The New Old World (80 page)

Whatever the immediate outcome of the conflict between them, the latest versions of Islamism and Kemalism derive from the same founding moment as their predecessors, even as each seeks sublimation into Europe. So too do the principal potential obstacles to Turkish entry into the EU. In Turkey, these are generally held to be European racism and Islamophobia, or the prospect of the country's future weight in the European Council as its largest member. Perhaps equally relevant, if less often mentioned, is the calculation that if Turkey is admitted, it will be difficult to refuse entry to Ukraine—not quite as large, but more democratic, with
a higher per capita income; a country which Romano Prodi once explained had as much chance of joining the EU as New Zealand. Such resistances are not to be minimized. But the more intractable difficulties lie within the country itself. Three of these command the rest. They have a common origin in the integral nationalism that issued, without rupture or remorse, from the last years of an Empire based on conquest.

The first, and in theory most pointed, obstacle to entry is Turkey's continued military occupation, and maintenance of a political dependency, in Cyprus. Refusal to recognize a member-state of the European Union, while demanding entry into it, requires a diplomatic sang-froid that only a former imperial power could allow itself. However eager Brussels is to welcome Ankara, the legal
monstrum
of Turkey's position in Cyprus lies still unresolved between it and accession. The second obstacle to ready incorporation in Europe is the domestic situation of the country's minorities. These are not small communities. Kurds number anywhere between nine and thirteen million, Alevis ten to twelve million, of whom perhaps two to three million are Kurds. In other words, up to a third of the population suffers systematic discrimination for its ethnicity or religion. The cruelties visited by the state on the Kurds are well advertised, but the position accorded by society to Alevis—often viewed as atheists by the Sunni majority—is even lower. Neither group forms a compact mass, subject to uniform ill-treatment. There are now more Kurds in the big cities than in the south-east, many of whom no longer speak Kurdish, and are intermarried with Turks,
⁷¹
while Alevis, concentrated only in a single mountain enclave, are otherwise dispersed throughout the land. But that neither comes near the equality of rights and respect which the Copenhagen criteria of the EU nominally enjoin is all too obvious.

Finally, there is the Armenian genocide, its authors honoured in streets and schools across the country, whose names celebrate the murderers. Talat: a boulevard in Ankara, four avenues in Istanbul, a highway in Edirne, three municipal districts, four primary schools. Enver: three avenues in Istanbul, two in Izmir,
three in occupied Cyprus, primary schools in Izmir, Mugla, Elazig. Cemal Azmi, responsible for the deaths of thousands in Trabzon: a primary school in that city. Resit Bey, the butcher of Diyarbakir: a boulevard in Ankara. Mehmet Kemal, hanged for his atrocities: thoroughfares in Istanbul and Izmir, statues in Adana and Izmir, National Hero Memorial gravestone in Istanbul. As if in Germany squares, streets, and kindergarten were called after Himmler, Heydrich, Eichmann, without anyone raising an eyebrow. Books extolling Talat, Enver and
Ş
akir roll off the presses, in greater numbers than ever.
⁷²
Nor is all this merely a legacy of a Kemalist past. The Islamists have continued the same tradition into the present. If Talat's catafalque was borne by armoured train from the Third Reich for burial with full honours by Inönü in 1943, it was Demirel who brought Enver's remains back from Tajikstan in 1996, and reburied them in person at a state ceremony in Istanbul. Beside him, as the cask was lowered into the ground, stood the West's favourite Muslim moderate: Abdullah Gül, now AKP president of Turkey.

An integral nationalism that never flinched in exterminating Armenians, expelling Greeks, deporting Kurds and torturing dissident Turks, and which still enjoys wide electoral support, is not a force to be taken lightly. The Turkish Left, consistently among its victims, has shown most courage in confronting it. Politically speaking, the ‘generation of '78' was cut down by the military coup of 1980—years of imprisonment, exile or death killing off any chance of a revival of popular attraction or activism on the same scale. But when the worst of the repression lifted, it was this levy that produced a critical culture without equal in any European country of the same period: monographs, novels, films, journals, publishing houses that have given Istanbul in many respects a livelier radical milieu than contemporary London, Paris or Berlin. This is the setting out of which Orhan Pamuk—not exempt from friendly criticism in it—along with other leading Turkish writers, comes.

If there is a blind spot in the outlook of this intellectual Left, it is Cyprus, about which few know much and most say less, an attitude not unlike that of British counterparts towards Northern Ireland. But on the other two most explosive issues of the time, its record has been exemplary. Defence of the Kurds has for decades been at the centre of its imagination, producing one leading writer or director—often themselves Kurds—after another, from Yas¸ar Kemal, Mehmed Uzun or Yilmaz Güney (
Yol
), to such recent films as Handan Ipekçi's banned
Big Man, Little Love
(2001) and Yesim Ustao
ğ
lu's
Journey to the Sun
(2001). As for the fate of the Armenians, it has been the object of a historical conference in Istanbul—cancelled under political pressure at two universities, held at another—a best-selling memoir (now in English: Fethiye Çetin,
My Grandmother
), novel (Elif Shafak:
The Bastard of Istanbul
), iconoclastic reportage (Ece Temelkuran:
Deep Mountain
), and many a column in the press (Murat Belge, in
Radikal
).

But above all, the outstanding work of the historian Taner Akçam has put the realities of the Armenian genocide, and their deep deposits in the Turkish state, irreversibly on the map of modern scholarship. His path- and taboo-breaking study of it was published in Turkey in 1999.
⁷³
A collection of key essays,
From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide,
appeared in English in 2004, and a translation of his first book as
A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility
in 2006. Himself a prisoner, then exile, of the military repression of 1980, Akçam has been repeatedly threatened and harrassed even abroad, where Canadian and American authorities have collaborated with their Turkish counterparts to make life difficult for him. Inside Turkey, the issue of the genocide remains a danger for anyone who speaks of it, as the charges against Pamuk and the killing of Dink—both under AKP rule—make plain.

Outside Turkey, there has long been a school of historians, headed by the late Stanford Shaw, that reproduced the official mythology
of the Turkish state, denying that any genocide ever occurred on Ottoman soil. Bald negationism of this kind has lost academic standing. Later versions prefer to minimize or relativize, in tune with the approach of the Turkish academic establishment, rather than repress altogether the fate of the Armenians. Intellectually speaking, these can now be regarded as discredited margins of the literature, but even such treatment as is to be found in the best historians of modern Turkey working in the West offers a painful contrast with the courage of Turkish critics themselves. In the most distinguished recent authorities, evasion and euphemism are still the rule. In the terse two paragraphs granted the subject in Caroline Finkel's massive 550-page history of the Ottoman Empire, we read that ‘terrible massacres took place on both sides'. As for genocide, the very word is a misfortune, which not only ‘bedevil[s] any wider understanding of the history of the fate of the Ottoman Armenians'—not to speak of ‘Turkish foreign relations around the world'—but ‘consigns Armenia, which borders Turkey . . . to a wretched existence' (
sic
).
⁷⁴

If we turn to Sükrü Hanio
ğ
lu's limpid
Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire
, just out, a single paragraph tells us that ‘one of the most tragic events of the war was the deportation of much of the Armenian population of Anatolia', in which ‘the finer details' of the government's decision that advancing Russian armies must be denied ‘crucial assistance' from ‘Armenian rebels' were unfortunately not observed in practice, leading to the unforeseen consequence of ‘massive loss of life'.
⁷⁵
Andrew Mango's acclaimed biography
Atatürk
is even more tight-lipped. There we are told that ‘Eastern Anatolia is inhospitable at the best of times', and if its Armenians were ‘deported', it was because they were drawn to the Russians and had risen against Ottoman rule. No doubt ‘the Armenian clearances' were ‘a brutal act of ethnic cleansing', but the CUP leaders had a ‘simple justification: “It was them or us” '.
⁷⁶
Any comment? Just a line. ‘The deportations strained Ottoman communications and deprived Anatolia of almost all its craftsmen'. German railroad traffic was going to be strained too.

Even Eric-Jan Zürcher, the Dutch historian who has done more than any other scholar to bring to light the linkages between the CUP underground and Kemal after 1918, could only allow
himself, in his classic
Turkey: A Modern History
, the cautious subjective avowal that while it ‘might be hard, if not impossible' to prove beyond doubt, ‘this author at least is of the opinion that there was a centrally controlled policy of extermination, instigated by the CUP'. That was in 1993. A decade later, in his revised edition of 2004, the same passage reads: ‘it can no longer be denied that the CUP instigated a centrally controlled policy of extermination'.
⁷⁷
The alteration, though its wording has gone astray—denials continue to be heard, from chairs and columns alike—is testimony to the impact of Akçam's work, to which Zürcher pays generous bibliographical tribute, and expresses a welcome shift in what a leading historian of Turkey feels can finally be said. But it would unwise to over-estimate the change. The reason for the pattern of evasions and contortions to be found in so much Western scholarship on Turkey that is otherwise of a high standard lies in the familiar fear of foreign—or expatriate—researchers, in any society where truth is at an official discount, that to breach national taboos will jeopardize access, contacts, friendships, at the limit bar them from the country altogether.

Where awards or consultations are concerned, there is yet greater cause for prudence. Zürcher's later edition marks an advance over his earlier version where Armenians are in question. But where Kurds are at issue, it moves in the opposite direction, forthright statements in 1993—‘Turkey will have to become a binational state, with Kurdish as its second language in the media, in education and in administration. The south-east will have to be granted some sort of far-reaching autonomy with Kurds governing and policing Kurds'—vanishing in 2004.
⁷⁸
Since then, Zürcher has been awarded a Medal of High Distinction by the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and become an adviser to the EU Commission. Scholarship is unlikely to benefit from either honour. Nor are political brokers often brave speakers. It would be wrong to condemn the compromises of Western historians of Turkey, even of such an independent spirit as Zürcher, out of hand. The constraints they confront are real. But the pressures on Turks themselves are much stronger. Greater safety warrants less escapism.

The one signal exception in the field confirms the rule. Donald Bloxham's
Great Game of Genocide
, which came out in 2005, is the work not of an Ottomanist but of a comparative historian of extermination, with no professional connexions to Turkey. Its ill-chosen title gives little sense of the clarity and power of this work, a succinct masterpiece on the killing of the Armenians, illuminating both its national context and its international aftermaths. The treatment of the CUP's genocide by accredited historians in the West forms part of Bloxham's story, but it is the attitude of states that moves centre stage in his account. Of these, as he shows, the US has long been the most important, as the Entente power that never declared war on the Ottoman Empire in 1916–18, and whose high commissioner to Turkey from 1919 to 1927, Admiral Bristol, advocated further ethnic cleansing after it. Since America contained Greek and Armenian communities that needed to be silenced, it was there that the casuistries of later negationism were first developed in the inter-war years, before they had much currency in Europe. By the thirties Hollywood was already cancelling a movie of Franz Werfel's novel on Armenian resistance to massacres in Cilicia, after threats from the Turkish embassy that it was a calumny.

Since 1945 Turkey has, of course, acquired far more importance for the US as a strategic ally, first in the Cold War and now the War on Terror. In the past twenty years, increasing pressure from the Armenian community, now much more salient than in the twenties, and the emergence of an Armenian scholarship that has pioneered modern study of the exterminations of 1915–16 in the West, have made repression of the question more difficult. After previously unsuccessful attempts to get resolutions on it through Congress, in 2000 the House International Relations Committee voted for a bipartisan resolution condemning the Armenian genocide, carefully exempting the Turkish Republic from any responsibility for it. Ankara's response was to threaten trade reprisals, withdrawal of American military facilities in Turkey and risk of violence against Americans in Turkey—the State Department even had to issue a travel advisory—if the resolution were passed by Congress. Characteristically, Clinton intervened in person to prevent the resolution ever getting to the floor. In Ankara, Ecevit exulted that it was a demonstration of Turkish power.