Moere on US Court Ruling‏

The Armenia Weekly

Gunaysu: Turkish Perception of the Recent US Court Ruling
By Ayse Gunaysu • on August 27, 2009 •

Among thousands of news items showering down from international agencies,

none of the Turkish dailies or TV channels skipped the news about a U.S. Federal

Court of Appeals ruling against Armenian demands for unpaid insurance claims.

Many headlines revealed a hardly concealed note of victory, reporting that the U.S.

Court had dealt a “big blow” to Armenians. Some of them were a little bit more

professional, reflecting only a satisfaction: “Court decision to anger Armenians.

” Even the most seemingly “objective” ones used wording that presented the issue

as a defeat on the part of the “Armenians” —not a violation of the rights of legitimate

beneficiaries, the clients of insurance companies that profited from a government’s

extermination of its own citizens. Even the daily Taraf, considered to be waging the

most courageous struggle against the “deep state,” used the headline: “Bad news

to Armenians from a US court” (Aug. 22, 2009, p.3), a headline that, intentionally

or not, reinforces the essentialist conception of Armenians widespread in Turkey

and reflects a cold-hearted pseudo-impartiality —“bad news”!—in the face of an

infuriating usurpation of one’s rights.

Apart from a handful of people, no one in Turkey, watching the news or reading the

headlines (often without reading the full texts), knows that at the turn of the century

several thousands of Armenians in the provinces of the old Armenia were issued

life-insurance policies, with benefits amounting to more than $20 million in 1915

—dollars still unpaid to the legal heirs of the victims who perished under a reign

of terror. This is not surprising because this audience is even ignorant of the fact

that on the eve of World War I, there were 2,925 Armenian settlements in the old

Armenia, with 1,996 schools teaching over 173,000 male and female students,

and 2,538 churches and monasteries—all proof of a vibrant Armenian presence in

the Ottoman Empire. When I tried to explain this to my 83-year-old mother, who

thought the U.S. court had done something good for Turkey, she couldn’t believe

her ears. She was quite sincere when she asked: “Western insurance companies?

At that time? In Harput, in Merzifon, in Kayseri? Are you sure?” Because she could

not even imagine that what is now to us the remote, less-developed cities with rural

environs where pre-capitalist patterns still prevail—places more or less isolated

from today’s metropolitan centers—were once, before 1915, rich and developed

urban centers, with inhabitants much closer to the Western world than their fellow

Muslim citizens, in their economic activities, social structure, and way of life.

Although a university graduate (something unusual for a woman in Turkey at that

time), a person of culture with a real sense of justice in everything she does, my

mother was brought up in a system of education based on a history that was

rewritten to reconstruct a national identity of pride, and which turned facts upside

down. This was the result: an “enlightened” individual who knew nothing about how

things were in her own—beloved—country and what had happened just a decade

before her birth.

So, how can one expect my mother to know that Talat Pasha, a member of the

PUC triumvira and one of the top organizers of the Armenian Genocide, had

shocked Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. Ambassador to Istanbul in 1915, with his

audacity when he said: “I wish, that you would get the American life insurance

companies to send us a complete list of their Armenian policy holders. They

are practically all dead now and have left no heirs to collect the money. It of course

all escheats to the state. The government is the beneficiary now. Will you do so?”

The Turkish audience, apart from that handful of people, that received the message

about the U.S. Court of Appeals ruling against the Armenians’ right to seek justice,

didn’t stop to think that this was something about one’s most basic rights.
But the reason is simple: National ideology blocks people’s minds. There is a

special meaning attributed to the word “compensation” in Turkey. It is believed that

recognition will be followed by demands of compensation, which will naturally lead

to demands of territory. So, the reference to “compensation” (to be paid to

“Armenians”) in these reports is directly connected in their minds to Armenians’

claim to territory.

This is all about denial. Denial is not an isolated phenomenon, not a policy

independent of all other aspects. Denial is a system. An integrated whole. You

don’t only deny what really happened; in order to deny what really happened, you

have to deny even the existence of the people to whom it happened. In order to

deny their existence, you have to wipe out the evidence of their existence from

both the physical and intellectual environment. Physical refers to the 2,925

Armenian settlements with 1,996 schools and 2,538 churches and monasteries

that are non-existent now. Intellectual corresponds to my mother’s perception

of the U.S. Court of Appeal’s ruling as something good for Turkey.

I watched a film on TV tonight, Akira Kurosawa’s “Rhapsody in August,” a film

about an old lady, a hibakusha (the Japanese word for the victims of the atomic

bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II) and her four grandchildren.

Watching the film, I saw people commemorating their dead ones with great respect,

taking care of their monuments with endless love, raising their children in the same

spirit, observing Buddhist rituals, praying for their losses. The details showing all

these were elegantly and very impressively depicted. Watching a blind hibakusha

gently cleaning the marble platform of the monument with great care, I thought of

Armenians of my country, who are deprived of this very basic right to publicly honor

the memory of their lost ones. This ban is woven into the very structure of Turkish

society, because the founders of the new Turkish Republic and their successors

built a nation and successfully put into practice an “engineering of the spirit”

whereby the people are convinced, made to sincerely believe, that such

commemorations are a direct insult to themselves.

The outcome of such engineering, this whole complicated system of denial, is

very difficult to dismantle. The Turkish ruling elite will not recognize the genocide,

not in the short-term, not in the mid-term. In the long-term, maybe. But how “long”

a term this will be is something unknown. The dynamic that would step up the

process is the recognition from below, i.e. recognition by the people—a very slow

process, but much more promising than an official recognition in the foreseeable

future. People in Turkey are one by one going through a very special kind of

enlightenment—meeting with facts, learning more about the near history,

getting into closer contact with Armenians here and elsewhere (for example,

meeting and listening to Prof. Marc Nichanian speaking in the language of

philosophy and literature, hearing his words about how meaningless an apology

is when what happened to Armenians was “unforgivable,” about the meaning of

the “usurpation of mourning” and the “impossibility of representation” of what

Armenians experienced. More and more stories are appearing in the dailies and

periodicals in Turkey of our grandmothers and grandfathers of Armenian origin

who were stripped of their Armenian identities, at least in the public sphere.

More and more books are being published about the genocide, enabling the

readers to try and imagine what is unimaginable.

This will turn the wheels of a long process of recognition from below, a recognition

in the hearts of people that will inevitably interact with the process of official

recognition—a must for true justice—no matter how distant it may be for the time

being.

ANCA CALLS ON PRESIDENT OBAMA TO REJECT MISGUIDED FEDERAL

APPEALS COURT DECISION
ARMENPRESS:
August 26, 2009
Yerevan

Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) called on President
Barack Obama to reject a misguided federal appeals court decision
striking down a California law to allow for the return of Armenian
Genocide-era assets, and encouraged him to immediately and publicly
affirm that it is not the "express federal policy" of the United
States, as the court argued, to prohibit the recognition of this
crime by the Congress or the states.

Representative of the ANCA Elizabeth Chouljyan told Armenpress that
the letter follows a August 20th ruling of a three judge panel of the
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in the case of Movsesian
v. Versicherung A.G. (No. 07-56722), that struck down a California
law providing remedies for Armenian Genocide-era wrongs. The ruling
contended that state level recognition of this crime contradicts
"express federal policy" and is therefore unconstitutional.

"You bear direct responsibility, Mr. President, by virtue of your
failure to keep your repeated, crystal clear pledges to recognize the
Armenian Genocide, for the Court's judgment that it is the official
policy of the Executive Branch of the United States government to
actively oppose proper recognition of this crime and, upon this basis,
to thus prohibit states from passing laws to help Armenian Genocide-era
victims seek to reclaim lost or stolen property," said Hachikian in
an August 25th letter to President Obama.

The California Legislature passed a law in 2000 giving heirs of those
who died or fled to avoid Armenian Genocide-era persecution until the
end of 2010 to file claims for old bank accounts and life insurance
policies. Class-action lawsuits brought by Armenian descendants in
California and other states led to a $20 million settlement with New
York Life Insurance Co. in 2005 and a $17 million settlement the same
year with French life insurer AXA.

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