Friday 28 May 2010

Another Important Piece from Taner Akcam‏

The Armenian Weekly: 19 May 2010
What Davutoglu Fails to Understand
by Taner Akcam

While the ruling AK Party in Turkey continues to sing the same old tune on
the genocide, it is trying out a new style. Our minister of foreign affairs,
Ahmet Davutoglu, is one of those testing out this new style with the concept
of “just memory.”

Davutoglu explains the concept in this way: “If [Armenian Foreign Minister]
Edward Nalbantyan had agreed to it that day [the protocols were signed,
Oct. 10, 2009], I had prepared a speech for after the signing… I had rested
that speech upon one single concept: just memory…a key concept. In other
words, to not look at that entire history from a single-sided point of view. We
should be empathetic to what the Armenians lived through, what they felt, and
what followed for them afterwards. But while expecting respect for their
memory, they in turn should show respect for ours too. We shouldn’t construct
a one-sided memory… 1915 may be the year of the deportation for them.
For us, it is at the same time the year of Canakkale and of Sarikamis”
(Murat Yetkin, Radikal, March 26, 2010).

In the press conference organized by Davutoglu in March after the decision
by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee for Foreign Affairs on the
Armenian Genocide, he expressed the same ideas: “1915 represents the
deportation for the Armenians but at the same time it represents Canakkale
for us… It was a period of time marked by the great defense for the endurance
of a nation. It was a period marked by great suffering in Anatolia. A time when
two million people migrated from the Balkans and from the Caucasus. In the
wake of the disintegration of an empire, chaos reigned. We have always
sympathized with the suffering of that time”

What Davutoglu is trying to do is actually quite simple. He’s trying to follow
a kind of “balancing” policy. To put it in a nutshell: “If the Armenians had their
suffering, we had ours too.” It may sound like a new statement, since he
seems ready to accept what happened to the Armenians in 1915. However,
the precondition for accepting it is that “Muslim suffering” must be equaled
with “Armenian suffering.” In reality, therefore, there is nothing new in his
statement. The reasoning behind “just memory” and “mutual suffering” has
a second and perhaps even more important aspect to it: It views recent history
as having been shaped by actors from two different sides—“Muslim” and
“Christian.” And these “two sides” developed different “histories and memories”
in a state of conflict. This is a serious distortion of history, and for this reason it
is worth taking a closer look at it.

First, the “just memory” and “mutual suffering” thesis is an extremely stale one.
It’s been repeated over and over again in Turkey for years. Justin McCarthy,
Sukru Elekdag’s history consultant, has written books on it. It represents a
violation of a simple rule that shouldn’t even need to be mentioned, but here it
is: You can never, ever, present civilian and military deaths that occurred during
a war as equivalent to the annihilation of a population upon the orders of a party
or government. This is a very ordinary denialist tactic. The fact that the civilian
and military deaths during World War II in Germany far exceed the number of
Jews who were destroyed is a fact known by every school child there. However,
today, outside of a few leftover Nazis and some extreme German nationalists,
you will not find a single German citizen opposed to acknowledging the
Holocaust based on the notion of “just memory” and “we suffered too.” Anyone
doing that would be shamed into silence. In a similar vein, if you were to take
the deaths caused by Stalin’s massacres against civilians during World War II,
and equate them to the losses suffered by the Soviet Army and civilian population
while combating the Nazis, that would again be considered shameful. For a less
known example, in the genocide perpetrated by the Hutu government against the
Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, 800,000 Tutsis were killed. If you were to compare
those 800,000 deaths with the deaths of Hutus by the Tutsi independence
organization called the Front for Rwanda Nationlovers (RPF), you would have
again committed a grave injustice. Today the Hutu nationalists being prosecuted
by the Rwanda International Criminal Court are making those very same arguments
in their defense.

This tendency, unfortunately, remains unexamined in Turkey. Whenever the subject
of the Armenians’ annihilation in 1915 comes up, the civilian Muslim and military
losses from the Caucasian and Balkan wars and World War I are presented as an
equivalent. Our so-called “liberal” writers engage in the same exercise. Sometimes
you can’t get away from all the “mutual suffering” literature being printed everywhere.
Since everyone has suffered and everyone needs to understand the other’s suffering,
a deep sense of “peace” settles into every corner. One can’t ignore the comfort in
replacing “accusations” and “conflicts” and “battles,” with “harmony” and “serenity”
and “understanding.” Since “everyone has suffered,” we gain a tremendous sense
of peace by “understanding each other’s pain.” Therefore there is no “perpetrator”
in our midst, no “malfeasor,” and no “victim.” We are all in the same position, so why
fight? We need to accept the fact that when “someone is feeling blamed” rather deeply,
turning it around and making themselves feel like the victim is actually quite comforting
to them. It’s a general rule: When cornered, make yourself the victim and get instant
stress relief.

From this point on, when we discuss 1915 we need to get away from this statement
that “All of us suffered.” What we are talking about are examples of violence that carry
different characteristics. Civilian and military losses during wars and the deliberate
destruction of a civilian population by the decision of an administration are not crimes
that can be examined on the same level, and cannot be considered equivalent. If you
are going to take examples of violence with completely different causes and different
results, and label them equivalent in degree, one can only conclude that you do not
want to understand what happened and that you would prefer to sweep things under
the rug.

Why bring up Turkish losses suffered during the war whenever the question of Armenian
losses—as a result of centralized decision-making—comes up? Isn’t this a rather
strange exercise in logic? By taking two completely different events, different both in
the players involved and their causes (in fact in the Caucasian migrations, occurring
in different centuries), and placing them side by side and then asking us to consider
them together, this isn’t just some silly distortion of history. It is something far worse.
It is trying to get us to make what the old folks used to call an “illiyet rabitasi,” or
“causation connection.” And it wants us to place the Armenians on one side of those
events—if possible, the opposing side. Fine, but there is just one simple question:
What possible connection did the Armenians of Anatolia have with the Balkans or with
the migration of Muslims from the Caucasus, which started around 80 years before
1915? And more importantly, wasn’t the Union and Progress Party responsible for the
losses suffered during World War I as well as what happened in 1915?

This question brings us to the second aspect of this issue: The softness of that phrase
“We’ve all suffered” carries within it a deep-seated nationalism and a distortion of
facts regarding our recent history. This sentiment views recent history as one marked
by two separate collective actors—the “Muslim Turk” and the “Christian Armenian.”
The “Muslim Turk actors” and their “history and memory,” and the “Christian Armenian
actors” and their “history and memory,” developed different “suffering” within the context
of their relations, maybe with clashes with each other, according to this view. For this
reason, when looking backward one shouldn’t be confined to just one side’s history
and memory. Both sides’ histories and memories need to be honored. This is a very
serious distortion of history. The facts don’t bear out this version of history.

This manner of thinking that Davutoglu has been trying to develop is both a manifestation
of the deep-seated Muslim identity within the AKP and a reflection of another phenomenon
described by the French historian Renan, that is, “a state can only be established upon the
deformation of the past. One can’t create a nation without deforming the past.” In other
words, 95 years of lies and denial politics have created this mindset of “sides” and
“memories” of the issue. This mindset is where the self-belief and self-concept of the
Muslim identity in Turkey meets with the secularist-nationalist interpretation of history.
This is why the AKP (and Davutoglu) continue the usual denialist policies.

Let’s start from the Balkan wars. The facts are really quite simple. The Balkan wars took
place against the Serbian, Greek, and Bulgarian states. One quarter of the army that was
mobilized by the Ottomans consisted of Christian Ottoman citizens. As Ottoman citizens,
the Armenians’ role in the war wasn’t simply limited to serving in the army. They were
active in soliciting donations for it. For example, the director of the Pangalti branch of the
Mudafaa-i Milliyet Cemiyeti (Society for National Defense) was Dikran Allahverdi. Dikran
bey was successful in procuring 3,000 Ottoman gold coins in donations for support of the
army, which even got his name mentioned in the daily newspapers of the time. Dikran
Allahverdi was one of the intellectuals who was arrested on April 24, 1915 and taken away.
Now, Mr. Davutoglu, where in your “just memory” is there a place for Dikran Allahverdi?
Isn’t it just a little bit strange to sit there and pronounce the “Balkan Wars” as belonging
to “our memory”—meaning “Muslim memory”—and present it as a contrast to the
“Armenians’ history,” especially what happened in 1915?

The Sarikamis example isn’t very different. According to Davutoglu’s “just memory,
” on one side is “our” (meaning “Muslim”) suffering over Sarikamis, and on the other
side is the Armenian suffering of 1915. Can Davutoglu explain to me why Sarikamis
is on one side of history while the Armenians are on the other side? No doubt this is
because of Davutoglu’s version of history, which places Muslims on one side and
Christians on the other side. Therefore the Muslim losses at Sarikamis get compared
with the Armenian-Christian losses of 1915, and presented as “different memories.”

Can there be a more meaningless “compare and contrast” method than this? Anyone
with an understanding of history would realize that Sarikamis and 1915 do not represent
“two different sides” that reflect “two different memories.” I didn’t compose the folk tune
“Askeri kirdiran Enver Pasha” (“Enver Pasha Who Destroyed Soldiers”). This nation did.
Enver is both the murderer of Sarikamis and the murderer of Armenians in 1915. Just a
simple understanding of history would make us realize that we shouldn’t contrast
Sarikamis and 1915; it would remind us to record both on the crime ledgers of Enver
and Talat Pasha.

Isn’t this actual history? Wasn’t the Union and Progress party responsible for both the
Muslim losses during World War I and the murders of Armenians? With what sort of
logic—and why—are two crimes of different characters enacted by the same government
both treated the same and also contrasted with each other? Why place one crime by the
Union and Progress Party on one side, and the other crime with the other side’s pain and
memory? Shouldn’t we put an end to the meaninglessness that hides behind bright words
like “just memory”? If Davutoglu had read the indictments of the prosecutions against the
Unionists in 1919, he would have seen that the Unionists were prosecuted for these two
different criminal episodes, and he would stop this strange business of comparing
Sarikamis with the attempted annihilation of the Armenians in 1915.

The situation doesn’t change when you consider Gallipoli. In fact, it presents a much more
serious different set of historical facts. It is a situation that is symbolized in the personality
of Captain Sarkis Torosyon, as related by Aydan Aktar (TARAF, March 22, 2010). The
battle of Gallipoli doesn’t fall neatly into different memories and suffering between “us”
and “Armenians,” as described by Davutoglu. Actually, it reminds us of a horrible and
different reality behind it. There were Armenians fighting in the Ottoman army in both
Sarikamis and Gallipoli, and when these soldiers were fighting on the battle front, their
families were being deported and destroyed. Gallipoli is not marked by Muslims Turks
on one side and the history and suffering of Armenians in 1915 on the other. Quite the
opposite. Gallipoli stands as a history where the families of those Armenian soldiers
battling in the Ottoman army were destroyed.

During the mobilization of Aug. 2, 1914, Armenian citizens between the ages of 18-45
were conscripted in the army like other citizens. After the defeat at Sarikamis on
Feb. 25, 1915, by secret orders sent personally by Enver Pasha, all the Armenians were
stripped of their weapons and most were placed in labor battalions. During the deportation,
these soldiers were systematically murdered. This wouldn’t be limited to the murder of
Armenians in the military, either. There was a much more painful aspect to this. The
families of the Armenian soldiers who survived and continued serving in the army were
also deported and killed. Sarkis Torosyan is not an exception. The Prime Ministerial
Ottoman Archives are filled with the correspondences of Armenian soldiers serving in
the army who wished to learn of the whereabouts of their deported families. Parsih, an
employee of the Ministry of War’s quartermaster general’s department, fourth branch
construction squadron; Minas Efendi, son of Nasib, a physician’s assistant with the
Dar-ul Muallimin Hospital, from the Bilecek community; Kiragos Efendi, the provisions
official with the Jerusalem First Station Hospital; Nersis Mikailyan of Bursa; the first
lieutenant Agop from Bolvadin; Aram Asador Demirjiyan of Izmit; Dikran Artun of Konya;
Artin, son of Ohannes from Balikesir; Sirakan, son of Papas from Istanbul; Kirkor Efendi,
son of Haji Serkis from the township of Arslanbey in the district of Izmit, are just some
of the names.

I won’t even bother going any deeper into the subject, knowing that these Armenian
soldiers who remained alive were from western Anatolia; that not a single piece of
writing can be found from the Armenians of eastern Anatolia; and that almost all of
the writings one encounters date from after August 1915…

Mr. Davutoglu, does your “memory of Gallipoli” have room for the Armenian soldiers
fighting in the Ottoman army and the destruction of their families?
Mr. Davutoglu, history wasn’t experienced with the Muslims on one side and the
Christians on the other.
Mr. Davutoglu, Gallipoli isn’t “ours” and 1915 “the Armenians’.”
The Ottoman state and its ruling party, the Union and Progress, ruthlessly oppressed
its own Muslim and Christian citizens. The Muslims perished by way of war and
sickness. The Armenians were removed from Anatolia by a policy intent on destroying
them. It’s as simple as that. Why are you having such a hard time admitting that? Is it
because you don’t see the Christian-Armenians as “one of us”? Maybe that’s why you
still can’t seem to find a resolution to the ordinary matter of the foundation properties of
Christian citizens. You realize, I’m sure, that in modern terms, this is what is referred to
as discrimination and racism.

The Turkish version of this OpEd appeared in Taraf on May 11, 2010.
Translated from the Turkish by Fatima Sakarya.

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