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An Open Letter To Aslı Aydntasbas

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  • An Open Letter To Aslı Aydntasbas

    An open letter to Aslı Aydınsbas
    By Aram Yardımyan

    http://www.armenianlife.com/2012/08/02/an-open-letter-to-asli-aydintasbas/
    August 2, 2012

    Every now and again, Turkish ministers and diplomats go on what appears
    to be a search for the historical soul of Anatolia. Calls are made,
    invitations are written, conciliatory public overtures are carefully
    recorded and published, and superfluous historical commissions are
    proposed. All, ostensibly, in the name of repairing relations with
    Armenians. That each of these heart-wrenching gestures happens to
    occur with the approaching of April 24th or some other small threat
    to the feelings of Turkish conservatives, should not betray a small
    amount of calculation on the part of Turkey. In fact, the gestures are
    timed atomically, their sunrises and sundowns, with the events. They
    are designed as means to obfuscation and distraction and the purchase
    of time. And often enough successfully. For hypnosis seems to affect
    thousands of Armenians and liberal-leaning Turkish intellectuals who
    get sucked in each time as if never before.

    In your Turkish-language editorial in July 7th's Milliyet, you
    expressed a hope that Foreign Minister Davutoglu's three-step plan,
    properly implemented, will result in a road toward pan-Anatolian
    reconciliation. Are you, too, affected by this hypnosis, Aslı? Make
    no error in judgment, the man is not sincere, and this three-phase
    plan is nothing more than a bigger carrot dangling from a bigger stick
    that will disappear by magic on April 25th, 2015. It is nothing more
    than a way to ensure indefinite suspension of Armenia's pain, all
    the while looking good and pro-active to the eyes of Hilary Clinton,
    Obama, and other Turkish houseplants.

    If this sounds cynical, go and review the last ten years worth of
    diplomatic overtures and pay close attention to the wording. Each one
    is reservedly conciliatory, highly generalized--often to the point of
    meaninglessness, and ultimately self-serving on Turkey's part. Each is
    an offer for Armenia and its diaspora to come forward to meet under
    the frame of equitable symmetry, and yet the symmetry can never be
    equitable. Each one has its goal to tailoring of a brand new suit for
    Armenia--one too tight to fit any compensation money in its pockets,
    one so shiny as to distract from the deterioration of its religious
    monuments in Anatolia, and one chained to a pocket dictionary of
    acceptable terms for the events of 1915-1917.

    Davutoglu knows well what is at stake. Let him make a concrete proposal
    for reparations, and dispense with abstractions about prodigal children
    coming home, and from these vampiric invitations for fireside chats
    about pain over common foodstuffs. Turkey has actually very little
    to lose by opening the border; or by allowing Armenia access to the
    Trabzon port; by rebuilding and returning our religious sites to the
    Armenian Patriarchate of Istanbul; by compensating the descendants of
    deportees and genocide victims; by returning confiscated properties to
    the descendants of their owners; etc. These are small gestures. Any
    attempt to forge a new language of obfuscation will fail, both among
    Armenians who will accept nothing without the word 'genocide', and
    among Turkish nationalists whose solicitors will smear it down the
    walls of the court.

    Turkey will not be genuinely forthcoming about these things. I do not,
    therefore, even begin to share your optimism in the approach of 2015,
    Aslı. Nor do I hold out for anything from a country who speaks of
    redefining diaspora while Kurds are still by many referred to as
    'Mountain Turks', and in which Article 301 continues to thrive not
    as government conspiracy but as public imperative. Turks everywhere
    still revere Talat and Enver and Nihal Atsız as national heroes. And
    do not forger the 'İttihat' in İttihat ve Terakki. Your country is
    founded on it. Davutoglu simply cannot be taken seriously if he means
    to challenge the İttihatists, and if he is serious, his family has
    my advance condolences.

    And what could he possibly mean by 'kapılarını acacak'? Who is
    invited and to what would they come back? Falsified textbooks, murdered
    newspapermen, throngs of football hooligans chanting the name of an
    assassin (they are all Oguns, indeed), and dead churches. What is
    Akhtamar now? A museum. What do you put in museums? Dead things. Who
    prays at Ani? Only the Nationalist Action Party. We are invited to
    join them in this? Delightful. Why not invite Zulus to a reenactment at
    Blood River? Why not invite German Jews home to celebrate Kristallnacht
    with skinheads?

    Davutoglu is at least right about one thing: Turkey is not Germany.

    Turkey has no Willy Brandt to fall on his knees in the Warsaw ghetto.

    It has only hidebound intellectuals and the own-tail-chasing of nth
    generation İttihatists. They are the meningitis in your country's
    spine. Imagine Germany attempting a presumption as self-serving
    as Davutoglu's 'just memory'. Does 'adil hafıza' mean doubly
    'obfuscation'? Does recognition of the Shoah sideline the losses of
    German life? Why do the Hutus not ask for 'just memory'? Why does
    only Turkey seek to share its culpability over baklava?--These are
    questions I would very much like to see Minister Davutoglu own up
    to. In 1915, the destruction was deliberate and systematic, just as
    it was in Nazi Germany and Rwanda and Kosovo and Cambodia. And in
    none of these places was there an absence of internal threat--real
    or imagined--to the integrity of the state. There is no need for a
    new word to describe the events of 1915-17.

    When the smoke has cleared and the mirrors have shattered, and the
    hypnotist's coin has been stored away, perhaps you will see that your
    foreign minister's overtures are a Queen's Gambit and a thin sham. He
    offers nothing but what he offers himself.

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