeping its
land border with that country closed or by other means of pressure
- it cannot control the historical and scientific work of scholars
in Armenia or abroad.
In a November 2010 interview with Ara Kotchounian, the editor of one
of the Armenian dailies in Istanbul, Zhamanag, ErdoÄ=9Fan stated:
"Turkey is not in hostility with any state. We have experienced many
painful events in history. But we have never seen these events as a
factor of shaping the future vision. After we had victory in the
Independence War, we have started a new era with all these
states. Also with Armenia, we can achieve this. I believe that this is
still possible. Leaving the history to historians and scientists, we
can walk to the future together. However, a segment of the Armenian
Diaspora does not have the same vision. This constitutes major
obstacle to the process."
Sometimes leaders say more than they think they say, even the smartest
and most visionary among them. This confusing statement in itself
could be parsed into a long article.
There are three vital points for the reader to take away:
=80¢ ErdoÄ=9Fan thinks history is important to Turks and Turkey, and
it is so in a way that he can pick and choose which events should be
remembered. Conversely, he does not think history should also be
important to Armenians.
=80¢ According to ErdoÄ=9Fan, Armenians in the Diaspora should share
in his vision of Turkey/Armenia relations, when they were not
consulted on the subject.
=80¢ The Diasporan Armenians -only one segment of this extremely
complex entity- were able to disrupt the vision that the powerful
ErdoÄ=9Fan had for interstate relations between Armenia and Turkey.
Regardless, he could have ignored them altogether. After all, the
state of Armenia did sign the protocols for the establishment of
normal relations between the two countries, contrary to the opinion of
that `segment of the Armenian Diaspora.' But still, the protocols
failed, even though the Armenian side did accept the constitution of a
joint sub-commission of historians to discover the historical
truth. It is evident that a specter is haunting ErdoÄ=9Fan, as it has
haunted those before him.
This does not bode well for the future of Turkish-Armenian relations
and, generally, speaking, for Turkish democracy. Turkey needs a second
liberation, liberation from taboos and unresolved issues that have
been the most significant foundations and symptoms of the absence of
democracy. The return to the conventional official Turkish view of the
past means creating a more serious conflict with Turkish scholarship
and civil society that have been moving in the opposite direction.
Since Armenia's independence, Turkey has taken some important positive
steps in bilateral relations, although there, too, it has failed to
move fully forward in the establishment of normal relations. Turkey
explains this failure by its linkage of progress in bilateral
relations to a resolution or progress in of the Karabakh conflict.
That, by and large, is another story. But it is significant that by
adopting ethnic affinity as the basis of its policy regarding that
conflict, Turkey has lost a great and strategic opportunity to become
a significant player in the whole region. Many Armenians, in or
outside Armenia, believe that the official Turkish policy in the
Karabakh conflict constitutes a mere subterfuge; that, along with the
denial of the genocide, it merely continues Ottoman and Turkish
policies toward Armenians and Armenia in general. For that segment of
the Armenian people, Turkey's denial of the genocide constitutes a
national security threat of an unrepentant state that justifies the
genocidal policies.
It is possible to think of another vision that could be shared: A
vision in which the Turkish state comes to terms with its past, once
and for all, and liberates itself, its public officials, its
diplomats, and above all, its people, from a heavy burden; a vision
that would also liberate the Diasporan Armenians, who are mostly the
children and descendants of the survivors of the massacres and
deportations.
This may be news to the leader of a powerful state such as Turkey and
his colleagues, but it is not up to them to decide what Armenians
remember, and how they remember. Armenians today cannot stop thinking
of those who did not survive and of a collective loss of historical
proportions that is bigger than a defeat in a battle. The loss
resulting from the massacres in and deportations of Armenians from
their historic homeland matches, at the least, the significance of the
War of Independence that created today's Turkey. I will leave aside
the argument that the successful outcome of the War of Independence
came at the expense of the Armenians. From the Turkish point of view
this was a necessary war led by extremely capable and visionary
leaders, who considered everything else, in contemporary terminology,
as collateral damage. But that collateral damage cemented the loss of
a homeland for another people, who deserve, at the least respect for
the memory of their victims and understanding of the meaning of the
loss of homeland.
That is where ErdoÄ=9Fan and his colleagues should begin. Respect does
not come from the constant display of power and arrogant or ignorant
statements; respect is gained through the display of maturity and good
judgment, values that can be easily found in the Koran.
I do not know whether the opportunity has already been lost for Turkey
to deal seriously with the Armenian and other critical issues, and, by
extension, the opportunity to strengthen democracy in the Turkish
Republic. Let us hope not.
Gerard J. Libaridian is a historian who served as senior advisor to
the first president of independent Armenia, between 1991 and 1997.
NOTES
1 It is significant that in assessing the number of Armenians in the
Ottoman Empire before the deportations and massacres and the number of
Armenian lives lost, and in presenting these arguments, the number of
Armenians, an ethnic group, is compared to that of `Muslims', not
Turks. The figures for Muslims included Kurds, Arabs, Albanians, a
variety of muhajirs or recent immigrants from the Balkans, the
Caucasus, etc.
2 The argument claiming that the term genocide was coined after the
events in question is irrelevant for this discussion. The term
`syphilis', describing a particular disease, was coined in the late
19th century. That does not mean the disease itself was originated
with the word; it had existed for centuries; it just had not received
a name. I am sure music existed long before we found a name or many
names for it.
3 See Gerard J. Libaridian, The Challenge of Statehood (Cambridge:
Blue Crane Books, 1999), or its Turkish edition, Ermenilerin
DevletleÅ=9Fme Sınavı (Istanbul: Ä°letiÅ=9Fim, 2001), and elsewhere.
4 While Jews of Istanbul were not harmed, those in Palestine were
placed in camps for a period, being suspected of collusion with the
British. They were released under American pressure, which did not
work for the Armenians.
5 There is no doubt that Western imperial powers aimed at the
dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, as they did of other non-Western
empires. That was an essential component of Western imperialism. Yet
the argument for territorial integrity is far less sacrosanct for an
empire than for a nation-state where there is no domina tion over a
geographically defined and repressed ethnic element. There is always a
problem in designating what that more reasonable state is, i.e., where
does the so-called nation-state begin and end when the empire
collapses. Empires had a chance to survive if they accommodated fully
the rights of non-dominant subjects individually and collectively,
although none of the traditional empires managed to do that s
uccessfully. The last to fall in this respect was the Soviet
empire. In Turkey's case, the question is not whether there were plans
to disasse mble the Ottoman Empire. There were plenty of plans; the
reason those plans did not work for so long is, mainly, the rivalry
between the British and Russian empires regarding who would get
what. The problem of the Sèvres Syndrome is not its historical
grounding, but its continuing confusion between empire and
nation-state, the projection back of today's Turkey as the natural and
only possible one out of the Ottoman E mpire. The second problem with
the Sèvres Syndrome resides in its exaggerated use during the Republic
to justify the dominance of the military the defender of a hegemonic
and non-democratic state.
6 Necmettin Erbakan, the leader of the Welfare Party (RP), might have
been the exception but he did not have time to display an alternative
new perspective; he was removed from power by the military after one
year as Prime Minister in June 1997.
7 Libaridian (1987); and Libaridian, `What Was Revolutionary about
Armenian Revolutionary Parties,' in Ronald G. Suny et al. (eds.), A
Question of Genocide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011),
pp. 82-112. See also, Dikran Kaligian, Armenian Organization and
Ideology under Ottoman Rule: 1908-1914 (New Jersey: Transaction
Publishing, 2011).
8 This would be the precursor of what is now labeled as the `deep
state'.
9 The relationship between ethnicity and religion requires, obviously,
a more thorough exploration than is possible within the confines of
this article. 10 This too is a suggestion that cannot be fully
explored and critiqued within the confines of this article.
11 I myself am not a fan of religion, any religion. But I do
recognize that organized religious systems represent one sort of
attempt by humankind to reach out to an ideal. God may be humankind's
best creation, except that man is not always at his best when creating
or interpreting God.
12 The ratification of the two protocols was aborted by Turkey, which
continued to link any progress in bilateral relations to progress in
the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict that involved the unrecognized
Nagorno-Karabakh Republic and Azerbaijan, as well as Armenia. Since
1993, Turkey has linked any progress in bilateral relations to this
particular issue, indicating that ethnic solidarity is more important
than other considerations.
13 `Turkey Attacks China `Genocide',' BBC World, 10 July 2009.
14 `Erdogan Accuses Israel of Genocide,' Asbarez.com, 15 March 2012.
15 `Srebrenica Will Never be Forgotten,' Sabah English, 12 July 2012.
16 Orhan Kemal Cengiz, `On ErdoÄ=9Fan, Genocide and Being pro-AKP,'
Today's Zaman, 9 November 2009,
17 Beyond the protocols, DavutoÄ=9Flu did make one attempt to deal
with the Armenian issue when he contacted some individuals from the
Armenian Diaspora. It appears, though, that his intention was to tell
these individuals about what to think and feel rather than to attempt
to fully understand any Armenian point of view. If you grow up in
total ignorance of an issue and are educated on the basis of a totally
different narrative of your country's birth and history, then a
dossier prepared by a few advisors is not sufficient to formulate a
policy that is constructive, even for a highly intelligent minister
such as DavutoÄ=9Flu.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
Turkish Policy Quarterly
Spring 2013
Vol. 12 No: 1
pp. 43-64
by Gerard J. Libaridian
This article examines the history of how Turkish leaders - the
current Prime Minister Recep Tayyip ErdoÄ=9Fan in particular - have
tried to deal with the Armenian Question. ErdoÄ=9Fan, due to his own
political philosophy, rooted in Islamic conservatism had the chance to
recognize and denounce the mistreatment of the Armenians at the hands
of the Ittihadists, since the latter's policies had nothing to do with
religion, but rather with nationalist principals that were dominant in
the final years of the Ottoman Empire, and installed into the
Republican regime in its early years. However, ErdoÄ=9Fan, like his
predecessors, failed to make the right choice.
When the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and Recep Tayyip
ErdoÄ=9Fan came to power in Turkey in 2002, there were reasons to
think that they would correct the state policies for dealing with
history, particularly regarding the treatment of Armenians by the
Ottoman government during the First World War. It would have been too
much to expect, even then, that the new government would accept the
characterization of deportations and massacres of Armenians as
genocide. At the least, there was a chance that they would distance
themselves from the policies of the Committee of Union and Progress
(Ittihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti in Turkish, abbreviated as CUP in this
article) that produced that genocide during that war. There was also
reason to believe that the new Prime Minister and AKP would distance
themselves from the policies of previous governments in Republican
Turkey that minimized the scope of the tragedy, denied its
intentionality, and spent enormous amounts of time, energy, resources,
and international political capital over decades to campaign against
the characterization of these events as genocide.
There were reasons for my hope that AKP would change the official
approach of Turkey to dealing with Armenian history, despite my
equally eternal and hopeless intellectual bent to doubt my own
optimism. Though it now appears very possible that I was mistaken, I
still have some hope. Why I was optimistic and why I may have been
mistaken is the subject of this article.
Republican Turkey and its Arguments
Except for the brief interlude immediately following the end of the
First World War, when Ottoman military tribunals tried and convicted
the CUP leaders for their treatment of Armenians during the War, the
Turkish state has followed a problematic and largely failed policy in
its accounting of events. By now an overwhelming number of scholars of
the period and of genocide have determine that what happened to
Armenians during the War was indeed genocide. So have a significant
number of states and their legislative bodies internationally. To the
extent that Turkish official policy has been able to impact the
characterization of these events by the U.S. and some others, has
revealed that the reluctance of the latter is due to political and
geopolitical considerations and not on the historical evidence.
In different ways and at a variety of forums Republican Turkey - the
state and its official historians and scholars following the state
line - have argued that:
i) The intention was to deport the Armenians and subsequent deaths
resulted from unsanitary conditions for deportees, as well as from a
civil war-type of conflict between Armenians and Muslims;1
ii) Losses of Armenian lives did not exceed a number between 300,000
and 600,000, no more than Muslim losses;
iii) To the extent that the state had any involvement, deportations
were due to the fact that `Armenians' -all Armenians, the 90 year olds
and those yet to be born- presented a threat to the security of the
state. These policies were, therefore, justified;
iv) Thus the wholesale deportations and massacres of the Empire's
Armenian subjects did not amount to what would eventually be
characterized as a genocide, that these policies were not intended to
`exterminate a nation,' the latter being a common international
description of these policies at the time of their occurrence;
v) The term =80=9Cgenocide', having been coined in 1948, could not be
applied to events that took place during the First World War.2 In
other words, Turkey argued that what occurred in 1915 was hardly
unusual or extraordinary. The sentiment was along the lines of: `We
did not do it; besides, Armenians deserved it.'
Rather than the known facts of the case, what is being fought over is
in the realm of the politics of genocide recognition.3 The fact that
the campaign for recognition is colored by the role it plays in
Armenian communities -the organization and legitimation of power- does
not change the character of what happened; nor does the fact that
these campaigns are used on occasion by various countries and
international organizations to deride Turkey, fairly or unfairly, in
its attempts to join the EU or advance its interests regionally or
internationally.
Dealing with Official Turkish Arguments
The purpose of this article is not to counter the arguments of the
Turkish state and associated scholars. As far as scholarship is
concerned, historians, including sociologists, legal scholars,
genocide specialists, and myself have dealt with these arguments
extensively, in detail and adequately. While much work needs still to
be done in working out various dimensions, the position of the Turkish
state and its official historians has been eroding as scholarship -not
just by Armenian scholars- has left little doubt that what was done to
Armenians in the Ottoman Empire either was planned as an extermination
or amounted to one. In other words, that it was genocide as defined by
the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide.
Understanding the Position of Republican Turkey
There has been significant analysis by scholars who have explored the
relationship between genocide denial and the establishment of the
Turkish Republic. There were, obviously, critical and organic overlaps
of the personnel that were part of the CUP administration during the
First Word War and the establishment of the Republic itself. One can
also see that the deportations and massacres of Armenians and other
non- Muslims such as Assyrians and Greeks during the First World War
and the following interlude period between 1918-1923, were a
necessary, even if not sufficient, condition for the establishment of
a Turkish Republic as understood by its facilitators and founders.4
Throughout this process, Turkish leaders had come to see the Christian
minorities, particularly Armenians, as the main reason for the
intervention of foreign powers in the affairs of the Ottoman Empire
and for the loss of territory. The problem with this perspective and
the fatal consequences it engendered was, first, that by and large the
Great Powers used the real social and economic problems Armenians had
as excuses to extract concessions from the Ottoman state for
themselves; and, second, such an approach rationalized the inclination
of Ottoman rulers to ignore the real problems Armenians and others
had.
The Young Turks had come to power in 1908 with a quasi-liberal agenda
and had reinstated the Ottoman Constitution of 1876 that had been
rescinded in 1878. Armenians and other non-Muslims, just as liberal
Muslims, supported the Young Turk Revolution. They expected the
reinstated Ottoman Parliament to become the actual branch of
government that should and could effectuate political, social, and
economic reforms. These proposed reforms - agrarian, but also legal
and administrative - were not only intended to improve the lot of
Ottoman subjects -and not only non-Muslim subjects- but in doing so
also preempt the need for foreign intervention to bring about such
reforms and thus make the continuation of the Ottoman state possible.
For a complex set of reasons, the leaders of the Ottoman Empire
determined after 1908 that such a path as insisted upon by the more
liberal elements of the Ottoman political spectrum that included
Armenians toward the preservation of the Ottoman state was not the
desirable one. They opted for another way to save the Empire and to
ensure that power was held by a specific ethnic/religious group; and
they had a very different vision in mind for the state. The new
Turkish state i) had to have a centralized and unitary structure, with
a strong military as the final arbiter of state affairs, and ii) would
have to be immune to foreign intervention by their radical methods of
elimination of elements that were prone to make demands of the state;
it was assumed that the Empire's Muslims were the least vulnerable to
dangerous liberal ideas and that they would all become good Turks in
the state that would emerge from the First World War.
What the CUP did, made the new Republic possible. But the elimination
of the liberal political impulses -no matter where these came from,
Muslims or Christians- and the repression of any opposition had become
a necessary precondition for the survival of that vision.
The official Turkish narrative of the birth of the Republic has come
as close as historical interpretation allows in presenting that birth
as an immaculate conception that produced the modern Turkish
nation. According to this narrative, nothing more happened than a
valiant struggle against imperialists; the birth of the republic was
the victory of the nationalist ideal over the nationalism of
others. Thus the Republic had an interest in inducing amnesia of and
ignorance in many aspects of that genesis. Acceptance of the full
array of measures that made that Republic possible would have
diminished the useful myth of an immaculate conception. The Turkish
Republic could not have created and inspired citizens who were devoted
to a Turkish nationalist ideal and nationalist state if the birth of
the Republic was, somehow, connected to less than charitable
policies. Nor could Turkey project itself as a modern state, in the
view of such statesmen, in the international arena, if they owned up
to a questionable form of behavior.
Of course, it is possible to argue that a recognition of such an event
in one's past might have been a better strategy to gain acceptance in
the international community as a modern state. But the hubris of
statism and Kemalism prevented Turkish leaders from taking that
route. The concept mediating between the past and the present is the
persistent and omnipresent `Sèvres syndrome', which maintains that
major foreign powers are always looking for an opportunity to carve up
what became Turkey, as was last proposed in the Treaty of Sèvres in
1920.5 The recognition of a genocide in this context, has been
formulated as a prelude to such a partition, against which the War of
Independence (1920-22), the founding act of the Republic, had been
fought.
Turkey's leaders preceding ErdoÄ=9Fan all shared, subscribed or acted
according to this nationalistic and statist perspective.6 Often weak
and compromised, the Prime Ministers of Turkey in the second half of
the 20th century could not and would not have challenged the
conventional formulas dictated, above all, by the military and what
Turkish analysts have called the `deep state' in Turkey.
ErdoÄ=9Fan and His Armenian Problem
Considering the perspective proposed above, how has ErdoÄ=9Fan handled
this issue since his consolidation of power?
ErdoÄ=9Fan, the AKP, and the current president Abdullah Gül did not
come to power through the usual political machinery in Turkey; they
created a new one. More importantly, their political philosophy is
derived mainly from religious concepts rather than secular
nationalism. They were able to mobilize the traditionalist-voting base
on different principles, rather than strictly through conventional
party allegiances.
They even won the support of some liberal and left leaning segments of
Turkish society that were tired of the limits to democracy -including
the freedom to explore and question conventional history- which had
been placed in the name of state security and stability within the
framework of the nationalist state. ErdoÄ=9Fan did not need the
narrative of the nationalists to assert a modern Turkishness and
project a vision for a strong homeland.
Indeed, ErdoÄ=9Fan challenged the role assigned by the nationalist
project to the military in the construction of Republican Turkey,
including the arbitrary and debilitating break with the Ottoman past
promoted by the Kemalist orthodoxy. Having liberated themselves from
the shackles of a by now mechanically applied and stringent framework
for statehood, ErdoÄ=9Fan and his associates juxtaposed the democratic
ideal derived from their spiritual foundations to the authoritarian
system that had been developed.
Armenians, Turkish Democracy, and Turkishness
ErdoÄ=9Fan and his party offered an alternative definition of Turkish
society, of Turkishness and, therefore of the state. At its core, this
alternative had two characteristics:
i) modifying and, possibly, replacing the nationalist story that had
legitimized the Republic and aiming to create a new secular Turkish
society, with one that relied more on moral values of a community as
defined by Islam, and that is more in tune with the traditionalism and
conservatism of the majority of citizens. This dimension would also
allow the displaying a better understanding of the Ottoman Empire
where, for most of its existence, power was legitimized on religious
principles; and, as an integral part of that vision,
ii) establishing a more democratic society, and a statism inspired by
spiritual values rather than the `secular religion' of a nationalist
statism.
These two issues are at the heart of the Armenian issue in Ottoman and
Turkish history and historiography as well as of the Turkish
narrative.
It is, indeed, possible to argue that the Ottoman policies toward
Armenians veered toward massacres and eventually genocidal steps when:
i) imperial Istanbul moved away from the traditional tolerance of
Muslim states toward non-Muslims - which dates back to the time of the
Prophet himself;
ii) the CUP started relying on statist and nationalist thinking to
solve the `Armenian Question', as its leaders understood it; and,
iii) as a result, the CUP undertook the repression of
parliamentarianism, and liberal economic and political reforms that
were more commonly supported by Armenian political groups and the
Armenian Patriarchate, as well as other non-Turkic Muslims, such as
Albanians and Arabs.
There is one dimension that has been lost to most historians and
writers of our time but not to those who were observing and making
decisions prior to the onset of the First World War: Armenian
political parties of the time, both of a revolutionary and socialistic
bent, and constituting the left-wing of the Ottoman political
spectrum, welcomed the 1908 Young Turk Revolution. The Dashnaktsutiun
or ARF -that had not advocated an independent Armenia- had been part
of the Ottoman opposition in exile, allied itself with a variety of
Ottoman opposition groups. The Hnchakians had advocated independence
earlier but removed that demand in 1909; they too began to consider
themselves an Ottoman party, and aligned themselves with Prince
Sabahaddin in opposition to the CUP and the ARF.
By and large, Armenian parties with organizational capacity and grass
roots support were the last bastions of a parliamentary and
representative democracy in the Ottoman Empire. In 1908 the
socialistic and revolutionary Armenian parties, now banking on the
idea of a common and liberal Ottoman state, were joined by the
Armenian Liberal Democratic (Ramgavar, or ADL) Party, representing the
interests of the Armenian wealthy and upper-middle class. The visions
of these Armenian political parties differed somewhat but they all
supported a version of Ottomanism that engaged all ethnic and
religious groups, either through a centralized or federalized
structure, where issues could be resolved internally, thus voiding the
need for foreign intervention.
By 1912 the Armenian leadership concluded that the CUP was not ready
to sponsor serious reforms. Although the Armenian leadership returned
to the policy of asking for help from the Great Powers, they continued
to labor hard to extract reforms from the CUP for a while longer. The
CUP coup of 1913 more or less destroyed that option of saving the
Empire through reforms. More often than not, history books and
articles on the Armenian issue fail to recognize that at the end of
the last serious set of negotiations between the ARF and the CUP, the
bottom line for the Armenian side was the demand from the CUP for
agrarian reform in the Ottoman Empire and, if that was too ambitious,
only in the provinces where most Armenians lived.7
The Turkish nationalist project was not only about the liberation of
what the nationalists considered `the minimal expanse for the
homeland' for their yet vaguely defined Turkish nation -yet to be
created- a nation to be melded of Muslims from a variety of ethnic and
linguistic backgrounds. It was also important that the new state be
`strong' and `virile', i.e., dominated by a combination of a political
elite and the military. This combination, first crystallized in the
pre-War CUP triumvirate of Talat, Enver, and Cemal pashas, would not
only protect the new state against foreign intervention but also from
domestic enemies that might want to `weaken' the state through
liberalism and a parliamentary system.8
The CUP and its accolades thought that parliamentary `games' would
threaten the `cohesion' of society, i.e., that parliamentarianism
would make society resistant to the hierarchical structure that needed
to be established, or re-established from earlier Ottoman times. What
was needed, it was thought, was saving the state and reshaping society
that would have a hierarchical structure, where loyalty to the state
as defined by the powers that would replace religion as the primary
form of self-identification.
At the end, CUP policies produced two results: i) the cleansing of
elements that were strongly in favor of a representative and elected
government in the Ottoman Empire, elements that were, in this case
defined by their ethnicity as well as their religion; ii) the
engendering of a society that took for granted the loyalty of Muslim
groups but questioned that of the others;9 and, iii) the creation of a
national/political entity, which, in this case, turned out to be
Republican Turkey.
ErdoÄ=9Fan and the AKP could have denounced the past treatment of
Armenians outright. In fact they could have pointed out that it was
extreme nationalist ideology, rather than Islam, that was responsible
for the genocidal policies toward Armenians and for the absence of
democracy in the early years of Republican Turkey. By doing that, he
could have saved the legacy of Ottoman history and its policy of
tolerance -however exaggerated- by rejecting the extremist policies of
the wartime CUP government, as inimical to Islamic values; and if CUP
policies or their consequences can best be characterized as genocide,
so be it.
Foreign Minister Ahmet DavutoÄ=9Flu has given the best articulation to
ErdoÄ=9Fan's understanding of foreign policy and to the value the
Ottoman legacy has in that perspective, by increasing Turkey's direct
involvement in the Balkans and the Middle East, once part of the
Empire. ErdoÄ=9Fan and DavutoÄ=9Flu have justified Turkey's more
intimate involvement in the affairs of Turkey's neighbors on national
security concerns, which is quite understandable. But the larger
framework for their thinking suggests that for Turkey's involvement in
these regions is inspired by their religion-based idealization of the
Ottoman experience. What they are imagining is a Pax Ottomanica, this
conveniently imagined community that could be recreated as a Pax
Turkica.10
It should be clear, nonetheless, that such an imagined, of not
imaginary, program cannot succeed if the AKP, Prime Minister
ErdoÄ=9Fan, and Minister of Foreign Affairs DavutoÄ=9Flu cannot
distinguish between the two opposing legacies of the Ottoman Empire:
The tolerant one, however imperfect; and the later phase of the
Ottoman experience that produced a genocide.
The issue of the fate of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire is relevant
to today's quest for democracy in Turkey. Liberal democracy had to
wait decades before it became an issue for a large number of Turkish
citizens, before citizens questioned the authoritarianism and
hierarchical thinking of the early decades of Republican Turkey and
were ready to break through taboos imposed by that hierarchical
framework.
An Ottoman Empire, however reduced in size, or Republican Turkey would
have to have been a liberal and democratic state had Armenians and
other ethnic groups been part of its population.
Definitions and Interests
The two aspects of ErdoÄ=9Fan's initial program -a Turkish identity
that relies less on ethnicity than on religion and a more democratic
state- correspond to the two interrelated dimensions at the core of
the historical Armenian issue: ethnicity as the basis for massacres
and deportations followed by the denial of a democratic,
parliamentarian Ottoman Empire.
ErdoÄ=9Fan and AKP could have used the Armenian issue to highlight the
difference between the distant tolerant past of the Empire, which they
seem to cherish, and the more nationalist late-Ottoman period, which
produced the massacres and deportations. In other words, recognizing
what had happened, they could have found fault with the CUP as a
regime for what they could characterize as policies inspired from a
soulless nationalism, just as was done with the policies of the Nazi
regime as opposed to the German state and its people as such.
The Armenian issue could have been seen as a tailor-made case on which
basis AKP could have extricated Turkey from a problem that refuses to
dissipate, if not disappear: That he could not manage to display the
delicate dimensions of history and may have fallen back on the
nationalist trap constitutes his Armenian problem.
A radical revision of Turkish policy could have given ErdoÄ=9Fan a
most visible high platform for his vision for Turkey based on
religious morals. Such a position would have also the corollary impact
of weakening his internal adversaries, which he considered nefarious
to a healthy country: the military and the deep state. After all, the
leaders of the CUP, Mehmet Talat, Ä°smail Enver, Ahmed Cemal (the
triumvirate of pashas), Bahattin Å=9Eakir, and the others responsible
for the government's planning and execution of extermination policies
did not act as devout Muslims. They only tried to use Islam to garner
last minute support for their designs, first of all designs to remain
in power.
In the same sense, the perpetrators of the Holocaust were all
Christians but that is not why they perpetrated the Holocaust. In fact
they despised Christianity, just as the same feeling CUP and Kemalism
had for their own religion, Islam.11 The immediate goal of the CUP was
the maintenance of the Empire; or, in its absence, the securing of a
state that would help them maintain their power through the
manipulation of slogans such as Pan-Islamism, Pan-Turkism, or
rallying, at the end, with Turkism. ErdoÄ=9Fan's Tentative Steps
Interestingly enough, during their first few years and in some
respects even later, there were signs that ErdoÄ=9Fan, Gül, and the
AKP embarked on a new course, even if cautiously.
When ErdoÄ=9Fan came to power, he was much more open in his treatment
of the Armenian issue, as well as on other important items, such as
media freedom, independence of the judiciary, and gay rights. In the
case of the Armenian issue, he wanted to leave history to
historians. This was an opening, since the Turkish state had always
dictated historical narratives down to every schoolbook, and has
always treated scholars and journalists who thought differently as
threats to national security.
ErdoÄ=9Fan made statements indicating that it should be up to
historians to determine the exact nature of what happened to Armenians
in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War; he made sure that
the rules governing access to Ottoman archives were eased, even though
by now these are most likely cleansed of the most obviously damning
documents, and the military archives are still not fully open. Rules
governing the terminology used to describe those events were eased or
applied less stringently. While this was partially due to internal
processes, much of this openness can be explained by European
requirements during Turkey's negotiations for entry into the European
Union.
The two protocols signed by Turkey and Armenia in October 2009 that
aimed at the normalization of relations between the two countries had
an indirect but clear reference to the genocide issue. This provided
further evidence that ErdoÄ=9Fan, certainly with strong support from
Gül, wished to move forward. The second protocol, which provides for
the creation of an overarching interstate commission to tackle the
areas of future cooperation and discussion, refers to a joint
sub-commission of historians that would `implement a dialogue on the
historical dimension with the aim to restore mutual confidence between
the two nations, including an impartial scientific examination of the
historical records and archives to define existing problems and
formulate recommendations.' This provision has been universally
understood to be referring to the genocide issue.
The largely negative Armenian reaction to this provision of the
protocols has received much attention, with particular reference to
the Diasporan organizations' responses in the form of demonstrations
against the Armenian government's acquiescence to a demand for such a
sub-commission that clearly was imposed by the Turkish side. It was
argued by these organizations and some opposition parties in Armenia
that by accepting such a provision, the Armenian side had placed a
question mark on the certainty that what had happened was genocide.
A more detached analysis of the document would lead us to add another
client to the doubter's list that this provision produced. If the
provision in question indicated that the Armenian side is placing the
truth about the genocide in question, so is the Turkish state. If the
only interpretation of the language used is that the truth is as yet
to be established, then the truth as propagated by Ankara and by
official historians is also in question. By agreeing that the truth
has yet to be established, albeit by an ambiguous sub-commission, the
Turkish Republic was also recognizing, as tacitly as the Republic of
Armenia, that the official Turkish position of absolute denial, which
was maintained for so long and at such cost, was being challenged and
moderated - at least in principle.
There were a few isolated protests by Turkish writers in this
respect. But there is no doubt that ErdoÄ=9Fan had the political
muscle to have it ratified by the Turkey's Parliament, just as
Armenia's President Serzh Sargsyan had the muscle to have it ratified
by the Armenia's Parliament. What went wrong when neither Parliament
even brought up the documents for ratification had little to do with
this dimension of the protocols.12
Even more significantly, in 2011, ErdoÄ=9Fan apologized for the
massacre of civilian Kurdish subjects in 1938 and 1939 in
Dersim/Tunceli. The idea and gesture of an apology itself are more
important than the details. No Turkish leader had ever apologized for
an atrocious policy or crime that the Ottoman or Turkish state had
ever committed against its own subjects. Indeed, such gestures are
much more recent in general, even in the international arena. It is
true that Mustafa Kemal criticized the CUP for atrocities against
Ottoman Christians, while members of that party who shared
responsibility for those massacres and deportations later served the
nationalist cause under him. Even then, there had been no apology;
Mustafa Kemal was just finding a good cause to reduce the CUP as a
political force without denying the favor that party had done to make
a new Turkish state possible. By addressing the particular issue of
the Kurds, ErdoÄ=9Fan set a precedent of distancing himself and his
party from the early Kemalist period of the history of the Turkish
Republic.
ErdoÄ=9Fan and the Term Genocide
It would be difficult to argue that ErdoÄ=9Fan and DavutoÄ=9Flu are
not familiar with the concept of genocide. Setting aside all
international or otherwise accepted definitions of genocide, one may
look at the cases where Prime Minister ErdoÄ=9Fan and Foreign Minister
DavutoÄ=9Flu have used the term genocide.
On 10 July 2009, ErdoÄ=9Fan accused China of `a kind of genocide,'
referring to that country's policies toward the Muslim population in
Xinjiang.13
On 15 March 2012, ErdoÄ=9Fan accused Israel of genocide against
Palestinians in the Gaza.14
On 11 July 2012, the 17th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre of
8,000 Bosnians, DavutoÄ=9Flu stated: `We once again strongly condemn
this grave humanitarian crime, share the pain of the victims' families
and reject any attempt to underestimate or deny that the genocide
occurred in Srebrenica.'15
On 14 July 2012, Prime Minister ErdoÄ=9Fan characterized the events in
Syria as `an attempted genocide' by the government of Syria.
Additionally, ErdoÄ=9Fan or DavutoÄ=9Flu have not objected to the use
of the term genocide by others and by international tribunals, for
situations that are far less sinister than what happened to Armenians
in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire.
The use of the term by these two officials describing the actions of
the accused governments in cases where ethnic or religious groups are
resisting policies of their governments or even attempting secession
has three implications. First, numbers do not matter; 8,000 Bosnians
killed qualifies the massacre as genocide. Second, intentionality does
not matter: the said massacres need not be part of a plan to
exterminate the whole group. Third, revolting against the government
by the victim group does not disqualify the government reaction from
being characterized as genocide. After all, Bosnians were in revolt
against their central authority, just as Syrian rebels, Xinjiang
Uighurs, and Gaza Palestinians are.
By these standards, what happened to Armenians in the Ottoman Empire
during the First World War should have qualified as the maximal form
of genocide.
To understand ErdoÄ=9Fan's intriguing position we need to refer to yet
another use of the term genocide by him, this time to deny one, a case
other than the Armenian. On 9 November 2009 he reacted to the charge
of genocide against the Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for its
policies toward the South Sudanese in Darfur. He rejected the charge,
arguing that a Muslim could not commit genocide, by definition. As a
reporter of Today's Zaman has indicated, it would have been different
if the Prime Minister had said any Muslim who committed genocide can
no longer be considered a Muslim. That is not what he said, nor was it
what he meant. ErdoÄ=9Fan seems to be arguing that Muslims simply
cannot commit genocide by definition.16 It is possible that he does
not realize that such a position makes any investigation of the
policies of the CUP totally irrelevant; since according to that logic,
being Muslims, what the CUP leaders did could not be characterized as
genocide, by definition.
One could agree with him, if one can make the following
proviso. Muslim governments, when acting in accordance with the
principles established by the Prophet Muhammad as to how a Muslim
state must deal with its non-Muslim subjects, should not be committing
massacres and genocide.
Armenians have lived for centuries in Muslim dominated states -Iran,
Arab, and African countries- and there has not been a massacre of
Armenians in any of those countries at any time. In fact, it was
largely Muslim piety and tolerance that led Muslim societies in the
Near East -Iranians, Syrians, Lebanese, Palestinians, Iraqis, and
others- to welcome the survivors of the deportations and massacres.
Similarly, as memoirs and oral history reveal, it was mainly Muslim
piety that led many Muslims to reject -at their own peril- the state's
death decree and save a significant number of Armenians who would have
otherwise perished. This does not mean that they have been treated as
equals, far from it. But there is a difference between mistreatment,
inequality, discrimination, repression, and oppression, on the one
hand, and genocide and massacres on the other. Muslims do commit
genocide -just as Christians do- when they stray from the principles
of Islam. Governments that happened to be composed of Muslims also
commit genocide when they adopt policies that are inspired by
ideologies such as extreme statism and nationalism.
ErdoÄ=9Fan's argument assumes that governments act according to their
religions when, in fact, the basis of their behavior is that they are
the government and define state and national interests according to a
number of criteria that have little to do with the religion they
-formally or otherwise- adhere to. When ErdoÄ=9Fan is denying genocide
in specific cases -such as 1915 and Sudan- he thinks he is saving
Islam. That was one method to do so, but one that does not hold up to
any kind of critical examination.
ErdoÄ=9Fan could have opted for another method regarding the Armenian
genocide: The genocide of the Armenian people was committed by the CUP
in power. And in committing that crime, the CUP was not acting as a
Muslim government but rather as a group comprised of a primarily
nationalist clique that had taken over power illegally and used
religion only to help make their policies work and `seem' sanctioned
by the dominant religion, Islam. This is a perfectly legitimate
political argument as well as a historically valid one.
ErdoÄ=9Fan would have done a better service to Islam if he had
presented such an argument. Rather than denying what was happening in
Sudan, he could have argued, equally, that the policies of the
Sudanese government in the south of that country and in Darfur were
not inspired by Islam but motivated by greed and love of power,
policies that had strayed from the Koranic precepts of respecting the
right to life of non-Muslim `peoples of the Book.' Just because
Germans were Christians does not mean that the inspiration for the
Holocaust committed by the Nazi government constituted the
articulation of principles enunciated by Christ.
The Official Position of the Government: Blackmail and Manipulation?
Prime Minister ErdoÄ=9Fan could have made that argument and resolved
an extremely thorny issue, especially given his overwhelming political
capital. Not only would he not have lost much of this capital, but he
would also have gained international respect both from governments
-including those that come under official Turkish pressure not to
recognize the Armenian genocide and succumb to that pressure- and from
civil societies in countless countries. But that is not has happened,
not yet anyway.
Officially, Turkey continues its unabated international campaign
against the Armenian inspired international campaign for the
recognition of the genocide. Ambassadors, consuls, and other
officials as well as historians who support the official position of
Turkey on this subject - whether of ethnic Turkish origin or not -
propagate the official Turkish position in as many forums as
possible. The government of Turkey is ready to blackmail - when it can
- any other government that moves toward the recognition of the
genocide. It appears that, after all, the issue has not been left to
historians, after all.
However, this is not first time that blinders cover the eyes of a
Turkish leader - no matter how liberal or reformist. The Armenian
issue is, indeed, the blind spot of Turkish leaders' vision.
It is possible that the official Turkish position continues to reflect
a deeply rooted reflexive reaction on the subject, particularly
entrenched in the Foreign Ministry of the Turkish Republic. It is
possible that the Prime Minister's inclination has not been
articulated as a policy and, therefore, not yet permeated this
powerful institution.
This could be the case since the brilliant and visionary Minister of
Foreign Affairs, Ahmet DavutoÄ=9Flu has bigger issues to deal with;
the Armenian issue is one that slows things down. It may very well be
that the Minister has too much on his plate to pay serious attention
to the vulnerabilities of the Turkish official position on the
Armenian dossier.17
It is possible that both ErdoÄ=9Fan and DavutoÄ=9Flu have too many
battles to fight, domestically, regionally, and internationally, to
take on this issue head on. Maybe this is an issue on which ErdoÄ=9Fan
does not wish to spend any political capital. It is possible that
ErdoÄ=9Fan has been in power too long and is now concerned about his
legacy and that he is thinking of his legacy in conventional terms.
After all, it may not have been wise to take on the deep state, the
military included, while confronting the deepest of the known secrets
that lie within the birth of the modern state of Turkey and modern
Turkishness. It is very difficult to lead all the revolutions
necessary to revamp society and the state.
It is possible, too, that ErdoÄ=9Fan, DavutoÄ=9Flu, and the AKP could
not fully disengage themselves from the original narrative;
fundamental myths are not destroyed while sharing in their
assumptions.
As so many Turkish historians, sociologists, and journalists have
noted in recent years, the development of democracy in Turkey is
organically tied to Ankara's policies toward the Kurdish population,
its views on the treatment of Armenians during the First World War,
and the proper examination and appreciation of that history today.
It is not a coincidence that ErdoÄ=9Fan's attempt to democratize the
country by dismantling the military's grip and the domination of the
deep state over the country was accompanied by a certain
liberalization of the official Turkish policy on the Armenian
issue. It is also not a coincidence that signs are increasingly
pointing to the possible replacement of one kind of deep state with
another, which induces a return to the reflexive policies of previous
administrations regarding the question of the recognition of the
Armenian genocide.
It is possible that ErdoÄ=9Fan, DavutoÄ=9Flu, and the AKP could not
resist the temptation, so common to radically minded reformers, to use
the same, ready-made methods of repression against their antagonists
to achieve their vision, methods they opposed before they came to
power. At the end though, the use of assumptions and methods which you
had opposed, will bring you where your opponents were before you
resisted and replaced them.
Maybe they did not understand that systems and regimes are
characterized by how they treat the different, the other, the
marginal, and the weak. The treatment of peoples in these categories
tells at least as much about that society and system as what they say
about themselves. Having initially wooed the liberal segments of
Turkish society to come to power and tamed -for the time being- the
military, ErdoÄ=9Fan has undertaken a campaign to muzzle the press,
control the judiciary, and retreat from the liberal agenda he had
espoused earlier. We are witnessing more areas where Islamic religious
values - at least as defined generally - determine policy.
A Matter of Options
When CUP came to power after the Young Turk Revolution in 1908, it had
two options. The first was to resolve the Armenian Question as a
matter of domestic policy. Namely, dealing with the social and
economic issues raised by Armenians, who except for the minority urban
middle and upper classes, were peasants, artisans, and small
shopkeepers. By and large there had a been a few long decades during
which farmers were losing their lands and craftsmen were losing their
markets, creating favorable conditions for a willingness to join an
Armenian revolutionary movement.
The second option was to see the Armenian Question as a foreign plot,
much like the way during the Cold War, when right-wing governments in
the third world wanted to see all revolts and guerrilla movements as
strictly Moscow inspired, devoid of any local logic and, therefore,
subject to justifiable repression.
The Young Turks started with the first and ended up opting for the
second. A potentially more or less egalitarian and representative
Ottoman Empire that based its strength on actual social and economic
reforms was seen as a weak state. The result was what happened in
1915.
When ErdoÄ=9Fan came to power, he too had options: he could have seen
the Armenian issue as a matter integral to Ottoman/Turkish history, a
revision of history being necessary to better pursue the
democratization; or, to continue the state policies on this issue as
if it is a foreign inspired conspiracy fueled by imperialists designs
to break up Turkey, an issue that is otherwise alien to the essence of
what Turkey is and should be.
ErdoÄ=9Fan gave signals opting for the first; the question is, has he,
too, ended up with the second option?
Dealing with the Armenian issue requires humility, especially by those
who claim to function according to deeply held and religion inspired
principles of behavior, and particularly so, when the policies in
question - from genocide to its denial- were in defiance of those
principles. To expect that in such cases Turkey project humility may
sound paradoxical: after all, Turkey is the greater power in this
relationship. However, there are some issues that refuse to disappear
and, with all of its power, Turkey is unable to control Armenians in
the Diaspora - even if it can harm Armenians in Armenia by keeping its
land border with that country closed or by other means of pressure
- it cannot control the historical and scientific work of scholars
in Armenia or abroad.
In a November 2010 interview with Ara Kotchounian, the editor of one
of the Armenian dailies in Istanbul, Zhamanag, ErdoÄ=9Fan stated:
"Turkey is not in hostility with any state. We have experienced many
painful events in history. But we have never seen these events as a
factor of shaping the future vision. After we had victory in the
Independence War, we have started a new era with all these
states. Also with Armenia, we can achieve this. I believe that this is
still possible. Leaving the history to historians and scientists, we
can walk to the future together. However, a segment of the Armenian
Diaspora does not have the same vision. This constitutes major
obstacle to the process."
Sometimes leaders say more than they think they say, even the smartest
and most visionary among them. This confusing statement in itself
could be parsed into a long article.
There are three vital points for the reader to take away:
=80¢ ErdoÄ=9Fan thinks history is important to Turks and Turkey, and
it is so in a way that he can pick and choose which events should be
remembered. Conversely, he does not think history should also be
important to Armenians.
=80¢ According to ErdoÄ=9Fan, Armenians in the Diaspora should share
in his vision of Turkey/Armenia relations, when they were not
consulted on the subject.
=80¢ The Diasporan Armenians -only one segment of this extremely
complex entity- were able to disrupt the vision that the powerful
ErdoÄ=9Fan had for interstate relations between Armenia and Turkey.
Regardless, he could have ignored them altogether. After all, the
state of Armenia did sign the protocols for the establishment of
normal relations between the two countries, contrary to the opinion of
that `segment of the Armenian Diaspora.' But still, the protocols
failed, even though the Armenian side did accept the constitution of a
joint sub-commission of historians to discover the historical
truth. It is evident that a specter is haunting ErdoÄ=9Fan, as it has
haunted those before him.
This does not bode well for the future of Turkish-Armenian relations
and, generally, speaking, for Turkish democracy. Turkey needs a second
liberation, liberation from taboos and unresolved issues that have
been the most significant foundations and symptoms of the absence of
democracy. The return to the conventional official Turkish view of the
past means creating a more serious conflict with Turkish scholarship
and civil society that have been moving in the opposite direction.
Since Armenia's independence, Turkey has taken some important positive
steps in bilateral relations, although there, too, it has failed to
move fully forward in the establishment of normal relations. Turkey
explains this failure by its linkage of progress in bilateral
relations to a resolution or progress in of the Karabakh conflict.
That, by and large, is another story. But it is significant that by
adopting ethnic affinity as the basis of its policy regarding that
conflict, Turkey has lost a great and strategic opportunity to become
a significant player in the whole region. Many Armenians, in or
outside Armenia, believe that the official Turkish policy in the
Karabakh conflict constitutes a mere subterfuge; that, along with the
denial of the genocide, it merely continues Ottoman and Turkish
policies toward Armenians and Armenia in general. For that segment of
the Armenian people, Turkey's denial of the genocide constitutes a
national security threat of an unrepentant state that justifies the
genocidal policies.
It is possible to think of another vision that could be shared: A
vision in which the Turkish state comes to terms with its past, once
and for all, and liberates itself, its public officials, its
diplomats, and above all, its people, from a heavy burden; a vision
that would also liberate the Diasporan Armenians, who are mostly the
children and descendants of the survivors of the massacres and
deportations.
This may be news to the leader of a powerful state such as Turkey and
his colleagues, but it is not up to them to decide what Armenians
remember, and how they remember. Armenians today cannot stop thinking
of those who did not survive and of a collective loss of historical
proportions that is bigger than a defeat in a battle. The loss
resulting from the massacres in and deportations of Armenians from
their historic homeland matches, at the least, the significance of the
War of Independence that created today's Turkey. I will leave aside
the argument that the successful outcome of the War of Independence
came at the expense of the Armenians. From the Turkish point of view
this was a necessary war led by extremely capable and visionary
leaders, who considered everything else, in contemporary terminology,
as collateral damage. But that collateral damage cemented the loss of
a homeland for another people, who deserve, at the least respect for
the memory of their victims and understanding of the meaning of the
loss of homeland.
That is where ErdoÄ=9Fan and his colleagues should begin. Respect does
not come from the constant display of power and arrogant or ignorant
statements; respect is gained through the display of maturity and good
judgment, values that can be easily found in the Koran.
I do not know whether the opportunity has already been lost for Turkey
to deal seriously with the Armenian and other critical issues, and, by
extension, the opportunity to strengthen democracy in the Turkish
Republic. Let us hope not.
Gerard J. Libaridian is a historian who served as senior advisor to
the first president of independent Armenia, between 1991 and 1997.
NOTES
1 It is significant that in assessing the number of Armenians in the
Ottoman Empire before the deportations and massacres and the number of
Armenian lives lost, and in presenting these arguments, the number of
Armenians, an ethnic group, is compared to that of `Muslims', not
Turks. The figures for Muslims included Kurds, Arabs, Albanians, a
variety of muhajirs or recent immigrants from the Balkans, the
Caucasus, etc.
2 The argument claiming that the term genocide was coined after the
events in question is irrelevant for this discussion. The term
`syphilis', describing a particular disease, was coined in the late
19th century. That does not mean the disease itself was originated
with the word; it had existed for centuries; it just had not received
a name. I am sure music existed long before we found a name or many
names for it.
3 See Gerard J. Libaridian, The Challenge of Statehood (Cambridge:
Blue Crane Books, 1999), or its Turkish edition, Ermenilerin
DevletleÅ=9Fme Sınavı (Istanbul: Ä°letiÅ=9Fim, 2001), and elsewhere.
4 While Jews of Istanbul were not harmed, those in Palestine were
placed in camps for a period, being suspected of collusion with the
British. They were released under American pressure, which did not
work for the Armenians.
5 There is no doubt that Western imperial powers aimed at the
dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, as they did of other non-Western
empires. That was an essential component of Western imperialism. Yet
the argument for territorial integrity is far less sacrosanct for an
empire than for a nation-state where there is no domina tion over a
geographically defined and repressed ethnic element. There is always a
problem in designating what that more reasonable state is, i.e., where
does the so-called nation-state begin and end when the empire
collapses. Empires had a chance to survive if they accommodated fully
the rights of non-dominant subjects individually and collectively,
although none of the traditional empires managed to do that s
uccessfully. The last to fall in this respect was the Soviet
empire. In Turkey's case, the question is not whether there were plans
to disasse mble the Ottoman Empire. There were plenty of plans; the
reason those plans did not work for so long is, mainly, the rivalry
between the British and Russian empires regarding who would get
what. The problem of the Sèvres Syndrome is not its historical
grounding, but its continuing confusion between empire and
nation-state, the projection back of today's Turkey as the natural and
only possible one out of the Ottoman E mpire. The second problem with
the Sèvres Syndrome resides in its exaggerated use during the Republic
to justify the dominance of the military the defender of a hegemonic
and non-democratic state.
6 Necmettin Erbakan, the leader of the Welfare Party (RP), might have
been the exception but he did not have time to display an alternative
new perspective; he was removed from power by the military after one
year as Prime Minister in June 1997.
7 Libaridian (1987); and Libaridian, `What Was Revolutionary about
Armenian Revolutionary Parties,' in Ronald G. Suny et al. (eds.), A
Question of Genocide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011),
pp. 82-112. See also, Dikran Kaligian, Armenian Organization and
Ideology under Ottoman Rule: 1908-1914 (New Jersey: Transaction
Publishing, 2011).
8 This would be the precursor of what is now labeled as the `deep
state'.
9 The relationship between ethnicity and religion requires, obviously,
a more thorough exploration than is possible within the confines of
this article. 10 This too is a suggestion that cannot be fully
explored and critiqued within the confines of this article.
11 I myself am not a fan of religion, any religion. But I do
recognize that organized religious systems represent one sort of
attempt by humankind to reach out to an ideal. God may be humankind's
best creation, except that man is not always at his best when creating
or interpreting God.
12 The ratification of the two protocols was aborted by Turkey, which
continued to link any progress in bilateral relations to progress in
the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict that involved the unrecognized
Nagorno-Karabakh Republic and Azerbaijan, as well as Armenia. Since
1993, Turkey has linked any progress in bilateral relations to this
particular issue, indicating that ethnic solidarity is more important
than other considerations.
13 `Turkey Attacks China `Genocide',' BBC World, 10 July 2009.
14 `Erdogan Accuses Israel of Genocide,' Asbarez.com, 15 March 2012.
15 `Srebrenica Will Never be Forgotten,' Sabah English, 12 July 2012.
16 Orhan Kemal Cengiz, `On ErdoÄ=9Fan, Genocide and Being pro-AKP,'
Today's Zaman, 9 November 2009,
17 Beyond the protocols, DavutoÄ=9Flu did make one attempt to deal
with the Armenian issue when he contacted some individuals from the
Armenian Diaspora. It appears, though, that his intention was to tell
these individuals about what to think and feel rather than to attempt
to fully understand any Armenian point of view. If you grow up in
total ignorance of an issue and are educated on the basis of a totally
different narrative of your country's birth and history, then a
dossier prepared by a few advisors is not sufficient to formulate a
policy that is constructive, even for a highly intelligent minister
such as DavutoÄ=9Flu.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress