Turkish still refuses to confront its past
By FATMA MÜGE GÖÇEK
Friday, June 3, 2005 Page A21
Last week was supposed to mark the opening of an unprecedented Turkish
conference on the issues surrounding the killing of Armenians during the
First World War. Organized at Istanbul's Bosporus University, the
three-day event was intended to provide a platform to academics to
question Turkey's official view of the 1915 killings. It also would have
showcased a new open approach by Turkish authorities, eager to show the
kind of freedom of expression that the European Union expects of
prospective members.
The conference never took place.
In the days leading up to the event, pressure was put on organizers to
include scholars who would defend Turkey's official state view -- which
denies that the killings were genocide and rejects estimates that 1.5
million Armenians were massacred.
The more the university organizers resisted any such intervention, the
more the pressure mounted, with the conference ultimately being described
as "detrimental to the interests of the Turkish state and
nation."
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Turkish Justice Minister Cemil Cicek condemned the gathering as
"treason" and "a stab in the back of the Turkish
people." University officials had little choice but to
"postpone" the event.
It is apparent that the government feels threatened by the significant
segment of the Turkish population who are increasingly determined to face
the long-standing issue of the Armenian question in a way that counters
the official Turkish thesis.
This official view is predicated on a Turkish nationalism that perceives
all existing interpretations of the Armenian issue as either for, or
against, the interests of Turkey. Because the conference participants did
not sanction the official thesis, the Turkish government characterized the
participants as rabble-rousers.
The Turkish state is unable to come to terms with its past because its
national identity is predicated upon the rejection of that particular
past. Advocating the nationalist ideology that the contemporary Turkish
state was built upon the ashes of the Ottoman Empire through the War of
Independence fought between 1919-1922, the Turkish state has always argued
that the nation had to look forward and not back into its past, especially
not into the period before 1919 that is considered to be the birth year of
the Turkish nation. The alphabet reform in 1928, when the official script
was changed from Arabic to the Latin script, further alienated the Turks
from their own history. Given the dearth of historical knowledge, Turkish
society could not help but accept the official thesis on the Armenian
issue as historical reality.
With more scholars delving into that past to generate their own
interpretations, the state thesis began to lose ground. The state efforts
to cancel the Istanbul conference comprise what I hope is the last attempt
to salvage the dominance of the Turkish official state thesis.
Turkey's possible membership in the European Union is an underlying reason
why debate of the Armenian issue is becoming increasingly prominent. The
EU advocates the recognition and protection of the rights of all
minorities. Among such minorities that currently exist in Turkey, the
tragedy that befell the Armenians before, during and after 1915, is the
most dramatic, and
the one that needs to be most
addressed and recognized by
Turkish society and the state. Such recognition necessitates an awareness
of minority rights and a public commitment to protect them.
Yet, such a recognition would undermine the Turkish state's control over
the public sphere. The unwillingness of the Turkish state in general, and
the military and the political parties in particular, to relinquish that
control over society has generated this crisis. This state unwillingness
translates into a nationalist stand that portrays European standards of
human rights as inherently destructive and debilitating. All advocates of
such rights within Turkish society likewise end up branded as subversive
elements in service of either Europe or the United States or both.
The chances of Turkey joining the European Union are diminished without a
state commitment to protect the rights of its citizens. In the meanwhile,
however, recent developments in Turkish society such as the liberalization
of the economy and the privatization of mass communication have generated
an increasingly conscious and vocal public sphere that is willing to take
issue with the current nationalist stand of the state. If the current
government utilizes its enhanced communication with Turkish society -- if
it forms, in particular, alliances with the liberal academics and public
intellectuals to develop a new democratic, multicultural vision for Turkey
-- then the Turkish state could overcome this quagmire.
Fatma Müge Göçek, associate professor of sociology at the
University of Michigan, was an organizer of the cancelled Turkish-Armenia
conference.ey
