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”

(see http://haber.sol.org.tr/devlet-ve-siyaset/davutoglu-1915-bizim-icin-canakkale-dir-haberi-24901).

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.