Fehim Tastekin
During the days when Turkey still hoped to
join the European Union, its people were becoming willing to question
their ethnic and religious ancestry. Since then, the country has
reverted to a time when people were disgraced and denigrated, with the
government’s blessings, as “crypto-Armenians."
Hrant Dink was the editor of the Armenian-language newspaper Agos in 2004 when he wrote that Sabiha Gokcen,
the first female military pilot of the Turkish Republic, was of
Armenian parentage. Because of this and other articles he penned, Dink
found himself the subject of investigation by the Justice Ministry. He
was assassinated in 2007 for reasons thought to be related to his strong support for Armenian causes.
There were two main reasons for all this secrecy: to conceal that
scores of Armenians, Syriacs, Greeks and Jews had converted to Islam,
and to avoid any debate about "Turkishness.” Its definition, “anyone who
is attached to the Turkish state as a citizen," was enshrined in the
constitution as part of the philosophy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the
founding father of the Turkish Republic and its first president.
For a long time, the official policy was that Turks formed a
cohesive ethnic identity in Turkey. But less than two weeks ago, on Feb.
8, population registers were officially opened to the public via an
online genealogy database. The
system crashed quickly under the demand. Some people who had always
boasted of their "pure" Turkish ancestry were shocked to learn they
actually had other ethnic and religious roots.
On the darker side, comments such as “Crypto-Armenians, Greek and Jews in the country will now be exposed” and “Traitors will finally learn their lineage” became commonplace on social media.
Genealogy has always been a popular topic of conversation in Turkish
society, but also a tool of social and political division. Families
often acknowledged in private that their lineage was Armenian or that a
long-dead relative was a convert to Islam, but those conversations were
kept secret. Being a convert in Turkey carried a stigma that could not
be erased.
Ethnic Armenian columnist Hayko Bagdat told Al-Monitor, “During the
1915 genocide, along with mass conversions, there were also thousands of
children in exile. Those who could reach foreign missionaries were
spirited abroad. Some were grabbed by roaming gangs during their escape
and made into sex slaves and laborers. The society is not yet ready to
deal with this reality. Imagine that a man who had served as the
director of religious affairs of this country [Lutfi Dogan] was the brother of someone who was the Armenian patriarch [Sinork Kalustyan].”
He went on, “Kalustyan, who returned to Turkey from Beirut in 1961,
was remembered as a saint in the Turkish Armenian Patriarchate and as
someone who had served in the most difficult times after 1915. During
the genocide, his mother sent the children away and converted to Islam.
Later she married [a man called] Dogan, who was of high social
standing, and had two girls and a boy. The boy was Lutfi Dogan. When the
mother, who was then with the Nationalist Action Party branch in
Malatya province, died, his uncle came in priest garb from Beirut to
attend the funeral. Nobody could say anything.”
The mindset of society was starkly clear when President Recep Tayyip Erdogan once complained, “We are accused of being Jews, Armenians or Greeks.”
There were those who feared that data obtained from population
registers could be used to stigmatize the famous and used for political
lynching campaigns. After the database went down, they spoke out against
its restoration. One of them was Tayfun Atay, a columnist for Turkey’s
daily Cumhuriyet.
“I was advised in a friendly manner not to admit that I am a
Georgian. That was the lightest form of pressure. What about those
who risk learning they are of Armenian ancestry or a convert? Just
think: You think you are a red-blooded Turk but turn out to be a
pure-blood Armenian. Imagine the societal repercussions,” he wrote Feb. 12.
As the debate raged, the system suddenly came back online Feb. 14.
Many Turks are questioning the timing of making this information available.
“If they had done this a few years ago when we were [becoming more
tolerant], conspiracy theories would not have been as strong as today,
when the state behaves as though we are in a struggle for existence.
This is how Turkey reinvigorates the spirit of the Independence War” to
inspire patriotism and pro-government thinking, journalist Serdar Korucu
told Al-Monitor.
Those who oppose the system fear that a society already in a morass
of racism will sink into it even further. Others, however, say that
though reality might be shocking, couldn’t it be useful in eradicating
racism?
“Yes, definitely. Everyone in Turkey is curious about their ancestry.
That is a fact,” Korucu responded. “Why is facing reality so hard?" He
said of the Sabiha Gokcen story, "That turned the country upside down."
Korucu believes data confidentiality is essential to prevent
population registers from being misused as instruments of political
defamation, but warned, “The state organs already know everything about
us."
In 2013, Agos reported that the government was secretly coding minorities
in population registers: Greeks were 1, Armenians were 2 and Jews were
3. The covert classification of religious minorities was met with wide
outrage.
"What's worse is these facts emerge when it is time for a young man
for report to military conscription. In short, there are those who know
us better than we do. So why not tell us about it?” Korucu asked.
“Population registers are dangerous. That is why Hrant Dink was
murdered," the columnist Bagdat noted. "The director of the Genocide
Museum in Yerevan told a delegation from Turkey [about] the three
most-discussed issues by those who were able to escape. Armenians first
tell us about the Muslims who helped them escape the genocide, then the
Armenians who betrayed them and only then do they narrate their
catastrophe. If we make public the names of Armenians who were forced to
convert to Islam, their grandchildren will be in danger today.”
He added, “This is how the situation is after 100 years: The Turkish
state asked us to accept being Turks. Fine, let me say I am a Turk. Will
I be given a public job? No. When I say, ‘No, I am an Armenian,’ I am
treated as a terrorist. Nothing has changed. Opening of the population
registers means nothing to me. How can we forget Yusuf Halacoglu,
the director of the Historical Society of Turkey in 2007, who had
bluntly threatened, ‘Don’t make me angry. I have a list of converts I
can reveal down to their streets and homes.’ These words, by this man
who later became a politician in the Nationalist Action Party, were a
threat to Turkish politics.”
Is the information in the now publicly accessible registers complete?
Another ethnic Armenian, journalist Yervant Ozuzun, has doubts. ”We
don’t know if anything changed. We know ethnic origins were marked with
different codes in the register. We as Armenians were code No. 2. Has
this changed? I don’t think so."
Government officials aren't saying one way or the other.
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