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The Financial Times , UK
31 January 2007 Wednesday 10:18:04 PM GMT
Turkey must loosen the grip of its founding myths
by Mark Mazower
The banners read "We are all Armenians" at the funeral in Istanbul
last week for Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian journalist shot in
January by a young nationalist assassin. "We are Turkish. We are all
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk," nationalist football fans chanted in reply
from terraces across the country, referring to modern Turkey's
founder.
As Dink's tragic death and the polarised reactions to it demonstrate
in the most graphic way, the ongoing reckoning with events now nearly
a century old remains a huge factor in Turkey itself. It is not
merely that, fairly or unfairly, its pursuit of European Union
membership is generating international pressure on the government to
recognise the Armenian genocide. The issue polarises the country
internally as well and raises more acutely than any other issue the
question of how tightly it remains within the ideological grip of its
founding fathers.
In many ways, the government of Tayyip Erdogan has moved further on
this issue than any of its predecessors. While still publicly
insisting the point has acquired an almost theological quality that
the mass murders of 1915-16 were not genocide, it has opened up the
Ottoman archives and even proposed to the Armenian government that
they jointly sponsor an international commission to settle the issue
once and for all. That the Armenians showed little interest may have
been just as well. States generally need to get out of the business
of adjudicating on history, not deeper into it.
Just as French parliamentarians would have done much better recently
to avoid laying down the law on a whole range of past (non-French)
crimes and (French) achievements, so the Turkish government should
not imagine that a bilateral commission of official appointees will
do anything more than continue politicking in another form.
Government committees, parliamentary resolutions and even
state-sponsored anniversaries often possess a powerful
headline-grabbing symbolic charge but, precisely for this reason,
they are a crude means of getting at truth.
The process of coming to historical understanding does not work
through officialdom. It is essentially uncontrollable, often
acrimonious and cannot be wrapped up fast to meet a ministerial
deadline. After 1945, Holocaust scholars enjoyed uniquely favourable
access to documents, survivors and perpetrators. Sixty years on, they
are still debating some fundamental matters of interpretation.
Serious discussion of the events of 1915-16 is at a much earlier
stage. Right now, it seems fairly clear that much of the killing was
centrally organised, and genocidal in scope; denial of this point
simply flies in the face of the evidence. Yet how the killing was
organised is poorly understood. Moreover, most Turkish nationalists
do not so much deny the killings themselves as claim they need to be
seen in the context of an all-out assault on what was left of the
Ottoman empire itself. It is certainly true though Europe still
ignores the unpalatable fact that the expansion of national states,
mostly Christian, was accompanied by the killing and expulsion of
Muslims from the Balkans and Russia. To explain is not to justify.
Yet the escalation of violence in Anatolia after 1914 was certainly
linked to the upheavals that had preceded it. Franker discussion of
the Armenian genocide thus has the potential to open up an entirely
different perspective on Europe's modern history as a whole.
There are many ways the Turkish government can help this along. Its
key responsibility lies in fostering better conditions for such
discussions to flourish. Repealing the now infamous article 301 of
the penal code, under which Dink among many others was convicted,
would be an important step towards ending the legal intimidation of
writers: the government's talk of reforming it is not really enough.
It could do more to support the dissemination of the exciting
research that is emerging from Turkey's flourishing universities.
Above all, it should take a hard look at how the country's history is
taught in schools. Right now, the Kemalist old guard still talks and
acts as though any discussion of the republic's founding myths will
jeopardise the security of the state. This is absurd: Turkey is not
going to crumble if its leaders finally acknowledge the Armenian
genocide. The Turkish army is not suddenly going to be weakened by a
more critical look at what happened 90-odd years ago. The
alternatives right now look pretty stark. On the one hand, an opening
to Europe. On the other, continuing to live in a world where the work
of defining patriotism and historical truth is placed in the hands of
trigger-happy 17-year-olds.
The writer teaches history at Columbia University
31 January 2007 Wednesday 10:18:04 PM GMT
Turkey must loosen the grip of its founding myths
by Mark Mazower
The banners read "We are all Armenians" at the funeral in Istanbul
last week for Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian journalist shot in
January by a young nationalist assassin. "We are Turkish. We are all
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk," nationalist football fans chanted in reply
from terraces across the country, referring to modern Turkey's
founder.
As Dink's tragic death and the polarised reactions to it demonstrate
in the most graphic way, the ongoing reckoning with events now nearly
a century old remains a huge factor in Turkey itself. It is not
merely that, fairly or unfairly, its pursuit of European Union
membership is generating international pressure on the government to
recognise the Armenian genocide. The issue polarises the country
internally as well and raises more acutely than any other issue the
question of how tightly it remains within the ideological grip of its
founding fathers.
In many ways, the government of Tayyip Erdogan has moved further on
this issue than any of its predecessors. While still publicly
insisting the point has acquired an almost theological quality that
the mass murders of 1915-16 were not genocide, it has opened up the
Ottoman archives and even proposed to the Armenian government that
they jointly sponsor an international commission to settle the issue
once and for all. That the Armenians showed little interest may have
been just as well. States generally need to get out of the business
of adjudicating on history, not deeper into it.
Just as French parliamentarians would have done much better recently
to avoid laying down the law on a whole range of past (non-French)
crimes and (French) achievements, so the Turkish government should
not imagine that a bilateral commission of official appointees will
do anything more than continue politicking in another form.
Government committees, parliamentary resolutions and even
state-sponsored anniversaries often possess a powerful
headline-grabbing symbolic charge but, precisely for this reason,
they are a crude means of getting at truth.
The process of coming to historical understanding does not work
through officialdom. It is essentially uncontrollable, often
acrimonious and cannot be wrapped up fast to meet a ministerial
deadline. After 1945, Holocaust scholars enjoyed uniquely favourable
access to documents, survivors and perpetrators. Sixty years on, they
are still debating some fundamental matters of interpretation.
Serious discussion of the events of 1915-16 is at a much earlier
stage. Right now, it seems fairly clear that much of the killing was
centrally organised, and genocidal in scope; denial of this point
simply flies in the face of the evidence. Yet how the killing was
organised is poorly understood. Moreover, most Turkish nationalists
do not so much deny the killings themselves as claim they need to be
seen in the context of an all-out assault on what was left of the
Ottoman empire itself. It is certainly true though Europe still
ignores the unpalatable fact that the expansion of national states,
mostly Christian, was accompanied by the killing and expulsion of
Muslims from the Balkans and Russia. To explain is not to justify.
Yet the escalation of violence in Anatolia after 1914 was certainly
linked to the upheavals that had preceded it. Franker discussion of
the Armenian genocide thus has the potential to open up an entirely
different perspective on Europe's modern history as a whole.
There are many ways the Turkish government can help this along. Its
key responsibility lies in fostering better conditions for such
discussions to flourish. Repealing the now infamous article 301 of
the penal code, under which Dink among many others was convicted,
would be an important step towards ending the legal intimidation of
writers: the government's talk of reforming it is not really enough.
It could do more to support the dissemination of the exciting
research that is emerging from Turkey's flourishing universities.
Above all, it should take a hard look at how the country's history is
taught in schools. Right now, the Kemalist old guard still talks and
acts as though any discussion of the republic's founding myths will
jeopardise the security of the state. This is absurd: Turkey is not
going to crumble if its leaders finally acknowledge the Armenian
genocide. The Turkish army is not suddenly going to be weakened by a
more critical look at what happened 90-odd years ago. The
alternatives right now look pretty stark. On the one hand, an opening
to Europe. On the other, continuing to live in a world where the work
of defining patriotism and historical truth is placed in the hands of
trigger-happy 17-year-olds.
The writer teaches history at Columbia University