TOUTING HISTORY

Resource : Zaman

We’ve all experienced it, but only recently did I learn that there is a special word for it in Turkish. “Hanutçuluk” refers to that special pestering that traders mete out to tourists wandering past their shops -- the totally resistible invitation to buy a carpet, see a leather jacket or eat shish kebab that often follows in the wake of an innocuous request to know the time or find out where you are from. Hanutçus are touts who drag customers into shops in exchange for a commission.

The practice is a scourge, according to the sub-provincial governor of Bodrum, one of Turkey’s busiest tourist centers. “In high season, tourists can’t even walk the streets,” said the official, Abdullah Kalkan, in front of an audience of the town’s local businesspeople last March. It’s actually a criminal offense but one which, he confessed, the law is powerless to suppress despite having issued 50,000 euros worth of fines and ordering 30 prime offenders to close shop altogether. Quoted in “Kolayidare” a Web zine for Turkish bureaucrats, he calls hanutçuluk “the enemy of tourism.”

Alas, the Bodrum sub-provincial governor’s office has itself discovered ways of discouraging tourism or, at the very least, sending visitors away not just with sunburn but a sour taste in their mouths. Hanging in Bodrum airport, with official endorsement of the sub-provincial governor’s office, are posters warning departing tourists not of touts but the false claims of the Armenian lobby. One poster consists of an old black and white photo of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, seated with his wife’s dogs at his feet. Beside it is a photo that has been doctored. The dog has been replaced with the corpse of an emaciated Armenian child -- with the legend “The Face of Denial.”

This bizarre bit of digital editing, according to the poster, is the work of some committee in California in a pamphlet advertising a rally to call for the recognition of the fate of the Ottoman Armenian population as genocide. That these people were forced to resort to so crude a fiction to make their case is proof that the genocide is itself a falsehood, the poster says.

You can imagine Mr. and Mrs. Nuclear Tourist Family wandering through Bodrum airport with their little ones clutching plastic buckets and spades. Whereas they might have approached the ticket counter with the regret and nostalgia of a holiday coming to an end, one look at the dead baby will send them running for their plane. In another terminal there is yet a second poster of an Armenian claim -- a reproduction of a painting of a pile of skulls which proves to be from the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 and not 1915. As an advertisement for Turkey it is on a level with the ads that some bright minister commissioned after a PKK bombing to restore confidence in the country’s tourism. These ran (and I paraphrase) “Come to Turkey and you probably won’t die.” “We didn’t cut these heads off, someone else did” is just not good advertising copy.

At the very least the posters are a false syllogism that even the most sunstroke-addled tourist will recognize. “Some Armenians in California are guilty of facile propaganda” = “Anything any Armenian says is propaganda” = “The disappearance of the Armenians of Anatolia is an illusion created by Photoshop.” Yet the posters contain an even more reckless assumption. “There are those in the Armenian diaspora who would make their case with disrespect for the founder of the Turkish republic” = “We, as public servants in Turkey funded at the taxpayers’ expense, should shout back in an even more hysterical tone.”

The history of the Armenian community at the end of the Ottoman Empire is too important an issue to be conducted through a deliberately shocking poster campaign. By all means the administrator of a region that attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists should clear the streets of obnoxious touts. He should not be out there trying to drag those same hapless tourists into an historical polemic. The posters should come down.