From opening to Armenia to the opening of the memory

by Ayse Hur

Published: Thursday September 17, 2009

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The Turkish original of the following article appeared in Taraf on September 6. We present an English translation by Arutun Maranci with the kind permission of the author.

While the wave of excitement for the steps taken by the government for a "Kurdish Opening" continues, an "Armenian Opening" initiative has started. In my view the most interesting headline concerning these two protocols, neither of which is yet in force, are the plans for the establishment of a historical commission. The commission is supposed to investigate claims of genocide, which are called "alleged" by the newspapers. We read in Taraf on September 4, 2009, Taner Akçam's views voncerning this subject. Answering Yildiray Ogur's questions, Mr. Akcam said that it is necessary to separate normalization of the relations from "reconciliation."

The historical commission

In the same article, Mr. Akçam recalled that for 90 years, "Turkey claimed that there were no Kurds, and that these people were really Turks who happened to live in the mountains. Telling Kurds today, ‘Let's form a commission and study the problem scientifically, and if the commission determines that Kurds do exist, we'll move forward from there,' makes about as much sense as saying, ‘We will accept the decision of a commission formed for the purpose of making a decision on the events of 1915.'"

Mr. Akçam also argues that scholars already know the answer to the question. Scholars may already "know"; nevertheless I want to add my views about this historical commission that has yet to be established. In these pages in the summer of 2008, I had presented a summary of Turkish-Armenian relations from the 1900s through 1990. I continue here where I had left off.

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From the beginning of the republic to this day, history has been disseminated as a project to develop national identity, and the authoritarian state model was understood to be in a natural relationship with that national identity, constituting a logical extension of it. The first requirement for the dissemination of history was that it be a "clean and honorable" history. For that purpose, the myth was created of a Turkish race that has remained pure throughout Anatolian history - despite the wholesale assimilation of other races. However, on this subject there were two different periods. Before 1975-85, before ASALA terrorism and parliamentary genocide resolutions, the schoolbooks would briefly mention Armenians as subjects in the distant past, without making disparaging remarks.

Owning Anatolia

For example, the capture by the Seljuks of Ani, the capital city of the Armenian Bagratid Kingdom, and the wars between the Seljuks and the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, which existed in the Adana region during the 12th to14th centuries, was sometimes presented in belittling terms, sometimes ignored, and sometimes treated as if there had been no conflict. In some cases these kingdoms were portrayed as tiny, and in others, the territory of the kingdom was made ambiguous. In some cases, the territories were stated to be lying outside of Anatolia, and in others, the lands where the Armenians lived were said to have been inhabited earlier by Oguz, Pechenek, and Kipchak tribes. In this way it was implied that the Armenians had no historical claims in Anatolia.

An interesting phenomenon that shows the cohesive force of the Armenian taboo among the intellectual class was the "Blue Anatolia" movement led by Sabahattin Eyuboglu, Azra Erhat, and "The Fisher of Halicarnassus" Cevat Shakir. A new breath was given by the movement to the slogan "Anatolia is ours, not because we conquered it, but it is ours because it was ours" and thereby the pagan, Christian, and Muslim history of Anatolia was offered as a continuum. Accordingly, Turkish was the final stage of the 72 languages spoken earlier, and Turkishness was a version of humanistic thought.

However, the name of Armenians was absent among these people and civilizations that constituted us at present. (The same tendency was shown by Yashar Kemal in 1992. In a speech about Cilicia, he discusses the Hittite and Byzantine past of the city of Anavarza but omits its Armenian past, whereas Anavarza was the capital city of the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia from 1100s to 1375 and it is impossible that Yashar Kemal did not know this.)

Esat Uras's book

Beginning with 1980, a radical change took place, and the subject of the Armenian Question entered the schoolbooks. The text was based on a 1953 book, The Armenian Question: Nine questions, Nine Answers, by Ahmet Esat Uras, who had participated in the Unionist movement and had played an active role in the 1915 deportations. The book had been of great interest to the Foreign Ministry upon its publication; it had been reprinted several times and had been translated into foreign languages. According to the book, Armenians, who had merged with Turkish culture and had lived a "happy" life in the Ottoman period, had suddenly taken a hostile attitude to the Turks. After offering the 1894-1896 Urfa and Sasoun and the 1909 Adana events as examples of this enmity, the Armenian deportations of 1915-17 were characterized to be in defense to these events. Later, the views of Esat Uras inspired other writers and new books were published. Finally the "official view" was put in history books.

An essay contest

On June 14, 2002, the Training and Education Committee of the Ministry of National Education decided to train teachers on how to address these matters in the schools. The decision was announced in the newspapers in August 9, 2002, under the heading, "The position of the state regarding the allegations of an Armenian Genocide, the establishment of a Pontus Greek State, and the Genocide of Christian Assyrians will be given in school books." The implementation of the decision was to begin in the 2002-2003 school year.