Interesting Articles in the Turkish frame of mind‏

ORHAN KEMAL CENGİZ
Our sophisticated fascists

21 July 2010

It is a well-known fact that Talat Pasha was quite talented in mathematics
and statistics. In 1915 he sent ciphered telegrams to every corner of

Anatolia orchestrating the deportation of Armenians.

He was not only deporting Armenians to the deserts of Syria, but also
relocating Muslims to the areas the Armenians left. He knew not only the
number of Armenians deported, but also their professions and skills,

how many Armenian carpenters, bakers, vinedressers, farmers and so

on lived in each town and village. After evacuating a town or village he

would try to create an identical population in its place. If, for example,

there were three bakers in the Armenian population who were deported,

then he would send three Muslim bakers to this region who had

immigrated from the Balkans to Turkey.

Talat Pasha and his supporters in the massacre and deportation of
Armenians were well-educated people, speaking a couple of foreign

languages, quite secular and had very “modern” lifestyles.

When I think of these Unionists who prepared the architecture of

modern Turkey, the image of a Nazi officer who sent Jews to gas

chambers by day and played Bach quite enthusiastically on a piano

by night comes before my eyes. There are so many parallels between

Nazis and our Unionists. Both of them were modern, secular, positivist,

progressive and “scientific.”

Actually, our new republic was established based on these values and

beliefs in 1923. It also, of course, created its own elite who owed their

wealth to the sins committed by the Unionists. Nation building based on

the exclusion of non-Muslims on the one hand, and the “civilization”

project of the republic on the other created a unique political atmosphere

and actors in Turkey. Without knowing this background you cannot

understand what is really going on in Turkey today.

I think a perfect example of these Turkish elites is the people who created

and directed the Hürriyet daily newspaper, which daily uses the famous

motto “Turkey belongs to Turks” beneath its logo. Hürriyet’s founders and

directors were also quite modern, secular and educated people like

Talat Pasha, who first uttered this motto, “Turkey belongs to Turks.”

All these thoughts went through my mind as I read the column of Fatih

Altaylı, editor-in-chief of Haber Türk. Altaylı was explaining the Hürriyet

daily’s contribution to the 1995 Kardak Island crisis between Greece and

Turkey. We have now learned from Altaylı that in the year of the crisis

Hürriyet had sent a correspondent to this tiny island to take down the

Greek flag and to plant a Turkish flag in its place. And the other day, the

photo of this flag was used in a headline story in Hürriyet. Altaylı also told

us how Hürriyet’s editor-in-chief defended this provocative news story by

saying that they had pursued the same policy when covering news in

Cyprus.

Actually, Hürriyet and its writers’ provocative pieces are not limited to

sabotaging Turkey’s relations with Greece and creating a crisis in Cyprus.

Hürriyet has always whitewashed the deep state and its crimes. Today it

is the most talented advocate of the Ergenekon gang. Their campaign

sent Hrant Dink to court and made him a target for ultranationalists. During

its long life Hürriyet has always been a leading figure in launching smear

campaigns against intellectuals and artists who in one way or another

crossed the line drawn by the deep state, from Nazım Hikmet to Ahmet

Kaya, from Taner Akçam to Osman Can.

Recently, Ayşe Hür, from the Taraf daily newspaper, explained Hürriyet’s

role in the chain of events leading up to the Sept. 6-7, 1955, pogroms in

Istanbul, which had long-lasting and devastating effects on Turkey’s

non-Muslim population. Hür states: “What was most effective in

contributing to the events of Sept. 6-7 were the provocative articles written

by journalists on Turkey’s Greek population after the Cyprus issue emerged.

In these pieces, spearheaded by the Hürriyet and Yeni Sabah newspapers,

both the Istanbul Fener Greek Patriarchate and its leader Patriarch

Athinagoras were criticized for remaining silent in the face of the Greek

operation that was unfolding with Makarios III at the helm. Newspapers

were pointing the finger at the patriarch, stressing that Fener represented

the whole of the Orthodox world and that with his ecumenical status he could

interfere in Makarios’ actions, and so, remaining silent meant condoning

Makarios.”

As a result of these provocations 4,124 houses, 1,004 businesses,

73 churches and many other buildings belonging to non-Muslims were

destroyed. Dozens of people were killed, 300 wounded and many women

were raped.

Hürriyet not only bears the words of Talat Pasha on its front page, but

keeps his spirit alive. They are the founders and owners of modern Turkey.

They are the smart, educated and sophisticated people of Turkey. They

are progressive, scientific, secular and modern. They are the descendants

of Talat Pasha. Until Turkey has an open confrontation with Talat Pasha’s

sins, we will not be able to understand exactly how these people have ruled

this country all these years. Until then, neither will we understand why Turkey’s

modern, secular elites are so anti-democratically fighting against minorities

and pluralism, nor why they give support to an authoritarian regime in Turkey.

To understand our sophisticated fascists and the real nature of the political

regime, we have to go to the very foundations.

Robert Fisk: We should mourn these desert staging posts
Saturday, 24 July 2010
Independent/UK

So what, readers, is a "caravanserai"? In Persian (or Dari), it is
"karvansara", in Turkish, "keravandaray" – yes, from which we get our
"caravan" – and it is an inn (or "pub" as we might call it) and I am
inspired this week to praise the "caravanserai" because it is where we
all met in the age before steamships and aircraft. Buddhist, Jew,
Muslim, Christian, we would all meet there.

Usually, their outer walls were made of black and white marble. There
is a caravanserai just south of my home in Beirut, at Saaderat, south
of Khalde, much splattered with machine-gun holes, but clearly the
last stop on the road to Beirut, the last secure resting-place for
camels and horses before you reached the "Bourj", the great Ottoman
gate to the second city of Syria (before the French cut it in half).

I have a great love of the caravanserai of Diyabakir in Turkey. Of
this town, it was said by a British consul that "the walls of the city
are black, the dogs are black and the hearts of its people are black".
I do not agree with the British consul. I was arrested there by the
Turkish police in 1991 for "defaming" the Turkish army.

I had written – accurately – that the Turkish army had stolen blankets
and food from Kurdish Christian refugees fleeing Saddam Hussein's
army. This was true. The Turkish police arrested me. And the chief
inspector of Diyabakir (noting my book on the Armenian genocide in my
bag and realising that I knew the truth about the 20th century's first
Holocaust, treated me with great respect).

"You are not my prisoner," he said. "You are my guest."

Well, up to a point, inspector. In fact, he had to ask the manager of
the Caravanserai Hotel – a Kurd – to translate, since he did not speak
English and I did not speak Turkish. This resulted in a weird
conversation in which he could not ask the questions he wanted and I
could not give the replies he didn't want about the Armenian genocide
and the Turkish army.

It ended up with me telling the inspector that my father regarded
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk as a titan, but that I could not understand why
Ataturk's soldiers should have so betrayed his memory as to have
stolen food and clothes from refugees. At this point, the inspector
put his arm round my shoulder and insisted that the local Turkish
newspaper reporter took a picture of us to show what good friends we
were.

I was taken by the cops (who had black coshes in their hands, by the
way, so don't think they were all nice guys) back to the Caravanserai
Hotel where I had to flush my Armenian contacts book down the loo
while a policeman stared through the keyhole of the lavatory before
being put on a plane back to Istanbul with a detective who had never
travelled by air before and whom I had to tell, en route, that he
would arrive safely.

But the hotel in Diyabakir really was a caravanserai. Its entrance was
wide enough for camels or horses. It was lined with black and white
marble. It was a fortress for travellers, a place of rest and comfort.

So now I move to my friend Tom Schutyser, a Belgian madman who is
obsessed (rightly) by caravanserai. He has taken the most magnificent
black and white photographs of these airports of the desert, voyaging
down the Silk Road from Iran through central Asia (Uzbekistan,
Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan) to China. As he writes in his beautiful
booklet to accompany his images, "In northern Iran, these silent,
solemn ruins of caravanserais languished in eerie, desolate,
motionless, desert winter landscapes. They are a reminder of the
prosperous eras of the Silk Road along which trade, inventions,
diplomacy, religions and culture were exchanged between China, the
Western world, the Middle East and Central Asia."

There were thousands of these caravanserais, staging posts across the
known world, accommodating, as Schutyser says, traders, pilgrims and
travellers. They were for commerce and for multicultural meetings.
Some caravanserais had their own translators so that Persians and
Indians and Arabs (and Brits, too, of course) could speak to each
other.

In Jordan, in Iran, here in Lebanon, I come across these places of
peace and solitude and happiness, usually in ruins. And oh, if only we
could re-create their world. What airport today will give you a
translator? What railway station will tell you what your fellow
traveller is saying? Some caravanserais had libraries – books – in
which a tired family could read of their fellow guests. How we should
miss these places.

Are Kurds a part of the ‘Turkish nation’?

Friday, July 23, 2010

MUSTAFA AKYOL

When we, the Turkish majority, speak of a homogenous “Turkish nation”

which includes all citizens of Turkey, we are wishful rather than factual.

Many Kurds, apparently, think otherwise

Last week, TESEV, a liberal think-tank in Istanbul, launched a report that

presented “constitutional and legal suggestions” to help solving Turkey’s

Kurdish question. But it got so much heat from the nationalist media that

it rather showed how difficult it is even to attempt to do anything about this

thorny issue.

What TESEV suggested, in a nutshell, was to delete all references to

“Turkishness” and the “Turkish nation” from the constitution. The word

“Turk,” they said, is an ethnic identity not shared by all citizens (most

notably by the Kurds, which make some 13-15 percent of the population,

according to surveys). The constitution and other basic texts, TESEV

further argued, should only speak of “the Republic of Turkey,” without

attempting to define its people.

Enter assimilationism

Now, if you are a foreigner, you might find this reasonable. But for most

people here, it is heresy because they grew up with the notion that every

citizen of Turkey is simply a Turk. That is written not just in the constitution,

but also in every textbook and almost on every official building. Even the

daily Hürriyet, the mainstream paper which gave its name to the Hürriyet

Daily News & Economic Review, has an unmistakable motto: “Turkey

belongs to the Turks.”

Those who see no problem here always emphasize that the “Turkishness”

they uphold just refers to citizenship and not to ethnicity or race. Within that

regard, they are partly right. Because although racism was an idea with

which the regime toyed in the 30’s (as I explained in a recent piece of mine)

it did not become the permanent official policy. What rather became the

official policy was the exact opposite: assimilationism.

The difference between the two is easy to see: Racists would want to

separate “real Turks” from other citizens, as the Nazis did in Germany with

their infamous Nuremberg Laws. Assimilationists, on the other hand, wanted

to make everybody Turkish. Hence they defined the Kurds as “mountain Turks,”

or a “Turkish tribe” who mistakenly lost its heritage, or, more recently, “our

citizens of Kurdish origin.”

The latter definition takes its inspiration from the more successful part of the

assimilation project: the melting of many non-Turkish Muslim ethnic groups

such Bosnians, Albanians, Circassians, Arabs or the Laz into the broader

Turkish majority. This happened gradually and organically throughout the 20th

century, often without the need for any imposition from the state. But the Kurds,

who, unlike most of the aforementioned groups, are not immigrants, and who

are much more numerous, was a different case. Most of them did not assimilate,

and the state’s heavy impositions on them to do so only made them more

resilient.

So, in the early 21st century, we ended up with a society of two distinct

identities. Some 85 percent of the people are proud members of the “Turkish

nation.” Most of the rest is made up of Kurds (and the Zaza, a subgroup), and

only few among them would define themselves as “Turkish.” The more

nationalist among them rather speak of “the Kurdish people” who should have

equal rights with “the Turkish people.”

This means that when we, the Turkish majority, speak of a homogenous “Turkish

nation” which includes all citizens of Turkey, we are wishful rather than factual.

And our wishes don’t come true by simply reiterating them.

From Ottomans to Turks

In the 19th century, the Ottomans had devised a better solution. “All subjects of

the empire are called Ottomans,” read the constitution of 1876, “[and] all Ottomans

are equal before law.” A political allegiance to the crown was enough to make you

a citizen, whereas identity remained as your own business. So you could be an

Ottoman Turk, an Ottoman Kurd, or an Ottoman Jew.

What the Kemalist Republic did was to simply redefine the diverse remnants of

the

empire s a homogenous nation of Turks. Atatürk had actually used a transitional

term in the early 20’s, a “nation of Turkey,” but he quickly moved on to “Turkish

nation,” and, alas, even the “Turkish race.” His belief was that with enough

“education,” and propaganda, the state would be able to transform the society

into whatever it wills.

Well, that dream obviously failed. The Kemalists often put the blame on the

“treason” of internal forces and the “conspiracy” of outside ones, but it is really

just human nature: most people want to retain their identities. When you force

them into amnesia, you only make them more ethno-nationalist.

So, TESEV’s idea is not too bad. A diverse “nation of Turkey” can be a notion

that can incorporate the Kurds. The only problem is that the majority of the

society will not be willing to accept such a pluralist definition of the nation.

For Kemalism could not transform the Kurds, but it transformed many others,

making them very staunch Turkish nationalists.