Absence of the present: the reburial of Adnan Menderes and the condition of possibility of public memory in Turkey

ABSTRACT

This essay analyzes the status of public memory surrounding the 1990 exoneration and reburial of former Turkish Prime Minister Adnan Menderes, who was executed by a military junta in 1961. During this revision of official memory of Menderes's legacy, a coordination of the concepts state, nation, and military produce the meaning of the reburial ceremony at the same time that these concepts are themselves constituted through the event of the reburial. Approaching this event of public memory as an “inscription” in Derrida's sense, this essay argues that events of public memory simultaneously produce and rely on the conditions of their own possibility.

KEYWORDS:

• Public memory
• Turkey
• Derrida
• military
• deconstruction

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by The Institute of Turkish Studies.

Notes

1. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 39.

2. See: Kendall R. Phillips, “Introduction,” in Framing Public Memory, ed. Kendall R. Phillips (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004); Kendall R. Phillips, “The Failure of Memory: Reflections on Rhetoric and Public Remembrance,” Western Journal of Communication 74, no. 2 (March–April 2010); M. Lane Bruner, Strategies of Remembrance: The Rhetorical Dimensions of National Identity Construction (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002); G. Mitchell Reyes, ed., Public Memory, Race, and Ethnicity (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010).

3. Jie Gong, “Re-Imaging an Ancient, Emergent Superpower: 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, Public Memory, and National Identity,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 9, no. 2 (2012): 191–214.

4. Stephen H. Browne, “Remembering Crispus Attucks: Race, Rhetoric, and the Politics of Commemoration,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 85, no. 2 (1999): 167–87.

5. Barbara Biesecker, “Remembering World War II: The Rhetoric and Politics of National Commemoration at the Turn of the 21^st Century,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88, no. 4 (November 2002): 399.

6. Ibid., 394, 406. Conceptions of public memory as a tool of social cohesion in the face of fragmentation appear frequently. See Ekaterina V. Haskins, “‘Put Your Stamp on History’: The USPS Commemorative Program Celebrate the Century and Postmodern Collective Memory,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no. 1 (February 2003): 1–18; Greg Dickinson, “Memories for Sale: Nostalgia and the Construction of Identity in Old Pasadena,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83, no. 1 (February 1997): 1–27; John R. Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

7. Some scholars avoid some of these presumptions about the present's influence on memory. Bradford Vivian argues that public memory is complicit in producing its own authority: Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010); Nathan Stormer shows how memory work can happen without recognizing itself as such: “A Likely Past: Abortion, Social Data, and a Collective Memory of Secrets in 1950s America,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7, no. 4 (December 2010); and G. Mitchell Reyes focuses on the way that memory operates as a medium for negotiating forms of difference: “Memory and Alterity: The Case for an Analytic of Difference,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 43, no. 3 (2010).

8. This essay relies on evidence from all national newspapers in Turkey from 1986 to 1990.

9. This is a process referred to in Derrida's neologism différance. Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 307–30.

10. Derrida, 315.

11. Ibid. My emphasis.

12. By drawing on Derrida's work rather than on the tradition of constitutive rhetoric in Communication Studies, I highlight the radically indeterminate production of and reliance on the present in public memory, avoiding a predetermined chronology where ideology guides the construction of a “past” (or a “people”) that then comes to exist materially in the present. For instance, Maurice Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73, no. 2 (1987): 133–50.

13. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2010), 3–4. See also, Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 40–56.

14. For the difference between history and memory, see Phillips, “Introduction,” 2.

15. “Official memory” therefore addresses aspects of Phillips's two poles of public memory, “the memory of publics” and “the publicness of memory.” Phillips, “Introduction,” 6.

16. William Hale, Turkish Politics and the Military (New York: Routledge, 1994), 127–28, 144. Erik J. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History (New York: IB Tauris, 2005), 248.

17. George Harris, “Celal Bayar: Conspiratorial Democrat,” in Political Leaders and Democracy in Turkey, ed. Metin Heper and Sabri Sarayı (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002).

18. Zürcher, 251.

19. Tercüman, “Aydın Menderes ‘Üç Şehitler’ konuştu ‘Devlet töreni çok mu görülüyor,’” May 22, 1987.

20. Tercüman, “Menderes İmralı’da kalıyor,” May 28, 1987.

21. All three of these concepts have long scholarly histories that, as Jeffrey K. Olick argues, overlap with themes in nationalism scholarship. Olick, ed., States of Memory: Continuities, Conflicts, and Transformations in National Retrospection (Durham, NC: Duck University Press, 2003). This essay builds on discursive theories of nationalism, approaching the concepts state, nation, and military through their organic emergence in speech rather than presuming their significance as a basis of analysis. Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Craig Calhoun, Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

22. The military has intervened once since 1990, on February 28, 1997.

23. Gerassimos Karabelias, “The Evolution of Civil–Military Relations in Post-War Turkey, 1980–95,” Middle Eastern Studies 35, no. 4 (October 1999): 132; Taha Parla and Andrew Davison, Corporatist Ideology in Kemalist Turkey: Progress or Order? (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004), 232.

24. Carter Vaughn Findley, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity: A History, 1789–2007 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 306; Hale, 94–95. Karpat (140–41) argues that the 1960 coup was nevertheless foreseeable. Kemal H. Karpat, “Military Interventions: Army–Civilian Relations in Turkey Before and After 1980,” in State, Democracy, and the Military: Turkey in the 1980s, ed. Metin Heper and Ahmet Evin (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1988).

25. Hale, 138. Parla and Davison (10ff) contest Turkey's status as a tutelary democracy.

26. Condemnation of the junta was also reflected in the elections of 1961. Karpat, 143.

27. Hale, 186. Hale argues that armed intervention in 1971 was highly unlikely and not actually planned.

28. Ibid., 195, 202–3. Karpat, 147–48; Frank Tachau and Metin Heper, “The State, Politics, and the Military in Turkey,” Comparative Politics 16, no. 1 (1983): 24. Parla and Davison (7) argue that scholarly reference to “Kemalism” uncritically reinscribes official discourse by simplifying it into an “ideology.” I use the term because “Kemalism” also circulates in Turkey as an overdetermined marker of a founding philosophy that must be defended by the military.

29. Hale, 240. Tachau and Heper, 24–25. Karpat, 149–50.

30. Zürcher, 279–80.

31. The legal reforms of 1980–1983 are too numerous to be treated fully here, and include an entirely new constitution. Zürcher, 278–83.

32. Article 2a of the 1983 National Security Council Law, quoted in Gareth Jenkins, Context and Circumstance: The Turkish Military and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 46.

33. Ümit Cizre Sakallioğlu, “The Anatomy of the Turkish Military's Political Autonomy,” Comparative Politics 29, no. 2 (January 1997): 157.

34. Kenan Evren “Preface,” in The General Secretariat of the National Security Council, 12 September in Turkey: Before and After (Ankara: Ongun Kardeşler Printing House, 1982), xi. This text is the official English account of the 1980 coup. Critics of the coup argue that the military was complicit in producing the “chaos,” and therefore contest the “relief” of the public. Karpat, 149.

35. Kenan Evren, “Speech Delivered by General Evren at the War Academy,” September 30, 1980, in 12 September in Turkey, 301.

36. Zürcher, 278.

37. Hale, 262, quoting an NSC decision of 1981.

38. Sakallioğu, 162.

39. Karabelias, 137. The Motherland Party was the only seemingly civilian-controlled party approved to run in the 1983 elections.

40. The law is quoted in: Cumhuriyet, “İtibarların iadesi,” April 18, 1990. Numerous opposition leaders criticized the vague language of the law: Tercüman, “Devlet töreni istiyoruz,” May 29, 1987.

41. Cumhuriyet, “Menderes'e Boğaz'da anıt mezar,” June 1, 1987.

42. Tercüman, “Devlet töreni,” op. cit. note 40. Eskişehir is approximately 60 miles southwest of the Sarıyar Dam.

43. Hürriyet, “27 Mayıs’ın 3 kurbanına ‘itibar’ iadesi,” May 23, 1987.

44. Quoted in: Hürriyet, “Menderes'in itibarı hukuken iade edildi,” April 12, 1990. For the full text of both laws, see Güner Sarısözen, ed., Yassıada'dan Anıtmezar'a, (Ankara: Demokratlar Kulübü Yayınları: 1, 1991), 47–51, 151–52.

45. Günaydın, “İmralı’dan … Anıtmezar'a … ,” September 18, 1990.

46. Günaydın, “Adnan Menderes'in oğlu Aydın Menderes: ‘Devlet, özür diledi,’” September 15, 1990.

47. Ibid.

48. Hürriyet, “Artık Anıtmezar'dalar … ,” September 18, 1990; Cumhuriyet, “Aydın Menderes: İdamlar cinayetti,” September 18, 1990, respectively.

49. Evren continued to reinforce this narrative distinction through the early 1990s in his memoirs. Kenan Evren'in Anıları (İstanbul: Milliyet Yayınları, 1991–1992).

50. Cumhuriyet, “Cenazeler devlet töreniyle anıt mezarda,” September 18, 1990.

51. After completion of this essay, on May 9, 2015 Kenan Evren died at the age of 97. Following his death, the Chief of the General Staff announced a state funeral ceremony for Evren on May 12 at the State Cemetery in Ankara. Evren was sentenced to life in prison in 2012 for his role in the 1980 coup, and all political parties immediately denounced and boycotted the planned state funeral ceremony. Hürriyet Daily News, “Low-Key ‘State’ Funeral for Turkish Coup Leader,” May 12, 2015. Amidst this controversy, on May 14, 2015 the Prime Minister launched a project to open Yassıada (the island on which Menderes was executed in 1961) for diplomatic meetings, tourism, and a memorial. The President of the Adnan Menderes Federation immediately denounced the tourist elements of the project as “disrespectful to the souls of the democracy martyrs.” Today's Zaman, “Turkey Marks 55th Anniversary of May 27 Coup with Condemnations,” May 27, 2015. The memory of Menderes, state funeral ceremonies, and the idea of the military continue to circulate in contemporary Turkey and evidence a continued relational significance.

52. Günaydın, “27 Mayısçılardan orduya teşekkür,” September 18, 1990.

53. Ibid.

54. Nehar Tüblek, “Nehar Tüblek'in gözüyle,” Günaydin, September 20, 1990.

55. Cumhuriyet, “Cenazeler,” op. cit. note 50.

56. One newspaper suggested Menderes did not deserve a state ceremony. Cumhuriyet, “‘Milletten devlete’ Demokrat Parti” [“‘From the national to the state’ Democrat Party”], September 18, 1990; Cumhuriyet, “DP ve parlamenter diktatörlük” [“The DP and parliamentarian dictatorship”], September 20, 1990.

57. Mehmed Kemal, “Oy mirasına oturmak,” Cumhuriyet, September 18, 1990.

58. Halbwachs, 39.

59. Derrida, 315.