The New Old World (74 page)

The repression, of course, had to be compensated. Once religion could no longer function publicly as common denominator of the nation, the state required a substitute as ideological cement. Kemal attempted to resolve the problem by generating a legendary essence of race and culture shared by all in the Turkish Republic. The materials to hand for this construction posed their own difficulties. The first Turkish tribes had arrived in Anatolia in the eleventh century, recent newcomers compared with Greeks or Armenians, who had preceded them by more than a millennium, not to speak of Kurds, often identified with the Medes of antiquity. As the most casual glance at phenotypes in Turkey today suggests, centuries of genetic mixing followed. A purely Turkish culture was an equally doubtful quantity. The Ottoman elite had produced literary and visual riches of which any society could be proud, but this was a cosmopolitan culture, which was not only distinct from, but contemptuous of, anything too specifically Turkish—the very term ‘Turk' signifying a rustic churl well into the nineteenth century. Reform of the script now rendered most of this heritage inaccessible anyway.

Undaunted by these limitations, Kemalism fashioned for instruction the most extravagant mythology of any inter-war nationalism. By the mid-thirties, the state was propagating an ideology in which the Turks, of whom Hittites and Phoenicians in the Mediterranean were a branch, had spread civilization from Central Asia to the world, from China to Brazil; and as the drivers of universal history, spoke a language that was the origin of all other tongues, which were derived from the Sun-Language of the first Turks.
³⁵
Such ethnic megalomania reflected the extent of the underlying insecurity and artificiality of the official enterprise: the less there was to be confident of, the more fanfare had to be made out of it.

Observing Kemalist cultural policies first-hand in 1936–7, Erich Auerbach wrote from Istanbul to Walter Benjamin: ‘the process is going fantastically and spookily fast: already there is hardly anyone who knows Arabic or Persian, and even Turkish texts of the past century will quickly become incomprehensible'. Combining ‘a renunciation of all existing Islamic cultural tradition, a fastening onto a fantasy “ur-Turkey”, technical modernization in the European sense in order to strike at the hated and envied Europe with its own weapons', it offered ‘nationalism in the superlative with the simultaneous destruction of the historic national character'.
³⁶

Seventy years later, a Turkish intellectual would reflect on the deeper logic of this process. In an essay of unsurpassed power, one of the great texts in the world's literature on nationalism, the sociologist Ça
ğ
lar Keyder has described the desperate retroactive peopling of Anatolia with ur-Turks in the shape of Hittites and Trojans as a compensation mechanism for its emptying by ethnic cleansing at the origins of the regime. The repression of that memory created a complicity of silence between rulers and ruled, but no popular bond of the kind that a genuine anti-imperialist struggle would have generated—the War of Independence remaining a small-scale affair, compared with the traumatic mass experience of the First World War. Abstract in its imagination of space, hypomanic in its projection of time, the official ideology assumed a peculiarly ‘preceptorial' character, with all that the word implies. ‘The choice of the particular founding myth
referring national heritage to an obviously invented history, the deterritorialization of “motherland”, and the studious avoidance and repression of a shared recent experience, rendered Turkish nationalism exceptionally arid'.
³⁷

Such nationalism was a new formation, but the experience that it repressed tied it, intimately, to that out of which it had grown. The continuities between Kemalism and Unionism, plain enough in treatment of the Kurds under the Republic, were starker still in other ways. For extermination of the Armenians did not cease in 1916. Determined to prevent the emergence of an Armenian state in the area awarded it—costlessly, on paper—by Wilson in 1920, Kemal's government in Ankara ordered an attack on the Armenian Republic that had been set up on the Russian side of the border in the Caucasus, where most of those who had escaped the killings of 1915–16 had fled. In a secret telegram its foreign minister instructed Kazim Karabekir, the commander charged with the invasion, to ‘deceive the Armenians and fool the Europeans', in carrying out the express instruction: ‘It is indispensable that Armenia be politically and physically annihilated'.
³⁸
Soviet historians estimate 200,000 Armenians were slaughtered in the space of five months, before the Red Army intervened.

This was still, in its own fashion, in time of war. Once peace came, what was the attitude of the Turkish Republic to the original genocide? To interested foreigners, Kemal would deplore, usually off the record, the killings as work of a tiny handful of scoundrels. To its domestic audience, the regime went out of its way to honour the perpetrators, dead or alive. Two of the most prominent killers hanged in 1920 for their atrocities by the tribunals in Istanbul were proclaimed ‘national martyrs' by the Kemalist Assembly, and in 1926 the families of Talat, Enver,
Ş
akir, and Cemal were officially granted pensions, properties and lands seized from the Armenians, in recognition of services to the country. Such decisions were not mere sentimental gestures. Kemal's regime was packed, from top to bottom, with participants in the murders of 1915–16. At one time or another his ministers of foreign affairs and of the interior;
of finance, education and defence; and of public works, were all veterans of the genocide; while a minister of justice, suitably enough, had been defence lawyer at the Istanbul trials.
³⁹
It was as if Adenauer's cabinets had been composed of well-known chiefs of the SS and the Sicherheitsdienst.

What of Kemal himself? In Gallipoli till the end of 1915, he was posted to Diyarbakir in the south-east in the spring of 1916, after the region had been emptied of Armenians. He certainly knew of the genocide—someone in his position could hardly have been unaware of it—but played no part in it. How he would have acted had he been in the zone at the time is impossible to guess. After the event, it is clear that he regarded it as an accomplished fact that had become a condition of the new Turkey. In this he was like most of his countrymen, for the elimination of the Armenians in Anatolia, who were at least a tenth of the population, unlike that of the Jews in Germany, who were little more than 1 per cent, was of material benefit to large numbers of ordinary citizens, who acquired lands and wealth from those who had been wiped out, as from Greeks who had been expelled, another tenth of the population. Kemal himself was among the recipients of this vast largesse, receiving
gratis
villas abandoned by Greek owners in Bursa and Trabzon, and the mansion on the hill of Çankaya that became his official residence as head of state in Ankara. Originally the estate of an Armenian family, there the presidential palace of the Republic stands today, it too planted on booty from the genocide.

Yet between taking part in a crime, and gaining from one, there is a difference. Kemal was one of history's most striking examples of ‘moral luck', that philosophical oxymoron out of which Bernard Williams made a Delphic grace. By accident of military appointments, his hands were clean of the worst that was committed in his time, making him a natural candidate for leadership of the national movement after the war. Personally,
he was brave, intelligent and far-sighted. Successful as a military commander, he was formidable as the builder of a state. Bold or prudent as the occasion required, he showed an unswerving realism in the acquisition and exercise of power. Yet he was also moved by genuine ideals of a better life for his people, conceived as entry into a civilized modernity, modelled on the most advanced societies of the day. Whatever became of these ideals in practice, he never turned on them.

Ends were one thing, means another. Kemal's regime was a one-party dictatorship, centred on a personality cult of heroic proportions. Equestrian statues of Kemal were being erected as early as 1926, long before monuments to Stalin could be put up in Russia. The speech he gave in 1927 that became the official creed of the nation dwarfed any address by Khrushchev or Castro. Extolling his own achievements, it went on for thirty-six hours, delivered over six days, eventually composing a tome of six hundred pages: a record in the annals of autocracy. Hardened in war, he held life cheap, and without hesitation meted out death to those who stood in his way. Kurds fell by the tens of thousands; though, once forcibly classified as Turks, they were not extirpated. Communists were murdered or jailed, the country's greatest poet, Nâzım Hikmet, spending most of his life in prison or exile. Kemal was capable of sparing old associates. But Unionists who resisted him were executed, trials were rigged, the press was muzzled. The regime was not invasive, by modern standards, but repression was routine.

It is conventional, and reasonable, to compare Kemal's rule with the other Mediterranean dictatorships of his day. In that wan light, its relative merits are plain. On the one hand, unlike Salazar, Franco or Metaxas, Kemal was not a traditional conservative, enforcing reactionary moral codes in league with the Church, an enemy of progress as the time understood it. He was a resolute modernizer, who had not come to power as a defender of landlords or bankers. For him, the state was everything, family and religion nothing, beyond discardable backstops. At the same time, unlike Mussolini, who was a modernist too—one from whom he took the penal code under which Turkey still suffers—he was not an expansionist, hoping to build another empire in the region. Recovery of so much more territory than had seemed likely in 1918 was sufficient achievement in itself, even if Turkish
borders could still be improved: one of his last acts was to engineer the annexation of Alexandretta, with the collusion of a weak government in Paris. But the imperial bombast of a New Rome was precluded: he was a seasoned soldier, not an adventurer, and the fate of Enver was too deeply burnt into him. Nor, of course, did Kemal stage mass rallies, bombard the nation with speeches on radio, go in for spectacular processions or parades. There was no attempt at popular mobilization—in this, Turkey was closer to Portugal or Greece than Italy. None was needed, because there was so little class conflict to contain or suppress.

But just because his regime could dispense with a mass basis, Kemal was capable of reforms that Mussolini could never contemplate. In 1934 Turkish women were given equal voting rights, a change that did not come in Italy or France till 1945, in Greece the mid-fifties, in Portugal the mid-seventies. Yet here too the limits of his cultural revolution showed: 90 per cent of Turkish women were still illiterate when he died. The country had not been transformed into the modern society of which he had dreamt. It remained poor, agrarian, stifled rather than emancipated in the grip of the Father of the Turks, as he styled himself in the last years of his life.

By the end Kemal probably knew, at some level, that he had failed. There can be no certainty about his last years, because so much about his life remains a closely guarded secret of state. Only surmises are possible. What is clear is that he had never liked the administrative routines of rule, and from the late twenties delegated day-to-day affairs of government to a mediocre subordinate, Ismet later called Inönü, who looked after these as premier, freeing Kemal to devote himself to his plans, pleasures and fancies in the salons of Çankaya or the cabarets of the Ankara or Pera Palace Hotels. There he summoned colleagues and cronies for sessions of all-night gambling or rousting, increasingly detached from daylight realities. In these flickering conclaves, Kemal shared a predilection with Stalin and Mao—all three, at the end, nocturnal rulers, as if tyranny requires the secrecy of the dark, and reversal of the order of hours, to bind its instruments to it. Nor did similarities stop there. If Kemal's style of detachment from government resembled Mao's—in his case too, it was a distance that did not preclude tight attention to big political operations: the crushing of Dersim or the Anschluss in Alexandretta—the fantastic theories of language that occupied his mind had their counterpart in the linguistic pronouncements
of Stalin's decline. All three, as they withdrew from the day, ended by suspecting those who had to live by it.

But in the taxonomy of dictators, Kemal stands apart in one unusual respect. When Politburo members assembled at Stalin's villa, liquor was poured throughout the night; but the general secretary himself was careful to keep control of his consumption, the better to force his entourage to lose theirs, with the chance of revealing themselves in their cups. Kemal's sessions were more genuine revelry. He had always been a heavy drinker, holding it well in debonair officer fashion. But in his final years,
raki
took its toll of him. Normally, absolute power is an intoxicant so much stronger than all others that alcohol, not infrequently shunned altogether, is at most only a tiny chaser. But in Kemal, perhaps because some scepticism in him—an underlying boredom with government—kept him from a full addiction to power, continual drinking became alcoholism.

Once pleasures of the will yielded to pleasures of the flesh, women were the other obvious consolation, of which Kemal did not stint himself. But they were no shield against his solitude; he was at ease only with men. In habits a soldier formed by a career in the barracks, he would have liked to move with grace in mixed society, that symbol of Western civility ever since
Lettres persanes
, but was too crude for it. A brief marriage to the Western-educated daughter of a wealthy merchant lasted little more than a year. Thereafter, random connexions and incidents followed, sometimes involving foreigners. A reputation for increasingly reckless behaviour developed. Adoptive daughters, guarded—a less up-to-date touch—by a black eunuch, multiplied. Towards the end, photographs of Kemal have something of the glazed look of a worn
roué
: a general incongruously reduced to a ravaged lounge lizard, terminal blankness nearby. Stricken with cirrhosis, he died in late 1938, at the age of fifty-seven.