Violence in eastern Anatolia Give up the g-word

Jun 25th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Rebel Land: Among Turkey’s Forgotten Peoples. By Christopher de Bellaigue. Bloomsbury; 288 pages; £20. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

MOST of the people who devote themselves to chronicling the history of Anatolia during the first world war fall into one category or another: those determined to prove that the Armenians suffered genocide, and those determined to prove the opposite. This Manichean split amounts to a “travesty of history and memory”. What is needed is a “vaguer designation, avoiding the g-word but clearly connoting criminal acts of slaughter.”

That is Christopher de Bellaigue’s argument and many people will be shocked by it. How could anyone want to blur the outlines of an unspeakable phenomenon whose precise definition has, in recent years, been of keen concern to liberal internationalists and humanitarian law buffs? What hope is there of stopping genocide if people do not even try to decide what the word means?

But honest readers of this moving and intricately woven look at Turkey’s 20th-century history will surely see his point. By focusing on a single, remote area in the east Anatolian highlands, and describing not only its blood-drenched history but the multiple layers of denial that obscure every episode, Mr de Bellaigue, a former correspondent for this newspaper, conveys some important messages about the elusiveness of historical truth.

As he shows, in places where “the past is not even past”, the passage of time does not always make it easier to discern or speak the truth. It is difficult, though not impossible, to establish even the basic facts about the fate of the Armenians in this part of Anatolia; it is also hard to establish what horrors occurred during the Kurdish uprising which began in the 1990s and is still sputtering away.

So many of the people who might be able to offer enlightenment—be they local residents, or migrants to Istanbul or Germany—are consciously or unconsciously hiding truths: about themselves and their family histories, as well as more public events. For example, some Armenians who escaped in 1915 were re-socialised as Turks or Kurds, without entirely losing their genetic memory. This has odd effects on the way such people, and their descendants, think and talk; this book analyses those effects shrewdly but not unkindly.

Indeed, the best thing about the book is the intelligence with which the author deconstructs all the private and public myths that seem to be haunting his interlocutors, including the various servants of the Turkish state who take it upon themselves to set him straight about their country’s history.

Many of his official informants assume that a person of Anglo-Saxon appearance, speaking fluent Turkish, must belong to the long line of spies and troublemakers who have meddled in this part of the world on behalf of perfidious Albion. The reader is not invited to mock or despise these envoys of the state. On the contrary, the feeling is that for all the peculiar and indeed downright wrong things they believe, such people have their own particular integrity.

As an account of the way truth is constructed by communities and families living in a state of war and fear, “Rebel Land” ranks in sophistication with any primer of postmodern philosophy or social anthropology. It is also far more gripping, not least because it is told in the vulnerable but never self-indulgent voice of somebody who loves this part of Turkey, and has a soft spot for all the peoples who have lived, loved, died and killed there.