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Le Monde Diplomatique, France
April 2 2015
A century's silence in Turkey: Armenian ghosts
by Vicken Cheterian
For 100 years Turkey has struggled to face up to the murder and
deportation of two thirds of the Armenians in the Ottoman empire in
just a few months in 1915.
After the genocide of 1915-6, the fate of the Armenians who converted
to Islam and became "Turkified" was taboo in Turkey; not until 2008
did lawyer and human rights activist Fethiye Çetin dare break the
silence by publishing a memoir of her grandmother, an Armenian who had
been a child when her family were deported or murdered, and who had
been brought up in a Turkish family (1). Many who had been through
similar experiences wrote to Çetin, who published their testimonies in
another book (2); none dared reveal their name or date of birth.
It is still hard to estimate how many descendants there are of the
2,000-3,000 Armenian women and children who were forcibly converted.
For decades, they remained silent on their origins and the fate of
their ancestors. But people around them knew, and looked down at those
who had converted to Islam not out of belief but to escape death. They
were kýlýç artýklarý (remains of the sword) (3) and stigmatised in
Turkish society. The state held documents on their origins and denied
them access to certain jobs, such as in education or the army.
Commemorating the centenary of Armenian genocide is not just about
remembering. It reveals things about the living, and casts a harsh
light on modern civilisation and some of its failures. There has been
no justice for the victims, and Turkey's denial of the events, and the
indifference of outside observers, had been tolerated all this time.
Turkey still denies genocide, claiming the deaths were due to conflict
between communities, and that the deportation of most of the Armenian
population was a military necessity (Turkey had entered the first
world war, on the side of Germany), or that the Armenians were rebels,
guilty themselves of mass murder, or working for Russia.
When genocide takes place in the shadows of war, and the world behaves
as if nothing had happened, what then? A crime that goes unrecognised
also goes on. Though the Armenians were the principal victims in 1915,
they were not alone: Ottoman Greeks, Assyrians and Yezidis were also
murdered and deported to destroy their communities. At the end of the
war, when the Ottoman empire was defeated and occupied by the Allies,
some Armenian and Assyrian survivors were able to return home. But
with the arrival of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk), the nationalist forces
undertook a population exchange with Greece, forcing the returnees
into exile in Syria, then under French control, or Iraq, under British
control. Anatolia was emptied of Christians.
Istanbul, with a mostly Christian population in 1914, was the only
place in Turkey where Greeks and Armenians stayed on. But the state
still persecuted them, depriving them of their livelihoods and
threatening their security. In the 1930s much property belonging to
the Armenian Church or Armenian charities was confiscated, including
the Pangaltý Armenian cemetery, near Gezi Park, now the site of luxury
hotels. The affluent Jewish community of European Turkey was reduced
by massacres organised by the Turkish state, the "Thracian pogroms" of
1934 (4). During the second world war, under the pretext of combating
"speculation", the government introduced a wealth tax, assessed
arbitrarily by municipal officials and payable only in cash: an
Armenian might have to pay 50 times more than a "Muslim" (5). This tax
was designed to eliminate the bourgeoisie among minorities. Their
possessions were sold off at prices well below actual value. Those who
could not pay had their property confiscated and were sent to labour
camps near Erzurum, in the east.
Memories erased
The Cyprus conflict reduced the minorities still further. In September
1955, after false rumours of an attack on the house where Atatürk was
born at Salonica (now Thessaloniki), in Greece, the intelligence
services bussed men into Istanbul's Pera district (now Beyoðlu), where
they attacked businesses, schools and religious institutions belonging
to Greeks and other minorities, while the police looked on. Tens of
thousands of Greeks went into exile.
In Anatolia, memories of the deported populations were erased.
Atatürk's replacement of Arabic script by the Roman alphabet was
celebrated as a victory for modernity. But it also allowed the
replacement of Armenian, Assyrian, Kurdish and Arabic-sounding place
names with Turkish-sounding ones. Thousands of churches and
monasteries were dynamited (6). In 1914, according to the Armenian
patriarchate, the Ottoman empire had an Armenian population of nearly
2 million, out of 16-20 million. Today there are only around 60,000
Armenians in Turkey. Out of 2,500 Armenian churches, only 40 have
survived, 34 of them in Istanbul.
During the first world war, Ottoman forces were under German control
and thousands of German officers directly witnessed, or even took part
in, the murder of Christians of the Ottoman empire. Between the wars,
Germany, facing a great crisis, failed to learn lessons from this: the
Nazis even drew inspiration from the Turkish nationalists (7).
The worst consequences have been in Turkey. In the eastern provinces,
the Kurds -- who had played a key role in the destruction of the
Armenians -- were stigmatised in turn. They had remained loyal to the
Ottomans, the Young Turks and Atatürk. But when Atatürk went back on
his promise of autonomy and replaced the caliphate with a Turkish
national state, the Kurds rebelled. Their uprisings were crushed, and
murders and deportations followed. Kurdish identity was denied: the
Kurds did not exist, and anyone who dared say differently was
punished.
Turkey failed to rid itself of this heritage. Those responsible for
the Armenian genocide later formed the backbone of Atatürk's republic:
the Teþkilt-ý Mahsusa (special organisation, SO) was a secret
organisation within the Committee of Union and Progress, the party in
power under the Ottoman empire, and had been established to foment
unrest among Muslim populations of the Russian and British empires.
Though the mission failed abroad, the SO played a key role at home.
Former officers of the SO were crucial in the Turkish war of
independence (1920-2), launched by Atatürk against Greek, French and
British forces, and later became the keystone of the "deep state", a
network of officers within the Turkish republic who enjoyed unlimited
power and were above the law; they repressed democratic progress,
carried out political assassinations and fought Kurdish and leftwing
guerrillas. Under the shelter of the state, they also trafficked
drugs.
In the Nagorno-Karabakh war, Turkey sided with Azerbaijan; from 1993
it imposed a blockade against Armenia and the autonomous region of
Nagorno-Karabakh, under de facto Armenian control. The
Turkish-Armenian border remains sealed and heavily guarded. In 2009,
following former Turkish president Abdullah Gül's visit to the
Armenian capital Yerevan, the Zurich protocol was signed, raising
hopes of progress to a peaceful solution (8), but the protocol has not
been ratified. This February Armenia's president Serzh Sargsyan said
Armenia was withdrawing from the process, complaining that the Turkish
government lacked political will and was undermining the spirit and
terms of the protocol. Azerbaijan threatens to use force to resolve
the conflict, and the Turkish government seems to encourage a
maximalist position.
'We are all Armenians'
After decades of silence, Turkey is now remembering the Armenians,
thanks to the work of a few courageous men and women. Ragýp Zarakolou,
a human rights activist and publisher, has translated books on the
genocide into Turkish; as a result, he and his late wife were
imprisoned many times. Taner Akçam, a historian, uncovered the
Armenian massacres in the late 19th century and then the genocide; he
has published in collaboration with the Armenian historian Vahakn
Dadrian (9), and re-established friendship and links between Armenian
and Turkish intellectuals. Academics at the University of Michigan
have undertaken an interdisciplinary study of Turkish-Armenian history
-- the seven international conferences they have organised have moved
Armenian history from the margins to the centre of Ottoman studies
(10).
But the most credit goes to Hrant Dink, a Turkish-Armenian journalist
and editor of the Armenian newspaper Agos. He spoke simply but clearly
to Turkish consciences: there used to be people known as Armenians
living here, but they are no longer here. What happened to them? He
once said both peoples were sick: "The Armenians are suffering from
trauma, the Turks from paranoia." Dink was persecuted by the Turkish
state, regularly prosecuted, and murdered outside his paper's offices
in Istanbul in 2007; 100,000 people took to the streets and joined his
funeral procession, chanting: "We are all Hrant Dink. We are all
Armenians."
Vicken Cheterian is a journalist and the author of Open Wounds:
Armenians, Turks, and a Century of Genocide, C Hurst & Co, London,
2015.
(1) Fethiye Çetin, My Grandmother: a Memoir, Verso, London and New York, 2008.
(2) Ayþe Gül Altinay and Fethiye Çetin, The Grandchildren,
Transaction, Piscataway (New Jersey), 2014.
(3) Laurence Ritter and Max Sivaslian, Kýlýç Artýklarý (The Remains of
the Sword), Hrant Dink Foundation, 2014.
(4) See Rifat N Bali, Model Citizens of the State: the Jews of Turkey
During the Multi-Party Period, Fairleigh Dickinson, Madison, 2012.
(5) See Stanford J Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman
Empire and Modern Turkey, vol 2, Cambridge University Press, 1977.
(6) Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide: a Complete History, I B
Tauris, London and New York, 2011.
(7) See Stefan Ihrig, Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination, Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, 2014.
(8) Vicken Cheterian, War and Peace in the Caucasus: Russia's Troubled
Frontier, C Hurst & Co, London, 2009.
(9) Vahakn N Dadrian and Taner Akçam, Judgment at Istanbul: the
Armenian Genocide Trials, Berghahn Books, New York, 2011.
(10) Some of their work has been published in Ronald Grigor Suny,
Fatma Müge Göçek and Norman M Naimark (eds), A Question of Genocide:
Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, Oxford
University Press, 2012.
http://mondediplo.com/2015/04/06armenians
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
April 2 2015
A century's silence in Turkey: Armenian ghosts
by Vicken Cheterian
For 100 years Turkey has struggled to face up to the murder and
deportation of two thirds of the Armenians in the Ottoman empire in
just a few months in 1915.
After the genocide of 1915-6, the fate of the Armenians who converted
to Islam and became "Turkified" was taboo in Turkey; not until 2008
did lawyer and human rights activist Fethiye Çetin dare break the
silence by publishing a memoir of her grandmother, an Armenian who had
been a child when her family were deported or murdered, and who had
been brought up in a Turkish family (1). Many who had been through
similar experiences wrote to Çetin, who published their testimonies in
another book (2); none dared reveal their name or date of birth.
It is still hard to estimate how many descendants there are of the
2,000-3,000 Armenian women and children who were forcibly converted.
For decades, they remained silent on their origins and the fate of
their ancestors. But people around them knew, and looked down at those
who had converted to Islam not out of belief but to escape death. They
were kýlýç artýklarý (remains of the sword) (3) and stigmatised in
Turkish society. The state held documents on their origins and denied
them access to certain jobs, such as in education or the army.
Commemorating the centenary of Armenian genocide is not just about
remembering. It reveals things about the living, and casts a harsh
light on modern civilisation and some of its failures. There has been
no justice for the victims, and Turkey's denial of the events, and the
indifference of outside observers, had been tolerated all this time.
Turkey still denies genocide, claiming the deaths were due to conflict
between communities, and that the deportation of most of the Armenian
population was a military necessity (Turkey had entered the first
world war, on the side of Germany), or that the Armenians were rebels,
guilty themselves of mass murder, or working for Russia.
When genocide takes place in the shadows of war, and the world behaves
as if nothing had happened, what then? A crime that goes unrecognised
also goes on. Though the Armenians were the principal victims in 1915,
they were not alone: Ottoman Greeks, Assyrians and Yezidis were also
murdered and deported to destroy their communities. At the end of the
war, when the Ottoman empire was defeated and occupied by the Allies,
some Armenian and Assyrian survivors were able to return home. But
with the arrival of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk), the nationalist forces
undertook a population exchange with Greece, forcing the returnees
into exile in Syria, then under French control, or Iraq, under British
control. Anatolia was emptied of Christians.
Istanbul, with a mostly Christian population in 1914, was the only
place in Turkey where Greeks and Armenians stayed on. But the state
still persecuted them, depriving them of their livelihoods and
threatening their security. In the 1930s much property belonging to
the Armenian Church or Armenian charities was confiscated, including
the Pangaltý Armenian cemetery, near Gezi Park, now the site of luxury
hotels. The affluent Jewish community of European Turkey was reduced
by massacres organised by the Turkish state, the "Thracian pogroms" of
1934 (4). During the second world war, under the pretext of combating
"speculation", the government introduced a wealth tax, assessed
arbitrarily by municipal officials and payable only in cash: an
Armenian might have to pay 50 times more than a "Muslim" (5). This tax
was designed to eliminate the bourgeoisie among minorities. Their
possessions were sold off at prices well below actual value. Those who
could not pay had their property confiscated and were sent to labour
camps near Erzurum, in the east.
Memories erased
The Cyprus conflict reduced the minorities still further. In September
1955, after false rumours of an attack on the house where Atatürk was
born at Salonica (now Thessaloniki), in Greece, the intelligence
services bussed men into Istanbul's Pera district (now Beyoðlu), where
they attacked businesses, schools and religious institutions belonging
to Greeks and other minorities, while the police looked on. Tens of
thousands of Greeks went into exile.
In Anatolia, memories of the deported populations were erased.
Atatürk's replacement of Arabic script by the Roman alphabet was
celebrated as a victory for modernity. But it also allowed the
replacement of Armenian, Assyrian, Kurdish and Arabic-sounding place
names with Turkish-sounding ones. Thousands of churches and
monasteries were dynamited (6). In 1914, according to the Armenian
patriarchate, the Ottoman empire had an Armenian population of nearly
2 million, out of 16-20 million. Today there are only around 60,000
Armenians in Turkey. Out of 2,500 Armenian churches, only 40 have
survived, 34 of them in Istanbul.
During the first world war, Ottoman forces were under German control
and thousands of German officers directly witnessed, or even took part
in, the murder of Christians of the Ottoman empire. Between the wars,
Germany, facing a great crisis, failed to learn lessons from this: the
Nazis even drew inspiration from the Turkish nationalists (7).
The worst consequences have been in Turkey. In the eastern provinces,
the Kurds -- who had played a key role in the destruction of the
Armenians -- were stigmatised in turn. They had remained loyal to the
Ottomans, the Young Turks and Atatürk. But when Atatürk went back on
his promise of autonomy and replaced the caliphate with a Turkish
national state, the Kurds rebelled. Their uprisings were crushed, and
murders and deportations followed. Kurdish identity was denied: the
Kurds did not exist, and anyone who dared say differently was
punished.
Turkey failed to rid itself of this heritage. Those responsible for
the Armenian genocide later formed the backbone of Atatürk's republic:
the Teþkilt-ý Mahsusa (special organisation, SO) was a secret
organisation within the Committee of Union and Progress, the party in
power under the Ottoman empire, and had been established to foment
unrest among Muslim populations of the Russian and British empires.
Though the mission failed abroad, the SO played a key role at home.
Former officers of the SO were crucial in the Turkish war of
independence (1920-2), launched by Atatürk against Greek, French and
British forces, and later became the keystone of the "deep state", a
network of officers within the Turkish republic who enjoyed unlimited
power and were above the law; they repressed democratic progress,
carried out political assassinations and fought Kurdish and leftwing
guerrillas. Under the shelter of the state, they also trafficked
drugs.
In the Nagorno-Karabakh war, Turkey sided with Azerbaijan; from 1993
it imposed a blockade against Armenia and the autonomous region of
Nagorno-Karabakh, under de facto Armenian control. The
Turkish-Armenian border remains sealed and heavily guarded. In 2009,
following former Turkish president Abdullah Gül's visit to the
Armenian capital Yerevan, the Zurich protocol was signed, raising
hopes of progress to a peaceful solution (8), but the protocol has not
been ratified. This February Armenia's president Serzh Sargsyan said
Armenia was withdrawing from the process, complaining that the Turkish
government lacked political will and was undermining the spirit and
terms of the protocol. Azerbaijan threatens to use force to resolve
the conflict, and the Turkish government seems to encourage a
maximalist position.
'We are all Armenians'
After decades of silence, Turkey is now remembering the Armenians,
thanks to the work of a few courageous men and women. Ragýp Zarakolou,
a human rights activist and publisher, has translated books on the
genocide into Turkish; as a result, he and his late wife were
imprisoned many times. Taner Akçam, a historian, uncovered the
Armenian massacres in the late 19th century and then the genocide; he
has published in collaboration with the Armenian historian Vahakn
Dadrian (9), and re-established friendship and links between Armenian
and Turkish intellectuals. Academics at the University of Michigan
have undertaken an interdisciplinary study of Turkish-Armenian history
-- the seven international conferences they have organised have moved
Armenian history from the margins to the centre of Ottoman studies
(10).
But the most credit goes to Hrant Dink, a Turkish-Armenian journalist
and editor of the Armenian newspaper Agos. He spoke simply but clearly
to Turkish consciences: there used to be people known as Armenians
living here, but they are no longer here. What happened to them? He
once said both peoples were sick: "The Armenians are suffering from
trauma, the Turks from paranoia." Dink was persecuted by the Turkish
state, regularly prosecuted, and murdered outside his paper's offices
in Istanbul in 2007; 100,000 people took to the streets and joined his
funeral procession, chanting: "We are all Hrant Dink. We are all
Armenians."
Vicken Cheterian is a journalist and the author of Open Wounds:
Armenians, Turks, and a Century of Genocide, C Hurst & Co, London,
2015.
(1) Fethiye Çetin, My Grandmother: a Memoir, Verso, London and New York, 2008.
(2) Ayþe Gül Altinay and Fethiye Çetin, The Grandchildren,
Transaction, Piscataway (New Jersey), 2014.
(3) Laurence Ritter and Max Sivaslian, Kýlýç Artýklarý (The Remains of
the Sword), Hrant Dink Foundation, 2014.
(4) See Rifat N Bali, Model Citizens of the State: the Jews of Turkey
During the Multi-Party Period, Fairleigh Dickinson, Madison, 2012.
(5) See Stanford J Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman
Empire and Modern Turkey, vol 2, Cambridge University Press, 1977.
(6) Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide: a Complete History, I B
Tauris, London and New York, 2011.
(7) See Stefan Ihrig, Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination, Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, 2014.
(8) Vicken Cheterian, War and Peace in the Caucasus: Russia's Troubled
Frontier, C Hurst & Co, London, 2009.
(9) Vahakn N Dadrian and Taner Akçam, Judgment at Istanbul: the
Armenian Genocide Trials, Berghahn Books, New York, 2011.
(10) Some of their work has been published in Ronald Grigor Suny,
Fatma Müge Göçek and Norman M Naimark (eds), A Question of Genocide:
Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, Oxford
University Press, 2012.
http://mondediplo.com/2015/04/06armenians
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress