British Apologist Supporters of Turkish Denialists
I refer to the article entitled "Bad things happen when empires fall" by Prof. Norman Stone in your issue of March 8, and can only conclude that it is the interpretations of history in the hands of historians like Prof. Stone, that create and enlarge world's problems rather than helping to resolve them. I shall not delve into the details of the Armenian Genocide, as others have amply done so. The absence of Armenians from their historic lands is one good indicator for it. Instead I would like to expose the untruths in Prof. Stone's article. Prof. Stone mentions that in 1914 "the Armenian leader" (sic. - whoever this might have been) was offered a government job. He then conveniently leaves that matter aside, failing to mention that during the following April, over 300 Armenian leaders and even lawyers and members of the Turkish parliament were summarily arrested, deported and executed without trial. There was only one survivor, the composer-priest Komitas, saved by foreign intervention, who after witnessing the massacres lost his mental balance. Yes, Professor Stone is correct mentioning that 1600 Turkish officials guilty of the massacres were tried and some, including the Young Turks leaders were given the death sentence. Even Mustafa Kemal Atatuk in his speech in Los Angeles during July of 1926 refers to "the ruthless mass drives of millions of Christian subjects..." (see Los Angeles Times, 1 August 1926). How very true! But a few years later, the same condemned killers were pardoned and turned into national heroes of Turkey. I should like to hear from Prof. Stone the names of those from the 1600 mentioned, who served their sentences or were executed. It is claimed that disease, starvation and massacres killed off a third of the population of Turkey. This is true, most of these people were Armenian and the remaining Muslims suffered because their rivers and sources of water were polluted by the thousands of Armenian corpses, spreading epidemics. As regarding the famine, this is also true, since the Armenian peasants, who were the main growers of wheat and barley were deported and killed, leaving the land uncultivated. As for the Turks massacred in the hands of the Armenians, let us look and evaluate the facts. At the onset of the war all Armenian men between the ages of 14 and 40 were called-up and were soon disarmed, driven to hard labour with no food and water and almost all were exterminated. This leaves the Armenian communities with unarmed men over 40, women and children. I wonder, how could these poor remnants of the communities even defend themselves, let alone massacre the heavily armed assailants? Turks cannot build a proper country on the bones of the victims of the Armenian Genocide. They must first clear their conscience, as the Germans did. After that the road would be smoother for all concerned. History is always interpreted in personal ways but reversing the truth and trying to cover the know facts can hardly be called "interpretation". There are better and more descriptive words for it! Bad things happen when empires fall apart
Harking back to Armenia in 1915 will only drive modern Turkey into China's arms
Norman Stone
The Times/UK
March 8, 2010
The best thing said about the Armenian tragedy was a sermon delivered
in the main church in Constantinople in 1894, more than 20 years
before it happened. Patriarch Ashikyan had this to say: `We have lived
with the Turks for a thousand years, have greatly flourished, are
nowhere in this empire in a majority of the population. If the
nationalists go on like this [they had started a terrorist campaign]
they will ruin the nation.'
That Patriarch was quite right, and the nationalists shot him (and
many other notables who were saying the same thing).
Now a US Congressional committee has had its say, by voting to
recognise as `genocide' the mass killing of Armenians by Turkish
forces that began in 1915, during the First World War.
Is the committee right? When the First World War broke out there were
Armenian uprisings and the Patriarch's fears were realised. The
population in much of the territory of today's Turkey was deported in
cruel circumstances that led to much murder and pillage.
But genocide? No, if by that you mean the sort of thing Hitler did.
The Armenian leader was offered a job in the government in October
1914 to sort things out (he refused on the ground that his Turkish was
not up to it). The Turks themselves put 1,600 men on trial for what
had happened and executed a governor. The British had the run of the
Turkish archives for four years after 1918 and failed to find
incriminating documents. Armenians in the main cities were not
touched. Documents did indeed turn up in 1920, but they turned out to
be preposterous forgeries, written on the stationery of a French
school.
You cannot really describe this as genocide. Horrors, of course,
happened but these same horrors were visited upon millions of Muslims
(and Jews) as the Ottoman Empire receded in the Caucasus and the
Balkans. Half of its urban population came from those regions and, in
many cases, the disasters of their families occurred at Armenian
hands.
Diasporas jump up and down in the politics of the United States - as
an American friend says of them, when they cross the Atlantic, they do
not change country, they change planet.
Braveheart is, for the Scottish me, a dreadful embarrassment. I have
to explain to Kurdish taxi drivers that the whole film is wicked tosh
that just causes idiots in Edinburgh to paint their faces and to hate
the English, whereas there cannot be a single family in Scotland that
does not have cousins in England.
But what will be the effect of the resolution in Turkey? The answer is
that it will be entirely counterproductive. Yes, the end of the
Ottoman Empire was a terrible time, as the end of empires generally
are: take the Punjab in 1947, for instance.
Disease, starvation and massacre carried off a third of the population
of eastern Turkey, regardless of their origin. But of all the states
that succeeded the Ottoman Empire, Turkey is by far the most
successful; you just have to look at its vital statistics to see as
much, starting with male life expectancy which not so long ago was a
decade longer than Russia's.
Turkey is in the unusual position of doing rather well. She has
survived the financial mess, her banks having had a drubbing some
years before, and exports are humming. The Turks are not quite used to
this, and this shows with the present Government, which (as the Prime
Minister's unfortunate anti-Israeli outburst at Davos a year ago
showed) can on occasion be triumphalist.
This Government has been remarkably successful, not least in getting
rid of the preposterous currency inflation that made tourists laugh,
but it should not be allowed to forget the bases of Turkey's
emergence: the strength of the Western connection, the link with the
IMF, the presence in the West of tens of thousands of Turkish
students, many of them very able.
However, every Turk knows that, during the First World War, horrible
things happened, and for Congress to single out the Armenians is
regarded in Turkey simply as an insult.
The Turkish media is full of tales about the resolution, and there has
been a great deal of dark muttering about it. There are Turks who
agree that the killings amounted to genocide, and there has been an
uncomfortable book, Fuat Dundar's The Code of Modern Turkey, as some
of the government at the time did indeed think of ethnic homogeneity
(though not the killing of children).
But the dominant tone is more or less of contempt: who are these
people, to orate about events a century ago in a country that most of
them could not find on the map? It all joins with resentment at US
doings in Iraq, and in the popular mind gets confused with the Swiss
vote against minarets or Europe's ridiculous admission of Greek Cyprus
to their Union.
In practice the Turks are being alienated, and will be encouraged to
think that the West is doing another version of the Crusades, that
`the only friend of the Turk is the Turk', and other nationalist
nonsense of a similar sort. Nowadays Turkey does not need the Western
link as before: trade and investment have been switching towards
Russia and Central Asia; the Chinese are quite active in Ankara. Is
that what we want to achieve, in a country that is otherwise the best
advertisement for the West that anyone could have imagined back in
1950?
Norman Stone is Professor Emeritus of Modern History at the University
of Oxford and head of the Russian-Turkish Institute at Bilkent
University, Ankara
The International Herald Tribune, France
March 6, 2010 Saturday
Giving Turkey a hard second look
by JOSEPH O'NEILL
ABSTRACT
In "Rebel Land. Unraveling the Riddle of History in a Turkish Town,"
Christopher de Bellaigue makes a courageous reappraisal of Turkey.
FULL TEXT
Rebel Land. Unraveling the Riddle of History in a Turkish Town. By
Christopher de Bellaigue. Illustrated. 270 pages. The Penguin Press.
$25.95; £20.
In 2005, Christopher de Bellaigue, a British journalist, installed
himself in a remote, forbidding Turkish town and, by so doing,
acquired an anguished intimacy with the region's peoples and their
secret and mythic pasts. This extraordinary intervention - which can
be read as old-fashioned Orientalism or, more generously, as a
globalized conscience courageously at work or, most accurately, as a
bit of both - has a reflexive subplot, namely Mr. de Bellaigue's own
intellectual and moral odyssey, which is of an unusually vulnerable
and romantic character.
As Mr. de Bellaigue freely explains in ''Rebel Land,'' a love affair
drew him to Turkey in 1995, whereupon ''the love affair ended but
Turkey captivated me.'' He stayed (in Ankara and Istanbul, writing for
The Economist), learned to speak Turkish fluently and, immersed in a
Westernized environment, more or less unwittingly became a Kemalist,
which is to say, a subscriber to the ''foundation myths'' promulgated
by Kemal Ataturk and holding sway in Turkey ever since.
Notable among these are the notions that the Turkish republic is a
nation-state containing no subgroups with valid claims to ethnic or
political differentiation, let alone autonomy; that the country has a
European and secular essence and destiny; and, more emotionally, that
the achievement of Turkish nationhood was an enterprise reflective of
a righteous people who to this day remain victimized by the
self-interested incomprehension of the West.
Mr. de Bellaigue in 2001 wrote an article for The New York Review of
Books containing a blandly pro-Turkish account of the fate of the
Ottoman Armenians. To Mr. de Bellaigue's somewhat surprising surprise,
this excited a furious response. The controversy led the writer to a
searching, shameful examination of his sources and his soul: ''I had
been charmed by the Turks, and perhaps intimidated by their blocking
silence'' about the Armenians. ''I had helped to keep Turkey's past
hidden.''
It may strike some as odd that a leading authority on modern Turkey
should be capable of such a blunder; an honest scrutiny of the
plentiful and detailed accounts of the 1915 events provided by
(overwhelmingly Christian) bystanders and survivors makes the case for
an Armenian genocide hard to resist. On any view of the available
materials - the Ottoman archives remain largely forbidden to scholars
- the Armenians suffered a comprehensive and horrifying ethnic
cleansing from their ancient homeland.
But Mr. de Bellaigue had failed to scrutinize these materials, for the
simple reason that he had, more or less literally, gone native. It was
only after he left Istanbul for Tehran (prompted by another, happier
love affair, with an Iranian who is now his wife) that his Turkish
ties began to shrivel and he came to realize he was ''no longer a
Turk.'' By 2005, he was ready to make amends for his offenses against
history, even if he would thereby go behind Turkey's back ''and betray
it.''
The betrayal took the form of repeated visits to ''a little place in
the middle of nowhere'' named Varto, and in this way Mr. de Bellaigue
climbed ''down from the crow's nest of history'' to a place where
''the science of history has been so abused and neglected ... that it
barely exists.'' Varto, we learn, is an exceedingly complicated place.
Situated in Turkey's beautiful, mountainous far east, in the early
20th century it was controlled in short succession by the Ottomans,
Russian invaders, Armenian nationalists and Kurdish rebels. Nowadays
the town and surrounding district are populated by Kurds, a very few
vestigial Armenians and a small minority of Turks.
This ethnic complexity is aggravated by tribal divisions (among the
Kurds) and by an unruly spillage of religions. Most Varto Kurds are
Sunni Muslims, others are members of the oppressed Alevi sect; ditto
the Turks. The Armenians of Varto are Muslims (their Ottoman ancestors
having prudentially converted from Christianity). Local speech is also
a hodgepodge.
Mr. De Bellaigue responds with outstanding energy and courage. Lodging
at Varto's Teachers' Hostel, he is tailed by the police and military
intelligence and suspected of being a spy. Nonetheless, he perseveres,
talking to, on the one hand, the captain of the gendarmerie, the
police chief and the district governor and, on the other hand,
herdsmen and Kurdish guerrilla fighters. He tracks down descendants of
famous and infamous figures in Varto history, and in Germany, he
speaks to exiled Kurdish nationalists. He constructs an unflinching
and painstaking history of the local Armenian apocalypse and
deconstructs the Kurds' inevitably shaky versions of their past.
If one thing becomes clear, it's that the region, indeed Turkey
itself, is buried in a thick ethnographic and historical cloud that is
only deepened by its various inhabitants, who, in this regard, are
helpless particles of fog. The people of Varto are smothered by the
official narratives of the Turkish state, credulous of family and
tribal lore and guerrilla propaganda, subdued by censorship and
hypersensitized by inherited and actual grievances. Their sense of
themselves and their neighbors is built on vagueness, prejudice,
misconceptions, hearsay and, above all, fear. Fear is general all over
Turkey.
Mr. De Bellaigue investigates this mess brilliantly and evenhandedly
(if occasionally emotively). Analytically, however, he can be abrupt.
He describes Varto as ''a place under occupation'' before concluding,
a little too tersely, that the ''Kurdish movement in Turkey ... is a
mirage.''
With regard to that hottest of potatoes, the Armenians, he deplores as
''a travesty of history and memory'' the divisive obsession with the
question of genocide: ''What is needed is a vaguer description for the
events of 1915, avoiding the G-word but clearly connoting criminal
acts of slaughter, to which reasonable scholars can subscribe,''
thereby promoting ''a cultural and historical meeting between today's
Turks, Kurds and Armenians.'' This is an important and potentially
attractive suggestion, but Mr. de Bellaigue declines to elaborate its
moral and philosophical foundations; a pity, since he has earned the
reader's trust.
It's a sense of trust, though, that ''Rebel Land'' ultimately
bequeaths - a rare, remarkable feat, given the treacherousness of the
terrain. Mr. de Bellaigue concludes his personal story with the
information that, having wandered restlessly among ''the tall stalks
of identity,'' fatherhood has returned him to England and to a new
appreciation of his citizenship. That may be so; but whatever his
protestations to the contrary, his heart remains part Turkish. And
Turkey, however much it may not like it, is lucky to have Christopher
de Bellaigue. This book ought to be compulsory reading from Batman to
Bodrum.
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