Erik Jan Zürcher
On the occasion of the centenary of the
Armenian genocide someone like me, who sees himself as a historian of
Turkey in the twentieth century, has to speak out.
In
the first place, there are moral and ethical reasons why this is so.
Historians of the late Ottoman Empire and Turkey in the twentieth
century have a special responsibility, because we have been part of the
fabric that maintained the silence for so long. We cannot allow a
situation to continue such as I knew it when I was a student and a young
university teacher in the nineteen seventies and eighties, when –in
spite of the fact that outside our field the genocide had been an object
of historical research for 50 years– we were barely aware of what had
happened in 1915. Our textbooks only mentioned it as a footnote to
history, if at all, and never defined it as a genocide. Our teachers
never discussed it.
The book was well received,
but a friend of mine translated a review in an Armenian journal for me.
That, too, was appreciative of my work, but it also voiced a criticism.
According to the reviewer my story seemed to play out in an empty
landscape, as if the elimination of the Armenians had not taken place.
At the time my reaction was: ‘Yes, that may be true, but my book was not about that.’
It was only 20 years later, when I started to involve myself more with
the Armenian question in the context of the pioneering Workshop on
Armenian Turkish Scholarship (WATS), that I realised that I had been
wrong. Even the continuity of the political leadership between the
Unionist period and the Kemalist republic, the subject of my book,
cannot be studied without taking into account the fact that this
leadership had been formed in the crucible of 1915-16 and that the
national resistance movement that brought forth the republic was in so
many ways a continuation of World War I –politically, ideologically and
personally. It is true, of course, that the top political and military
leaders of the World War I era had fled the country in 1918 and that
most of them were killed by Armenian agents in the following years, but
still: quite a few of the people involved in the genocide held high
office in the republic, and the shared experience of 1915-16 undoubtedly
created group solidarities.
Involving
oneself with the issue of the genocide is not just a moral issue,
however. Historians of Turkey also have something specific to offer. Now
that the outlines and many of the details of the genocide have been so
well established by historical research based on original documents and
eye-witness accounts, there are, I think, two areas where historians of
Turkey can contribute significantly to a better understanding of it, on
the basis of Turkish sources. The first area is that of the causes and
motives. At this point in time we have come to recognise that both
longer-term developments (the popularity of social Darwinism,
militarism, the issue of reforms and land disputes, mass migration of
Muslim refugees) and short-term ones (the Ottoman loss of the Balkan
War, the outbreak of the World War I, the Ottoman defeat at Sarıkamış
the British landings at Gallipoli and the rebellion at Van) played a
role.
Looking for causes and motives
is important because it helps us better to understand what happened. It
does not affect the issue of genocide, and the fear of some Armenian
scholars that analysing the causes and motives is necessarily
apologetic, is groundless. What is important for the definition of
genocide is intent, the intent to destroy an ethnic or religious group
wholly or in part. The motive behind this intent is not relevant, that
is why the denialist argument that what happened in 1915 cannot be
genocide because Armenians formed a threat is nonsense, even if this
contention were founded in fact.
The
other issue is the way in which modern Turkey, as it emerged after World
War I was shaped by the Armenian genocide. I have looked at the
personal and ideological continuities between the Committee of Union and
Progress and the Kemalist republic, which are considerable. More can
certainly be done in this field, but the issues that now require
attention (and increasingly are also getting it, in Turkey as well) are
the transfer (or theft) of Armenian property and the conversion of
Ottoman Armenians. The first, together with the more regulated takeover
of Greek properties, laid the basis for the emergence of a Turkish
bourgeoisie during the republic and quite a few major corporations of
Turkey have their roots in this process. I am not a lawyer and I have no
idea about the validity of legal claims after a century has passed, but
for a better understanding of Turkey we need to know more about the
transfer of property, for instance through access to the still closed
cadastral archives.
The conversion to
Islam of large numbers of Armenians during World War I is the other big
issue that needs to be addressed. As in any nation-building process,
homogenising the population has been a key feature of modern Turkish
history. This has obscured the fact that many Turks today have some
Armenian roots. Nobody knows exactly how many Armenian women and
children were taken into Muslim families in 1915-16, but even if we
assume a relatively low number of 100,000 and project on that the
demographic trends of Turkey in the twentieth century, that would mean
that something like 2.5 million Turks have at least one Armenian
grandparent. Rediscovering these roots has become popular among
progressive Turks in recent years.
In
other words: the Republic of Turkey not only carries the legacy that it
was founded and ruled to a considerable extent by people who had been
involved in the genocide, it also carries a material and a personal
legacy of the Armenians themselves.
I
am happy to say that not only in the world of Turkish studies in
general, but also among Turkish historians in Turkey the number of those
who are genuinely interested in finding the truth and discussing it
openly, is increasing constantly. Both the ground breaking conference at
Bilgi University in 2005 and the demonstrations following the murder of
Hrant Dink in 2007 have been milestones. At the many conferences that
have been held at the centenary of the genocide, Turkish scholars have
played an important role.
This new
openness is a hopeful sign that reconciliation between Turks and
Armenians is a possibility. That reconciliation cannot be built on
denial, that is obvious, but it also cannot be built on compromise.
Compromise is a politician’s tool and it serves to solve current issues,
but it has nothing to do with an enquiry into historical truth. People
cannot be slightly murdered. Nor can reconciliation be built on the
notion, heavily promoted by the current Turkish government, that all
those who suffered in the horrible years of the World War I in Turkey
should be commemorated together. Many more Germans died in the World War
II than Jews (although some of the Germans were Jews and some of the
Jews Germans) but Chancellor Merkel would not dream of claiming that
these should be remembered equally as victims of their time and
circumstances. ‘Respectfully agreeing to disagree,’ a solution
proposed by some semi-official spokesmen in Turkey, is no solution
either. It implies that recognition and non-recognition of the genocide
are morally and academically equivalent positions. They are not.
Acceptance
of the historical truth will take time, even though the circle of
Turkish historians actively promoting it is increasing. Younger
generations of Turks (which means the vast majority of them as this is a
young country), having been exposed to nationalist state rhetoric in
school, during military service and in the media, are genuinely
convinced that the story of the genocide is a lie. Unlike the first
generation of the republic they no longer consciously deny a truth they
know only too well. Instead, the younger generations of Turks often
place the ‘Armenian lies’ in the context of the conspiracy theories that
are so prevalent in Turkey – they see them as a weapon used by the West
to denigrate and harm the country.
That
makes the task of re-educating the Turkish public and opening up the
debate huge. But the door has been opened and it cannot be closed. Among
Kurdish intellectuals and politicians, too, we see a completely new
readiness to discuss the events of 1915 with an open mind, not only in
Istanbul and Ankara but also, even primarily, in the southeast.
A
broader realisation in Turkey and beyond that genocide is a personal
crime, in other words: that persons can be accused and convicted of
genocide, but not nations or states, might also make the discussion
easier. The current Turkish state and society can rightfully be accused
of denying the genocide, but not of the crime itself. Its perpetrators
are long dead.
Recognition is important not just for the
Armenians, but also for Turkey itself. As Taner Akçam has argued long
ago, the genocide needs to be faced if Turkey is to develop into a more
relaxed, more democratic, more humanist society. Discussion and
recognition can act as a catalyst to remove the blanked of narrow and
increasingly religiously tainted nationalism that lies over this
society. So, let us hope that the centenary is the opening of a new page
in the story of facing the historical truth, in the interest of Turks
as well as Armenians."Research Turkey" (researchturkey.org), May 9, 2015
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