Erbal and Suciyan: One Hundred Years of Abandonment

By Ayda Erbal and Talin Suciyan

The Armenian Weekly
April 2011 Magazine 

The history of the Ottoman Armenians in the 19^th century^[1] is a history of great promises but also of greater abandonment. More than 200 Ottoman-Armenian intellectuals who were arrested the night of April 24, 1915 and the two weeks that followed possessed the damning knowledge that they were left alone. Zohrab’s Unionist friends, with whom he had dined and played cards, would choose not to stop his assassination. But abandonment will not abandon the Armenians. The survivors in the camps of Mesopotamia were alone, as were those hiding in the secluded mountains or villages of Anatolia. And those who survived through conversion or forced concubinage were left alone not only in the summer of 1915, but also in the hundred years that have followed.

The surviving Istanbul-Armenians who staged a book-burning ceremony were on their own too.^[2] Compelled to imitate the Nazi party’s book-burning campaigns, they would gather in the backyard of Pangalti Armenian Church, build a book-burning altar, put Franz Werfel’s The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, along with his picture on the altar, and burn it to the ground. As a last act of symbolic perversion forced upon them, they would not only denounce the author, but also denounce the book’s content, hence denouncing themselves and denying their own history.

Hayganus Mark, Hagop Mintzuri, Aram Pehlivanyan, Zaven Biberyan, Vartan and Jak Ihmalyan, and the less famous all shared a similar fate, which happened to be that of Hrant Dink too: abandonment.[3]

Likewise, when Armenians around the world gathered to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the genocide, the Istanbul Armenians found themselves in the middle of Taksim Square delivering wreaths to the Republican Statue in protest. The continuous and almost non-changing price of their survival would be their compulsory self-alienation from all other Armenians.^[4]

Indeed, the community in Istanbul was attempting to distance itself from the diasporan communities. Moreover, there was hardly any communication between the communities of Anatolia and of Istanbul at the time. Soon the mythical Anatolia, which is vainly romanticized and widely hailed today in Turkey,[5] would become an open-air prison of leftover Armenians during the Republican years. For, a handful of communities scattered around the country would not be able to perpetuate their identity as Armenians and would leave their birthplaces yet another time. Their offspring would become Istanbul Armenians.

Meanwhile in Istanbul, the remnants of a fading intellectual life Armenian journalists and writers, along with schools, churches, and foundations, would all be left to struggle alone against a myriad of verbal, physical, and legal attacks from both the government and Turkish intellectuals of their time.^[6] The price levied on the Armenians was extremely high and included not only a clear disengagement from a quest of justice for themselves, but also a clear—albeit forced—disengagement from their relatives in the diaspora. The never-spoken cost for Istanbul Armenians was the complete negation of their political identity and history.

One can argue that this survival strategy was the direct result of Republican nationalist policies regarding Turkey’s minorities. Thus the contemporary Turkish practice of demonizing the assertive and politically demanding segments of the Armenian Diaspora falls squarely within the same Republican nationalist framework that Istanbul Armenians historically embraced as a survival strategy. It’s rather puzzling to see why otherwise completely equal non-Armenian Turkish citizens would appropriate this predominantly Turkish-Armenian strategy without questioning it. Additionally, the recent privileging of certain Diasporan Armenians as legitimate interlocutors in the Turkish-Armenian divide is a continuity of the same Republican nationalist mentality, because more often than not these privileged diaspora Armenians happen to be the ones who have chosen not to articulate any political demands.[7] A subtle, premeditated silencing of Armenians’ legal and political demands, therefore, permeates both relations and the discourse, and leads to a further evasion from the issue that is, in essence, political.^[8] Today, 103 years after 1908, the Armenian “Question” revolves around the same problem of legal, political, and social equality before the law, and equality also means that those involved in this quest should not be ostracized or demonized as a fifth column. Unfortunately, even the progressive segments of the Turkish society feel more comfortable when they are able to establish relationships with Armenians from a position of power, that is, when the Armenian interlocutor is speaking from a position of structural weakness.^[9] Even though nowhere can diaspora Armenians match the kind of international power intellectuals from Turkey or the Turkish state can muster, these Armenians are perceived and represented as powerful. Furthermore, they are demonized as radicals and nationalists, and not necessarily represented as a people enjoying equal political rights in the polities to which they belong. To a great extent, then, solitude, although experienced differently, remains the most prominent characteristic of Armenian society both in Turkey and in the diaspora.

In this light, the contemporary discourse among intellectuals from Turkey is far from being able to fully confront the institutional and societal history of hostility and discrimination against both domestic and Diasporan Armenians.^[10] Although the scholarship over the past 15 years, stemming from a critical need to face recent history, is a welcome addition to the literature, it mostly concentrates on crystallized instances of institutional discrimination, such as the 1942 wealth tax, compulsory second military service for minorities (20 kura askerlik),[11] the events of Sept. 6-7, 1955, or the Dersim Massacres.^[12] These discussions have often fallen short of grasping the issue of normalized discourses of essentialist patriotism and racism in their day-to-day representations.[13] To a certain extent, approaching these issues as isolated cases, as opposed to a deeply embedded systemic and ideological problem, contributed to the practices of discourse normalization.^[14] Indeed, until the assassination of Hrant Dink, racism was a taboo word in Turkey. If anything, racism was either an American or European problem; certainly not one that intellectuals from Turkey should take seriously. Thus, conscious efforts to keep racism far away from public awareness resulted in the domestication and cherry picking of issues, and the creation of pseudo-rival discourses—their nationalists vs. our nationalists[15] (a false parity)—in dealing with the dark history of racism in Turkey.

In a similar vein, the complete avoidance of the Holocaust in public discourse, for example, or in rare instances its use to refute the Armenian case among leftist circles, is indicative of a political culture of either obscurantist or viciously pragmatic nature. For example, the year 2011 marked the first Holocaust commemoration in Turkey during which the state message oscillated between emphasizing the uniqueness of the Jewish case and highlighting the Ottoman Imperial, and then Turkish Republican, tolerance and acceptance of Iberian, then European, Jews, instead of engaging in serious soul searching on the meaning of the Holocaust or the dark chapters of minority history in Turkey, including several waves of hostility against Turkish-Jews.

ENTITLEMENT, ETHNICISM, RACISM

The debate over the term racism has come a long way since the Holocaust and the American civil rights movement. Theoretically speaking, American, continental, and Australian approaches to racism are not as much interested in dominative (old-fashioned) racism as they are in modern, normalized, ambivalent, aversive, laissez-faire, differential, and institutional forms of racism operating through linguistic discursive tools of othering or subordinating within an asymmetrical relationship of power.[16] Yet, it’s hard to claim these academic and/or popular debates with all their contextual and non-contextual theoretical subtleties had any profound effect on intellectual life in Turkey.

Of relevance to this discussion in Turkey is the lack of proper problematization and of consciousness regarding everyday normalized racism[17] as the root cause of attitudes when dealing with Armenians in general, and minority history and personalities in particular. This general problem is exacerbated by the wide-scale ignorance of majority Ottoman Armenians’ living conditions during the long 19^th century and 1915 itself, and Turkish-Armenians’ living conditions and survival strategies during Republican history. There has been neither an institutional nor societal acknowledgement of the racism[18] ingrained in the mainstream mindset, nor any wide-scale institutional measures to combat everyday racism manifesting itself in all its different sub-types. Yet, somehow, the intellectuals from the majority think they are, by definition, devoid of such bias.[19] Even if they admit the existence of racism in Turkey, they conceive it to be a problem of the right and centrist ideologies and not theirs.[20]

These everyday attitudes manifest themselves in four major distinguishable forms of majority entitlement. The first concerns the screening, choosing, and separating of the “good Armenians” (Turkish Armenians plus a small number of Diasporan Armenians who don’t prioritize genocide recognition) from the “bad Armenians” (who push for keeping the recognition issue on the international agenda). In other words, interlocutors from Turkey still think that dialogue as such is a matter of finding either the apolitical or non-organized Armenians, or those Armenians who operate only from a position of weakness—either stemming from being a minority in Turkey or from a position of geographic dependency, such as Armenians from Armenia. Besides being an imperial practice akin to choosing to deal with the “house negroes,” so to speak—a post-modern loyal millet, a reincarnated millet-i sadika—its regressive character is not limited to this. Implicit in this approach is the perception of politically assertive Armenians as the problem. Also it implies a wishful thinking that if all politically assertive Armenians were gotten rid of, then the political problem of institutional discrimination and inequality that is still haunting Turkey would evaporate on its own. Yet, even if there were no significant Armenian political activity for recognition, the overall institutional commitment problem in post-1915 Turkey would have been the same.[21] It’s highly improbable that such mock deliberation geared towards avoiding the legal and political nature of the issue could deliver the sorely needed institutional outcomes in transitional political settings. As a matter of fact, aside from their non-identical religious characteristics, Turkey’s Kurdish Question and Armenian Question have had similar trajectories because of Turkey’s Turkish “Question,” which either does not understand or does not care to solve the institutional problem of equality that has existed for over 200 years now. What Armenians think of other Armenians is completely irrelevant to the issue of Turkish state’s much needed institutional commitments. Moreover, this practice reproduces a divide-and-rule colonial/imperial mindset, antithetical to the legal frameworks of human rights and equality. Trying to build a politics based on the instrumentalization of the inter-Armenian differences to delay justice cannot solve Turkey’s problem of 1915. With or without the presence of these inter-Armenian differences, the necessity of implementing institutional changes and complying with human rights standards will remain the same. If anything, Kurdish political trajectory should be a grim reminder for those avoiding the core issues at hand.

The second problematic entitlement concerns the blurring of the difference between the perpetrator and the victim in order to water down the majority state and societal responsibility. This is done with two different, but interconnected, arguments: one concerning the past, the other concerning the present. The first is reminiscent of the late 1980’s Historikerstreit discussion in Germany,[22] although the depth of the argument and counter-argument does not compare. A number of intellectuals, including Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, emphasize that Turks also suffered greatly in World War I, in general, and in 1915, in particular, especially in the case of the Gallipoli campaign. No one trained in comparative history denies the fact that the Ottoman Army and non-Armenian Ottoman citizens experienced tremendous losses during World War I; however, the argument misses the point by establishing a false parity, equating war to a state-sponsored campaign of killing its own citizens, and a false causality as if Ottoman Armenian citizens were responsible either for the war itself or a major episodic campaign. The second argument, again mostly originating in conservative quarters in Turkey, but not limited to them alone, blurs the distinction between the victim and the perpetrator, and the subsequent generations’ responsibilities by resorting to an “our common pain” argument—as in you suffered but we suffered, too, because of your suffering. Apart from being a recent creation, this discourse of common pain reduces the perpetrators’, bystanders’, deniers’ and their institutions’ responsibility to “feel the pain.” A symbolically violent appropriation of pain of an unimaginable magnitude, which even survivor generations are reluctant to own, the “feeling the pain”[23] discourse more often than not becomes a tool to absolve the institutional and societal inheritors from ethical and political consequences. We should recall Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” in which he writes: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are surely caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one, affects all indirectly.” Nowhere does King argue that one is entitled to own the other’s pain as a substitute for, or as a means of diluting, political responsibility.

Thirdly, in rare cases where the victims’ historical suffering is granted, a rather obscene sense of entitlement surfaces. The victims’ interlocutor, itself the institutional and social inheritor of a generation of perpetrators, bystanders, or deniers, expects the descendants of the victims to speak in a way that will not make them feel bad. Despite placing an emphasis on empathy (itself a problematic term) and openness, the willingness to listen to Armenians is mostly conditional and carries the implied threat of “If you don’t speak properly we won’t listen to you.” The burden of responsibility, thus, rather perversely falls on the shoulders of the historically victimized and structurally powerless; and the interlocutor, whose power and posture is the opposite result of the same history of gross human rights violations, comes to the discussion not as a truly interested party but as if doing a favor to the Armenians.

There is an additional relative silencing effect in the sense that the victim has to temper its discursive tone to suit and prioritize the emotional needs of its interlocutor at large—in this case, the emotional needs of the majority Turkish citizens, as decided upon by these same intellectuals. The entire discussion surrounding the usage of the term genocide, or the avoidance thereof, is a prime example. The mentality behind this “dialogue” is where the unequal and sometimes supremacist thrust of the equation becomes the most visible in the conditionality of the listening and the absolute power to shut down the dialogue if Armenians fail to find a proper language (and tone) to explain their pain. This power dynamic is not unique to the intellectuals’ relationship to Armenians, as it also applies to their relationship with others, including their historically ambivalent relationship with the Kurdish citizens of Turkey.[24]

Finally, as a further frame of entitlement, a discourse of sameness is imposed upon Turkey’s minorities.[25] By discourse of sameness, we mean a reductionist tendency whereby a supposed cultural similarity between Turks and Armenians, via food and music, is assumed and presented as a better alternative to rights and equality before law. This particular discourse, which may have a phenotypic (we look alike), cultural (our food and music are similar), and geographic (Anatolia) similarity argument, has a dangerous tint to it. It involves a pseudo-inclusion of Armenians in an imagined community in Anatolia where the dominant trait is a potentially exclusionary narcissism, which is able to love and respect only that which is similar to itself, and glorifies cultural similarity as a political solution. The regressive quality of the argument is more evident when turned upside down, since it’s not very clear how it will treat difference, or what it will do if the minority party does not take the offer of similarity, or if it simply wants to insist on its difference. After all, during those limited times when conversion was an option between 1895 and 1915, the majority of Armenians did not want to convert, and the whole history leading to 1915, and 1915 itself, can also be read as a history in which Ottoman authorities did not want to deal seriously with the issue of difference and inferiority stemming from a dual legal framework of Sharia and Dhimmi Law. In a similar vein, the sameness argument indirectly hints at the suppression of differences for the sake of social harmony.[26]

All in all, especially the 19^th century land romanticism of the sameness argument that takes Anatolia[27] as a common mythic location with ahistorical references to a peaceful, equal co-existence is totally outdated, and cannot provide a solution to serious political issues. It can only be a conversation starter where it belongs—at the raki/arak/dolma table. Rarely does one encounter such problematic self-orientalization[28] elsewhere. Hummus, as far as we know, does not have problem-solving powers nor does it have a place in serious academic or journalistic discussions within the Arab-Israeli-Palestinian divide. If the same cuisine and music has not been able to provide any tangible solution to the much lesser Kurdish-Turkish divide, one wonders how this untenable discourse of sameness will solve anything among Armenians and Turks. If one is to take this sameness argument seriously then one has to also explain how sameness was able to kill sameness.

HISTORY AS CIRCULAR NIGHTMARE

To a certain extent, the history of Ottoman and Ottoman Armenian, and Turkish – Armenian and Turkish – Turkish-Armenian is trapped in the same pre-1908 conundrum of difference and equality before the law. On one side of the equation are those who are, still in this day and age, either totally unwilling or reluctant to accept that Armenians have a right to political agency and equality before the law (then domestic Ottoman, now several international polities).[29] On the other side of the equation are those who understand what political equality and political action mean in order to secure justice and equality. Neither side is made solely of Turks or solely of Armenians. Although the latter is mostly made of Armenians, there are a few scholars and human rights activists from Turkey, both in the U.S., Europe, and Turkey, who do not shy away from politics of recognition. These people know recognition is not just a onetime deal, some sort of ticket to oblivion, but only the first step in a long struggle of institutional commitments affecting the human rights and history curricula in all countries where there is a substantial political debate on recognitions and denials.

The inability to get out of the circularity of a pre-1908 mentality sets the boundaries of Turkish-Armenian citizens as well, unfortunately. Since there is not any real coming to terms with the past, Turkish-Armenian citizens are still perceived as a fifth column in general, and still have to distance themselves from the diaspora in order to be heard. Instead of dealing with institutional barriers, there is a novel but archaic tendency where the state looks mostly concerned with window-dressing solutions. Efforts are being made to appoint Turkish-Armenian citizens to state positions in order to partially counter the critics of structural inequality. At this point, one has to remember that there were more than two-dozen Armenians who worked as high-level Ottoman officials before the genocide; that alone was not indicative of a commitment to equality and human rights. If anything, the same pre-1908 mentality conditioned, and still to a certain extent conditions, the set of political choices for Turkish-Armenians briefly touched upon at the beginning of this article. So coming to terms with history is the only way for Turkish-Armenians to cease to be perceived as a fifth column and to become fully equal citizens.

In light of the discussion above, the fact that Hrant Dink was assassinated for, among other things, calling a spade a spade, and that he continued to be tried in absentia even after his assassination for daring to describe his experience, shows that it’s impossible to be a Turkish-Armenian freely able to describe his/her experience publicly. The victim has been further victimized while trying to qualify the legal and political magnitude of his victimhood. The intellectuals from Turkey cannot pretend that January 19, 2007 does not signify a major rupture. This rupture requires a reevaluation and deeper understanding of the Republican history of Turkish-Armenian strategies of survival.

If ever Turkey could approach the issue of 1915 from the perspective of justice, a justice frame that also includes calling a spade a spade just as Hrant did, on that day, justice will prevail in the case of assassination of Hrant Dink as well. Further, by doing so, Turkey would be able to approach and perhaps even lighten the heavy burden of loneliness of Armenians in her own country and in the diaspora.

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