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Gunaysu: Turkish Perception Of The Recent US Court Ruling

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  • Gunaysu: Turkish Perception Of The Recent US Court Ruling

    GUNAYSU: TURKISH PERCEPTION OF THE RECENT US COURT RULING
    By Ayse Gunaysu

    http://www.hairenik.com/weekly/2009/08/27 /gunaysu-turkish-perception-of-the-recent-us-court -ruling/
    August 27, 2009

    Among thousands of news items showering down from international
    agencies, none of the Turkish dailies or TV channels skipped the
    news about a U.S. Federal Court of Appeals ruling against Armenian
    demands for unpaid insurance claims. Many headlines revealed a
    hardly concealed note of victory, reporting that the U.S. Court had
    dealt a "big blow" to Armenians. Some of them were a little bit more
    professional, reflecting only a satisfaction: "Court decision to anger
    Armenians." Even the most seemingly "objective" ones used wording
    that presented the issue as a defeat on the part of the "Armenians"
    -not a violation of the rights of legitimate beneficiaries, the
    clients of insurance companies that profited from a government's
    extermination of its own citizens. Even the daily Taraf, considered
    to be waging the most courageous struggle against the "deep state,"
    used the headline: "Bad news to Armenians from a US court" (Aug. 22,
    2009, p.3), a headline that, intentionally or not, reinforces the
    essentialist conception of Armenians widespread in Turkey and reflects
    a cold-hearted pseudo-impartiality -"bad news"!-in the face of an
    infuriating usurpation of one's rights.

    Apart from a handful of people, no one in Turkey, watching the news
    or reading the headlines (often without reading the full texts), knows
    that at the turn of the century several thousands of Armenians in the
    provinces of the old Armenia were issued life-insurance policies,
    with benefits amounting to more than $20 million in 1915-dollars
    still unpaid to the legal heirs of the victims who perished under
    a reign of terror. This is not surprising because this audience is
    even ignorant of the fact that on the eve of World War I, there
    were 2,925 Armenian settlements in the old Armenia, with 1,996
    schools teaching over 173,000 male and female students, and 2,538
    churches and monasteries-all proof of a vibrant Armenian presence in
    the Ottoman Empire. When I tried to explain this to my 83-year-old
    mother, who thought the U.S. court had done something good for Turkey,
    she couldn't believe her ears. She was quite sincere when she asked:
    "Western insurance companies? At that time? In Harput, in Merzifon, in
    Kayseri? Are you sure?" Because she could not even imagine that what
    is now to us the remote, less-developed cities with rural environs
    where pre-capitalist patterns still prevail-places more or less
    isolated from today's metropolitan centers-were once, before 1915,
    rich and developed urban centers, with inhabitants much closer to the
    Western world than their fellow Muslim citizens, in their economic
    activities, social structure, and way of life. Although a university
    graduate (something unusual for a woman in Turkey at that time),
    a person of culture with a real sense of justice in everything she
    does, my mother was brought up in a system of education based on
    a history that was rewritten to reconstruct a national identity of
    pride, and which turned facts upside down. This was the result: an
    "enlightened" individual who knew nothing about how things were in
    her own-beloved-country and what had happened just a decade before
    her birth.

    So, how can one expect my mother to know that Talat Pasha, a member
    of the PUC triumvira and one of the top organizers of the Armenian
    Genocide, had shocked Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. Ambassador to Istanbul
    in 1915, with his audacity when he said: "I wish, that you would get
    the American life insurance companies to send us a complete list of
    their Armenian policy holders. They are practically all dead now and
    have left no heirs to collect the money. It of course all escheats
    to the state. The government is the beneficiary now. Will you do so?"

    The Turkish audience, apart from that handful of people, that
    received the message about the U.S. Court of Appeals ruling against
    the Armenians' right to seek justice, didn't stop to think that this
    was something about one's most basic rights.

    But the reason is simple: National ideology blocks people's
    minds. There is a special meaning attributed to the word "compensation"
    in Turkey. It is believed that recognition will be followed by demands
    of compensation, which will naturally lead to demands of territory. So,
    the reference to "compensation" (to be paid to "Armenians") in these
    reports is directly connected in their minds to Armenians' claim
    to territory.

    This is all about denial. Denial is not an isolated phenomenon,
    not a policy independent of all other aspects.

    Denial is a system. An integrated whole. You don't only deny what
    really happened; in order to deny what really happened, you have to
    deny even the existence of the people to whom it happened. In order
    to deny their existence, you have to wipe out the evidence of their
    existence from both the physical and intellectual environment. Physical
    refers to the 2,925 Armenian settlements with 1,996 schools and 2,538
    churches and monasteries that are non-existent now. Intellectual
    corresponds to my mother's perception of the U.S. Court of Appeal's
    ruling as something good for Turkey.

    I watched a film on TV tonight, Akira Kurosawa's "Rhapsody in
    August," a film about an old lady, a hibakusha (the Japanese word
    for the victims of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
    during World War II) and her four grandchildren. Watching the film,
    I saw people commemorating their dead ones with great respect,
    taking care of their monuments with endless love, raising their
    children in the same spirit, observing Buddhist rituals, praying for
    their losses. The details showing all these were elegantly and very
    impressively depicted. Watching a blind hibakusha gently cleaning
    the marble platform of the monument with great care, I thought of
    Armenians of my country, who are deprived of this very basic right
    to publicly honor the memory of their lost ones. This ban is woven
    into the very structure of Turkish society, because the founders
    of the new Turkish Republic and their successors built a nation
    and successfully put into practice an "engineering of the spirit"
    whereby the people are convinced, made to sincerely believe, that
    such commemorations are a direct insult to themselves.

    The outcome of such engineering, this whole complicated system of
    denial, is very difficult to dismantle. The Turkish ruling elite
    will not recognize the genocide, not in the short-term, not in the
    mid-term. In the long-term, maybe. But how "long" a term this will be
    is something unknown. The dynamic that would step up the process is
    the recognition from below, i.e. recognition by the people-a very slow
    process, but much more promising than an official recognition in the
    foreseeable future. People in Turkey are one by one going through a
    very special kind of enlightenment-meeting with facts, learning more
    about the near history, getting into closer contact with Armenians
    here and elsewhere (for example, meeting and listening to Prof. Marc
    Nichanian speaking in the language of philosophy and literature,
    hearing his words about how meaningless an apology is when what
    happened to Armenians was "unforgivable," about the meaning of the
    "usurpation of mourning" and the "impossibility of representation"
    of what Armenians experienced. More and more stories are appearing
    in the dailies and periodicals in Turkey of our grandmothers and
    grandfathers of Armenian origin who were stripped of their Armenian
    identities, at least in the public sphere. More and more books are
    being published about the genocide, enabling the readers to try and
    imagine what is unimaginable.

    This will turn the wheels of a long process of recognition from below,
    a recognition in the hearts of people that will inevitably interact
    with the process of official recognition-a must for true justice-no
    matter how distant it may be for the time being.
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