Tim Arango
CUNGUS (*),
Turkey — The crumbling stone monastery, built into the hillside, stands
as a forlorn monument to an awful past. So, too, does the decaying
church on the other side of this mountain village. Farther out, a
crevice is sliced into the earth, so deep that peering into it, one sees
only blackness. Haunting for its history, it was there that a century
ago, an untold number of Armenians were tossed to their deaths.
“They
threw them in that hole, all the men,” said Vahit Sahin, 78, sitting at
a cafe in the center of the village, reciting the stories that have
passed through generations.
Mr.
Sahin turned in his chair and pointed toward the monastery. “That side
was Armenian.” He turned back. “This side was Muslim. At first, they
were really friendly with each other.”
A
hundred years ago, amid the upheaval of World War I, this village and
countless others across eastern Anatolia became killing fields as the
desperate leadership of the Ottoman Empire, having lost the Balkans and
facing the prospect of losing its Arab territories as well, saw a threat
closer to home.
Worried
that the Christian Armenian population was planning to align with
Russia, a primary enemy of the Ottoman Turks, officials embarked on what
historians have called the first genocide of the 20th century: Nearly
1.5 million Armenians were killed, some in massacres like the one here,
others in forced marches to the Syrian desert that left them starved to
death.
The
genocide was the greatest atrocity of the Great War. It also remains
that conflict’s most bitterly contested legacy, having been met by the
Turkish authorities with 100 years of silence and denial. For surviving
Armenians and their descendants, the genocide became a central marker of
their identity, the psychic wounds passed through generations.
“Armenians
have passed one whole century, screaming to the world that this
happened,” said Gaffur Turkay, whose grandfather, as a young boy,
survived the genocide and was taken in by a Muslim family. Mr. Turkay,
in recent years, after discovering his heritage, began identifying as an
Armenian and converted to Christianity. “We want to be part of this
country with our original identities, just as we were a century ago,” he
said.
The
100th anniversary will be commemorated on April 24, the date the
Ottomans rounded up a group of Armenian notables in Istanbul in 1915 as
the first step in what historians now agree was a wider plan of
annihilation. Armenians from Turkey and the diaspora are preparing to
gather in Istanbul’s central Taksim Square to honor the dead. They will
also hold a concert featuring Armenian and Turkish musicians.
Similar
ceremonies will be held in capitals around the world, including in
Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, which Kim Kardashian, who is of
Armenian descent, recently visited with her husband, the rapper Kanye
West, to highlight the genocide.
The
Turkish government acknowledges that atrocities were committed, but
says they happened in wartime, when plenty of other people were dying.
Officials stoutly deny there was ever any plan to systematically wipe
out the Armenian population — the commonly accepted definition of
genocide.
Ankara
is not participating in any of the memorials, nor does it appear ready
to meet Armenian demands for an apology. Instead, on the same day of the
genocide anniversary, the Turkish authorities scheduled a centennial
commemoration of the Battle of Gallipoli, an event that helped lay the foundation of modern Turkish identity.
The
anniversary comes after several years in which the Turkish government
seemed to be softening its position. With the flourishing of new civic
society organizations, the government became more tolerant of views of
history that differed from the official one. Last year, President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, in offering condolences to the Armenians, went further than any Turkish leader ever had in acknowledging the painful history.
Yet
as the anniversary has drawn near, the situation has fallen back into
well-established patterns: Turkish denial, Armenian anger and little
sign of reconciliation. Mr. Erdogan has turned combative, embracing the
traditional narrative.
“The
Armenian diaspora is trying to instill hatred against Turkey through a
worldwide campaign on genocide claims ahead of the centennial
anniversary of 1915,” Mr. Erdogan said recently. “If we examine what our
nation had to go through over the past 100 to 150 years, we would find
far more suffering than what the Armenians went through.”
In
a country defined by its divisions, between the secular and the
religious, rich and poor, liberal and conservative, the legacy of the
Armenian genocide is a unifying issue for Turks. A recent poll conducted
by the Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies, an Istanbul
research organization, found that only 9 percent of Turks thought the
government should label the atrocities a genocide and apologize for
them.
Turkey’s
ossified position, so at odds with the historical scholarship, is a
legacy of how the Turkish republic was established after World War I.
Under its founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, society here underwent a
process of Turkification: a feat of social engineering based on an
erasure of the past and the denial of a multi-ethnic history. The
Armenian massacres were wiped from the country’s history, only to emerge
for ordinary Turks in the 1970s after an Armenian terrorist campaign
against Turkish diplomats.
Even
now, Turkish textbooks describe the Armenians as traitors, call the
Armenian genocide a lie and say that the Ottoman Turks took “necessary
measures” to counter Armenian separatism. A room at the Istanbul
Military Museum is devoted to the suffering of Muslims at the hands of
Armenian militants.
“There
clearly were Armenian revolutionaries and rebels who were intending to
side with Russia,” (*) said Thomas de Waal, a historian with the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace who recently wrote a book on the
genocide titled “The Great Catastrophe.” “This is a case of punishing
the whole for the perceived disloyalty of a few.”
Mr. de Waal described the genocide as “collective punishment on a mass scale.”
Many
of the leaders of the new Turkish republic — but not Ataturk — were
primary architects of the genocide, and some grew rich off the
confiscation of Armenian properties.
“It’s
not easy for a nation to call its founding fathers murderers and
thieves,” said Taner Akcam, a prominent Turkish historian of the
genocide.
The
Turkish government, in the run-up to the anniversary, has reverted to
the position that the matter should be subject to further study by
historians, sponsoring a website called lethistorydecide.org.
Armenians
regard this as an insult and a diversion, because it suggests that the
historical record is unsettled. The facts, though, have been documented
through a century of scholarship, relying on Ottoman archives, testimony
in trials that were briefly carried out in Istanbul under Allied
occupation after World War I, and witness accounts from the time.
“It is wrong to claim that there is a historical dispute,” Mr. de Waal said. “The historical facts are well established.”
The facts were also largely known as the events were unfolding. A New York Times headline from Aug. 18, 1915, blared, “Armenians Are Sent to Perish in Desert.” A headline from December read, “Million Armenians Killed or in Exile.”
Even
then, though, the Turks were setting down the language of denial. A
Turk, in a letter to the editor published in The Times in October 1915,
wrote of “so-called” Armenian massacres. It is the same description of
the slaughter used today by pro-government newspapers in Turkey.
The
legacy of the genocide has also long figured in American politics,
through the lobbying efforts of Armenian organizations in the United
States who for decades have pushed for recognition of the genocide.
Presidential candidates, including Barack Obama, have used the word
genocide on the campaign trail. But no sitting president has uttered it,
for fear of disrupting American relations with Turkey.
With
the coming anniversary, Mr. Obama is coming under added pressure to use
the word genocide during his customary, annual statement April 24. That
Pope Francis recently described the massacres as a genocide adds to the pressure on Mr. Obama.
Experts
say Mr. Obama’s decision this year will be complicated by United States
efforts to secure more cooperation from Turkey in the fight against the
extremists of the Islamic State, also known as ISIL or ISIS, in Iraq
and Syria.
Representative
Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, who has joined with other
lawmakers to introduce a resolution to recognize the genocide, said he
was worried that the “fight against ISIS and the necessity of having
Turkish support” would forestall attempts at genocide recognition.
Here
in the largely Kurdish southeast of Turkey, a different narrative — one
of reconciliation, apology and an honest appraisal of a painful past —
is playing out.
The
Kurds, said Cengiz Aktar, a Turkish writer who has challenged the
official Turkish narrative on the issue, “were very much involved in the
genocide.”
“They were the killers,” he said.
And
now they are the ones intent on confronting history. In recent years,
the local Kurdish authorities in Diyarbakir, in southeast Turkey, helped
restore the Sourp Giragos Church, the largest Armenian church in the
Middle East. It has since become a center for local Armenians, who were
raised to believe they were Muslim and Kurdish and are only now
rediscovering their family roots.
“We are trying to pay back what we owe,” said Abdullah Demirbas, the former mayor of Diyarbakir’s old city.
In the absence of a full reckoning with history, clashing narratives have defined separate collective memories.
On
a recent afternoon near the old monastery here, a Muslim woman spoke of
“the awful things the Armenians did to the Muslims here,” and said she
grew up hearing of stories about Armenians killing pregnant Muslim women
in boiling vats of jam.
A
young schoolgirl standing nearby, Zisan Akmese, said that in class,
they never hear of the Armenians. “They teach us about Gallipoli and the
war of the Ottomans in Libya,” she said.
At
the cafe, as the men shared the stories of their community’s past that
were told by their parents, one man raised an issue that is linked to
Turkey’s denial. Recognizing the genocide, he said, could lead to
reparations or compensation for Armenian land taken by the Ottomans. The
man told his friends not to tell a visiting reporter that “this was a
non-Muslim area.”
“They will come and take our land,” he said.
Later,
away from his friends, a 50-year-old man named Behcet Basibuyuk said
that he was of Armenian descent and that his grandmother had survived
the massacres and was taken in by a local Muslim family. Mr. Basibuyuk
said he was proud of his heritage, even though he is often subject to
slurs and insults.
“One
should not measure a person by his origins or religion, but by what
kind of person he is,” he said. “But they don’t do that here.”
"The New York Times," April 16, 2015
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(*) Chunkush (Չնգուշ) in Armenian sources ("Armeniaca").
(**) "There clearly were Russian Armenian revolutionaries and rebels" should be the actual sentence, but neither Turks nor non-Turkish "experts" are willing to understand the existence of the additional word Russian. There were no revolutionaries or rebels in Turkey ready for any rebellion at the beginning of 1915 (except in the forged Ottoman tales), no more than there were elders from Zion writing protocols in the late nineteenth century (except in the forged Russian tales) ("Armeniaca").
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