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ABSTRACT
It is a commonplace in Genocide Studies to say that ‘Turkey denies the Armenian genocide’. The Turkish state's official policy towards the Armenian genocide was and is indeed characterized by misrepresentation, mystification and manipulation. But when one gauges what place the Armenian genocide occupies in the social memory of Turkish society, even after nearly a century, a different picture emerges. Even though most direct eyewitnesses to the crime have passed away, oral history interviews yield important insights. Elderly Turks and Kurds in Eastern Turkey often hold vivid memories from family members or fellow villagers who witnessed or participated in the genocide. This article is based on interviews conducted with (grand)children of eyewitnesses to the Armenian genocide. The research suggests there is a clash between official state memory and popular social memory: the Turkish government is denying a genocide that its own population remembers.
Notes
1 George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Secker and Warburg 1949), 35.
2 A recent volume dealing with this subject, although a notable exception, does not deal with the treatment of memory by the Young Turk regime itself: Esra Özyürek (ed.), The Politics of Public Memory in Turkey (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press 2006).
3 For two comparative volumes dealing with these themes, see David E. Lorey and William E. Beezley (eds), Genocide, Collective Violence, and Popular Memory: The Politics of Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources 2002); and Nanci Adler, Selma Leydesdorff, Mary Chamberlain and Leyla Neyzi (eds), Memories of Mass Repression: Narrating Life Stories in the Aftermath of Atrocity (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers 2009).
4 Tzvetan Todorov, Mémoire du mal, tentation du bien: enquête sur le siècle (Paris: Laffont 2000), ch. 3.
5 Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989), 12–15; see also Patrick J. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1994), 26.
6 First published: Vasiliĭ Grossman, Zhizn’ i sud'ba: roman (Lausanne: L'Age d'homme 1980); Primo Levi, I sommersi e i salvati (Torino: Einaudi 1986); Milan Kundera, Kniha smíchu a zapomnění (Toronto: Sixty-Eight Publishers 1981).
7 Aleida Assmann, ‘Re-framing memory: between individual and collective forms of constructing the past’, in Karin Tilmans, Frank van Vree and Jay Winter (eds), Performing the Past: Memory, History and Identity in Modern Europe (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2010), 35–50 (41–2).
8 Aleida Assmann, ‘Re-framing memory: between individual and collective forms of constructing the past’, in Karin Tilmans, Frank van Vree and Jay Winter (eds), Performing the Past: Memory, History and Identity in Modern Europe (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2010), 37–8.
9 Aleida Assmann, ‘Re-framing memory: between individual and collective forms of constructing the past’, in Karin Tilmans, Frank van Vree and Jay Winter (eds), Performing the Past: Memory, History and Identity in Modern Europe (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2010), 42.
10 Aleida Assmann, ‘To remember or to forget: which way out of a shared history of violence?’, in Aleida Assmann and Linda Shortt (eds), Memory and Political Change (Basingstoke: Palgrave 2012), 53–71.
11 Sabrina P. Ramet, ‘The denial syndrome and its consequences: Serbian political culture since 2000’, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, vol. 40, no. 1, 2007, 41–58 (54).
12 Nimet Arsan (ed.), Atatürk’ün Söylev ve Demeçleri, 3 vols (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu 1959–64), I, 241. Translations from the Turkish, unless otherwise stated, are by the author.
13 Editorials, Cumhuriyet, 6 and 9 September 1933; Arı İnan, Düşünceleriyle Atatürk (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu 1991), 162.
14 For a study of Turkish-Greek rapprochement after 1923, see Damla Demirözü, Savaştan Barışa Giden Yol: Atatürk-Venizelos Dönemi Türkiye-Yunanistan İlişkileri (Istanbul: İletişim 2007).
15 See Lerna Ekmekçioğlu, Surviving the New Turkey: Armenians in Post-Ottoman Istanbul (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press forthcoming).
16 Anush Hovannisian, ‘Turkey: a cultural genocide’, in Levon Chorbajian and George Shirinian (eds), Studies in Comparative Genocide (New York: St Martin's Press 1998), 147–56.
17 Bedri Günkut, Diyarbekir Tarihi (Diyarbakır: Diyarbekir Halkevi 1937), 150–1.
18 Uğur Ümit Üngör, ‘Creative destruction: shaping a high-modernist city in interwar Turkey’, Journal of Urban History, vol. 39, no. 2, 2013, 297–314.
19 Vahé Tachjian, ‘Expulsion of the Armenian survivors of Diyarbekir and Urfa, 1923–1930’, in Richard G. Hovannisian (ed.), Armenian Tigranakert/Diarbekir and Edessa/Urfa (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda 2006), 519–38; Kerem Öktem, ‘Incorporating the time and space of the ethnic “Other”: nationalism and space in Southeast Turkey in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, Nations and Nationalism, vol. 10, no. 4, 2004, 559–78.
20 Surp Giragos, one of the largest churches in the Middle East, became an object of Armenian diaspora lobbying in the late 2000s. In negotiations with the Kurdish mayor of Diyarbakır (Osman Baydemir), the municipal authorities renovated the church in 2010–11 and reopened it for use on 23 October 2011. For a website commemorating Surp Giragos, see ‘Diyarbakır Ermeni Surp Giragos Kilisesi’, Facebook, 26 October 2011, available at www.facebook.com/SurpGiragosKilisesi (viewed 5 March 2014).
21 Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi Zabıt Ceridesi, period V, session 45, vol. 17 (1937), 7 April 1937, 26.
22 Garabed Kapikian, Eghernapatum Pokun Hayots ev norin metsi mayrakakhaki Sebastioy (History of the Calamity of Armenia Minor and Its Great Capital Sebastia) (Boston: Hairenik 1924).
23 Prime Ministerial decree, 10 June 1934: Başbakanlık Cumhuriyet Arşivi (Republican Archives), Ankara (hereafter BCA), 030.18.01.02/46.49.5.
24 Marie Sarrafian Banker, My Beloved Armenia: A Thrilling Testimony (Chicago: Bible Institute Colportage Association 1936).
25 Prime Ministerial decree, 28 September 1937: BCA, 030.18.01.02/79.82.14.
26 Prime Ministerial decree, 10 February 1949: BCA, 030.18.01.02/118.98.20.
27 Arshak Alboyajian, Badmootiun Hye Gesaria (History of Armenian Kayseri), 2 vols (Cairo: H. Papazyan 1937. Prime Ministerial decree, 31 December 1951: BCA, 030.18.01/127.95.1.
28 Krikor Mkhalian, Bardizagn ou Bardizagtsin (Bardizag and Its People) (Cairo: Sahag-Mesrob Press 1938). Prime Ministerial decree, 10 July 1941: BCA, 030.18.01.02/95.60.3.
29 Franz Werfel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, trans. from the German by Geoffrey Dunlop (New York: Viking 1934).
30 Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005), 204.
31 Prime Ministerial decree, 13 January 1935: BCA, 030.18.01.02/51.3.2.
32 Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution 1933–1939 (New York: HarperCollins 1998), 11–12.
33 Paul du Véou, Chrétiens en péril au Moussadagh! Enquête au Sandjak d'Alexandrette (Paris: Baudinière 1939).
34 Prime Ministerial decree, 25 January 1940: BCA, 030.18.01.02/90.12.7.
35 Ayşe Zarakol, After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2011). Forthcoming monographs will examine the ebb and flow of the Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide from a long-term perspective: Fatma Müge Göçek, Deciphering Denial: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present and the Collective Violence against Armenians, and Jennifer Dixon, Changing the State's Story: Continuity and Change in Official Narratives of Dark Pasts.
36 Anthony D. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1999).
37 Ana Maria Alonso, ‘The effects of truth: re-presentations of the past and the imagining of community’, Journal of Historical Sociology, vol. 1, no. 1, 1988, 33–57 (50).
38 James V. Wertsch, Voices of Collective Remembering (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2002), 70.
39 Dennis Deletant and Harry Hanak (eds), Historians as Nation-Builders: Central and South-East Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1988); Anthony D. Smith, ‘Nationalism and the historians’, in Anthony D. Smith (ed.), Ethnicity and Nationalism (Leiden and New York: Brill 1992), 58–80.
40 Victor Roudometof, Collective Memory, National Identity, and Ethnic Conflict: Greece, Bulgaria, and the Macedonian Question (Westport, CT: Praeger 2002).
41 Günkut, Diyarbekir Tarihi, 26.
42 Günkut, Diyarbekir Tarihi, 27.
43 Günkut, Diyarbekir Tarihi, 144–5.
44 Günkut, Diyarbekir Tarihi, 144–5.
45 For English-language publications, see Roger W. Smith, ‘Denial of the Armenian genocide’, in Israel W. Charny (ed.), Genocide: A Critical Bibliographical Review, vol. 2 (New York: Facts on File 1991), 63–85; Vahakn N. Dadrian, ‘Ottoman archives and denial of the Armenian genocide’, in Richard G. Hovannisian (ed.), The Armenian Genocide: History, Politics, Ethics (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1992), 280–310; Vahakn N. Dadrian, The Key Elements in the Turkish Denial of the Armenian Genocide: A Case Study of Distortion and Falsification (Toronto: Zoryan Institute 1999); Richard G. Hovannisian, ‘The Armenian genocide and patterns of denials’, in Richard G. Hovannisian (ed.), The Armenian Genocide in Perspective (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books 1986), 111–33; Israel W. Charny and Daphna Fromer, ‘Denying the Armenian genocide: patterns of thinking as defence-mechanisms’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 32, no. 1, 1998, 39–49; Stanley Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Cambridge: Polity 2001), 134–5; and Jennifer M. Dixon, ‘Defending the nation? Maintaining Turkey's narrative of the Armenian genocide’, South European Society and Politics, vol. 15, no. 3, 2010, 467–85.
46 Donald E. Miller and Lorne Touryan Miller, Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide (Berkeley: University of California Press 1993); David Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia during World War I (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press 2006), Appendix; Ayşe Gül Altınay and Fethiye Çetin, Torunlar (Istanbul: Metis 2009).
47 The notable exception is Leyla Neyzi: see Hranush Kharatyan-Araqelyan and Leyla Neyzi, Speaking to One Another: Personal Memories of the Past in Armenia and Turkey, trans. from the Armenian by Samvel Simonyan (Bonn: Dvv International 2010); Leyla Neyzi, ‘The secrets of stories: remembering Armenians’, in Zerrin Özlem Biner and Yael Navaro-Yashin (eds), What Is Left Behind? Remnants of Past Inhabitants and Their Place in Turkey's Present (New York: Columbia University Press 2014).
48 The Armenian Genocide, dir. Andrew Goldberg (New York: Two Cats Productions 2006), broadcast on PBS stations, 17 April 2006.
49 My subject position as a ‘local outsider’ (being born in the region but raised abroad) facilitated the research as it gave me the communicative channels at once to delve deeply and draw back at the appropriate moments. It also provided me with a sense of immunity from the dense moral and political field in which most of this research is embedded.
50 For similar problems in Soviet historiography, see Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (London: Allen Lane 2007), xxxv.
51 See also Ramazan Aras, The Formation of Kurdishness in Turkey: Political Violence, Fear and Pain (London: Routledge 2013), 1–12.
52 Interview conducted with A. D. (from Varto district), Heidelberg, 24 November 2009.
53 Interview conducted with M. Ş. (from Piran district), Diyarbakır, 15 July 2004.
54 Interview conducted with Erdal Rênas (from the Kharzan area), Istanbul, 18 August 2002.
55 Interview conducted with K. T. (from Erzincan), Bursa, 28 June 2002 and 20 August 2007, partially screened in the documentary Land of Our Grandparents, dir. Alexander Goekjian (Amsterdam: Zelović Productions 2008).
56 Humans are deeply influenced by several cognitive biases. One of these is the myth or fallacy of the ‘just world’, the belief that injustices happen for a good reason, despite glaring evidence that people suffer without cause. This bias leads people to believe that genocides occur not because perpetrator regimes unilaterally decide to annihilate a group, but because the victims must have done something to deserve it. The just-world myth induces perpetrators to adopt a mindset in which they blame their victims to reduce their own feelings of guilt. For them this is crucially important in order to perpetrate the killings and maintain their own sense of well-being; otherwise the realization of the victims’ humanity and the enormity of the injustice would produce a guilt that would be unbearable. Instead, for self-preservation, they lapse into the irrational cognitive bias of denial and a reinterpretation of the event. James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002), 249–56.
57 Ricardo Hausmann, Laura D. Tyson and Saadia Zahidi, The Global Gender Gap Report 2012 (Geneva: World Economic Forum 2012), 9.
58 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action. Volume 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. from the German by Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press 1987), 136.
59 Konrad H. Jarausch, After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945–1995, trans. from the German by Brandon Hunziker (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2006); Frederick Taylor, Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany (London: Bloomsbury 2011).
60 Richard Jenkins, Rethinking Ethnicity (London: Sage 2008), 132.
61 For a captivating discussion of a similar conflict of memory, see Ilan Gur-Ze'ev, ‘The production of Self and destruction of the Other's memory and identity in Israeli/Palestinian education on the Holocaust/Nakbah’, Studies in Philosophy and Education, vol. 20, no. 3, 2001, 255–66.
62 Donald E. Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller, ‘Memory and identity across the generations: a case study of Armenian survivors and their progeny’, Qualitative Sociology, vol. 14, no. 1, 1991, 13–38.
63 Rachel Anderson Paul, ‘Grassroots mobilization and diaspora politics: Armenian interest groups and the role of collective memory’, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, vol. 6, no. 1, 2000, 24–47.
64 Fethiye Çetin, Anneannem (Istanbul: Metis 2004).
65 Fréderike Geerdink, ‘Lawyer and writer Fethiye Çetin: “My identity has never been purely Turkish”’, 20 May 2006, available on Geerdink's website JournalistinTurkey.com at www.journalistinturkey.com/stories/human-rights/fresh-air_22 (viewed 20 February 2014).
66 Dorian Jones, ‘Armenian quest for lost orphans’, BBC News, 1 August 2005, available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4735171.stm (viewed 20 February 2014); Ariane Chemin, ‘Ma grand-mère turque était arménienne’, Le Monde, 26 February 2007.
67 Crypto-Armenians have even been openly threatened by the Turkish Historical Society, the Kemalist official producer of nationalist historical narratives. Its director, Yusuf Halaçoğlu, went as far as stating that he had in his possession a ‘list’ of names, ‘house by house’, of crypto-Armenians living in Turkey, claiming he would not hesitate to ‘make it public’. Osman Özsoy, ‘Ermeniler neden Aleviliği seçti?’, Radikal, 22 August 2007; Şahin Alpay, ‘Halaçoğlu “maalesef” ırkçılık yapıyor’, Zaman, 25 August 2007.
68 Bekir Coşkun, ‘Ermeni meselem’, Hürriyet, 30 September 2005; ‘500 Bin Kripto Ermeni Var’, Oda TV, 23 September 2010, available at www.odatv.com/n.php?n=500-bin-kripto-ermeni-var--2309101200 (viewed 5 March 2014); Hairenik, 6 January 2011.
69 Laurence Ritter and Max Sivaslian, Les Restes de l’épée: les arméniens cachés et islamisés de Turquie (Paris: Editions Thaddée 2012); Kemal Yalçın, Seninle Güler Yüreğim (Bochum: CIP 2003); Kemal Yalçın, Sarı Gelin: Sarı Gyalin (Cologne: Eylül 2004); ‘İçimizdeki Kripto Ermeniler’, Millî Gazete, 28 December 2005.
70 Quoted in Erhan Başyurt, Ermeni Evlatlıklar: Saklı Kalmış Hayatlar (Istanbul: KaraKutu 2006), 30–1.
71 For a collection of life stories, see Altınay and Çetin, Torunlar.
72 Jennifer M. Dixon, ‘Education and national narratives: changing representations of the Armenian genocide in history textbooks in Turkey’, International Journal for Education Law and Policy, special issue on ‘Legitimation and Stability of Political Systems: The Contribution of National Narratives’, 2010, 103–26.
73 Étienne Copeaux, Espaces et temps de la nation turque: analyse d'une historiographie nationaliste 1931–1993 (Paris: CNRS Éditions 1997).
74 Ayhan Aktar, ‘Diyarbakir 1915: Kötülüğün arkeolojisi’, Taraf, 1 February 2012.
75 Ayşe Günaysu, ‘Toplu mezar Ermeni ve Süryanilere ait’, Özgür Gündem, 7 November 2006.
76 For the official website of the museum, see www.tiem.gov.tr (viewed 20 February 2014).
77 For the situation in Russia, see Nanci Adler, ‘The future of the Soviet past remains unpredictable: the resurrection of Stalinist symbols amidst the exhumation of mass graves’, Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 57, no. 8, 2005, 1093–119.
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Uğur Ümit Üngör
Uğur Ümit Üngör was Lecturer in International History in the Department of History at the University of Sheffield in 2008–9, and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for War Studies at University College Dublin in 2009–10. Currently he is Lecturer in the Department of History at Utrecht University and at the Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD) in Amsterdam. His main area of interest is the historical sociology of mass violence, especially during the fragmentation and collapse of states. His most recent publications include Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property (Continuum 2011) and The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950 (Oxford University Press 2011). In 2013 the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences awarded him the Heineken Young Scientist Award for History. Email: [email protected]