The Long Denied Armenian Genocide

Turkey's carefully forgotten history

Turks, and their history books, still cannot accept that there was
organized mass murder of Armenians between 1915-17. Perhaps that
is because so many of the murderers and looters were also heroes of
the founding of the modern Turkish republic.
by TANER AKCAM *

It would be naïve to suppose that France was motivated by compassion for the Armenians and
their tragic past when it voted, last January, to describe the killing of the Armenians in 1915 as
genocide. As the Turks say often enough, France should first recognize that it has itself been
guilty of genocide or crimes against humanity in Algeria. But questionable French motives
should not be a reason for yet another cover-up of what the ruling Ottoman party did to the
Armenians in 1915-1917.

Many of the Turkish criticisms of France aimed to obscure the facts, rather than dispute a false
charge. A Turkish paper published these words of anger: "Let it be clear to world public opinion:
in the past we punished all the infamous half-castes who, not content with profiting from our
lands, attacked our possessions, the lives and honour of the Turks. We know that our forefathers
were right and, if there were such threats again today, we would not hesitate to do what was
necessary" (1). This angry outburst is not exceptional: works regarded as scientific use similar
expressions.

Why does the word genocide provoke such rage in Turkey? The Turks could, after all, simply
recognize that the massacres occurred but say they were not responsible for them. The founder of
modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, spoke on the subject dozens of times; he condemned
the massacres, which he called infamous, and demanded that those who were guilty be punished.
The leaders of the then ruling Ottoman party, Ittihad ve Terakki (Union and Progress) (2),
who organized the killings were tried in 1926, although they were indicted for different crimes.
Several of them were executed. So Turkey could simply express regret for the crimes against the
Armenians and explain they had been committed by the Ottoman state, not the new Turkish
republic.

In search of identity

One the main obstacles to a public debate is a collective amnesia: the loss of Turkey's
communally shared memory results from the deadening of the Turks' historical awareness over
several decades. Ataturk severed the lines connecting people to their past. Every nation-state, at
the moment of its creation, looks for historical roots on which to found its legitimacy. If it
doesn't find them, it invents them. As French historian Ernest Renan noted, "Forgetting and even
historical mistakes are essential factors in creating a nation" (3). The founder of the young
Turkish republic scrupulously obeyed this rule.

The Turks faced a specific difficulty: over the centuries of Ottoman rule, Islam had gradually
effaced everything to do with Turkish identity from the collective memory. The Turks had to go
back to the pre-Ottoman period to discover their missing identity and roots - passing over 600
years of history in silence.

Through a series of reforms, such as the westernisation of dress codes, they tried to erase the
traces of a recent past that had become undesirable and, with the adoption of the Latin alphabet
in 1928, more or less inaccessible to the younger generation. The collective memory was thus
emptied of much of its content. It was replaced by an official history written by a few authorised
academics, which became the sole recognized reference. Events prior to 1928 and the writings of
past generations became a closed book. The notion of the past was rendered evanescent, and the
limits of memory and historical awareness reduced to no more than people's own personal
experience and that of their closest environment. In these circumstances, how can ordinary Turks
be expected to take the initiative and open a debate on their own history ?

In addition to the absence of historical awareness, there is another, greater reason for the Turks'
behaviour: their history is composed of a series of traumatic shocks. Between 1878 and 1918 the
Ottoman rulers lost 85% of their lands and 75% of the population of their empire. In its final
century, the empire steadily disintegrated: a series of heavy military defeats, interspersed with
the occasional victory, led to unfavourable armistices under pressure from the Great Powers.
This period of uninterrupted wars, which killed tens of thousands, was, for the Turks, an era of
dishonour and humiliation.

The Ottoman elite, crushed by the weight of a glorious past and suffering from a loss of selfesteem,
saw the first world war as a historic opportunity to regain its former grandeur and
recover its national pride. That illusion fast vanished. In the atmosphere of resentment that
followed, the genocide seems to have been revenge against those seen as responsible for this
situation. The Armenians became substitute enemies for the Great Powers and, by implication,
the Christian peoples of the empire.

The Ottoman leaders used the Armenians to settle scores they could not settle elsewhere. That is
why they insisted on presenting the new republic as a renaissance - or even an absolute
beginning. Their leaders did not just purge this period of trauma by rewriting history and
refashioning a new national identity. They also managed to blot out its memory and stifle any
initiative that could impinge on this organised amnesia. This explains the susceptibility towards
anything that touches on the Armenian question. The Turks have not yet been able to construct
an identity purged of the old trauma

The republic implicated

Links between the founding of the republic and the Armenian massacres have also done much to
make the subject taboo. Leading figures connected to the republic have spoken publicly on the
issue. A well-known member of the Ittihad ve Terakki party, Halil Mentese, said: "If we had not
cleansed eastern Anatolia of the Armenian militia who collaborated with the Russians, the
founding of our national republic would not have been possible" (4). At the republic's first
National Assembly, speeches were made on the themes of: "We took the risk of being thought of
as murderers to save the fatherland". Another assembly member said: "As you know, the
question of the deportation was an event that provoked the reaction of the whole world and made
us all seem like murderers. We knew, before we launched this action, that we would be subjected
to the anger and hatred of the Christian world. Why did we allow our name to be mixed up with
the opprobrium of a reputation of murderers? Why did we take on such a huge and difficult task?
Because we had to do what was necessary to preserve the throne and future of our country,
which in our eyes are more precious and sacred than our own lives."

With time, these words affirming with some courage that the republic had been founded on
genocide were superseded by official history: anti-imperialism and respect for the Kuvay-i
Milliye forces (the first resistance troops during the war of national independence) became the
indispensable components of national identity. So the Kuvay-i Milliye spirit became a symbol of
anti-imperialist identity for all the young generation of revolutionaries in Turkey in the 1960s.

Fear of seeing these certainties crumble is an important reason for the Turkey's refusal to debate
the Armenian question. There would be a danger of destroying the usual models of
representation used to explain Turkey and the world. A debate on the genocide would end up by
showing that the state was not the product of an essentially anti-imperialist struggle, but rather of
a war conducted against the Greek and Armenian minorities. It would also become clear that a
significant number of the Kuvay-i Milliye soldiers, held up as heroes, had either directly taken
part in the genocide or had profited from looting the Armenians.

Before the end of the first world war, plans for a retreat in Anatolia and for organising a national
resistance had already been worked out in case of defeat. In 1918 these plans were put into
action. The organisations behind the national resistance movement such as Mudafaa-i Hukuk
(Society for the Defence of Rights) or Reddi Ilhak (Refusal of Division) were founded, either on
the express orders of Talat Pasha, minister of interior from 1913-1917, or of Enver Pasha,
minister of defence during the same period, or on the orders of the Commissariat (5) which they
headed. These organisations were set up in particular in regions where there was a possible
Greek or Armenian threat.

After the capitulation treaty signed with the British on 30 October 1918 in Mundros, Greece, the
first five resistance committees were organised against the minorities: three against the
Armenians and the other two against the Greeks. Their founders were members of the Ittihad ve
Terakki party, some of whose officials were wanted by the British for having taken part in the
genocide. The commissariat, among other tasks, had to hide them and find them shelter in
Anatolia. It thus became a symbol of the interweaving of the genocide of the Armenians and the
resistance in Anatolia.

Afraid of revenge

There was a second link between the emergent republic and the genocide. It came from the
emergence of a class enriched as a result of the genocide, which came to constitute one of the
social bases of the national movement. The leading families, or "notables", who had prospered
from the looting, feared that the Armenians would return to take back their possessions and take
revenge. That is what happened, in fact, in the Cukurova region, where the surviving Armenians
returned with the occupation forces to take back what belonged to them. So the notables fell in
with the national liberation movement, and even organised it in some places. Some of them were
close to Mustafa Kemal himself: for example Topal Osman who later became commander of his
personal guard. Measures passed by the old Constantinople (Istanbul) government on 8 January
1920 for the restitution of Armenian possessions were cancelled on 14 September 1922. The new
government in Ankara (which became Turkey's capital in October 1923) realised the need to
look after the interests of those who had contributed to the founding of the state.

There is also a third link between the genocide and the republic: some of the organisers and top
officials of the first Kuvay-i Milliye brigades in the regions of the Marmara, Aegean and Black
Seas were wanted for taking part in the massacres. In organising the resistance movement,
Mustafa Kemal had been actively helped by members of the Ittihad ve Terakki party wanted for
crimes against the Armenians. They were later given the highest positions.

Sukru Kaya, minister of the interior and secretary general of the People's Republican Party
(Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP) founded by Mustafa Kemal, was in charge of settling immigrant
and nomadic populations at the time of the "deportation". This position made him officially
responsible for organising the deportation. The German consuls present recorded Sukru Kaya's
words: "We must exterminate the Armenian race".

Mustafa Abdulhalik Renda was prefect of Bitlis, then of Aleppo, during the massacres. The
German consul Rössler describes him as someone "relentlessly taken up with the destruction of
Armenians". Vehip Pasha, commander of the 3rd army, explained in the account he wrote in
1919 how, during the war (after February 1916) Renda had had thousands of men burned alive in
the region of Mus. He later became a minister and president of the National Assembly.

Arif Fevzi, detained in Malta (prisoner number 2743) for having directly organised the
Diyarbekir massacres, became a minister from 1922 to 1923. Ali Cenani Bey (prisoner number
2805), who profited materially from the genocide, was minister of trade from 1924 to 1926.
Trustu Aras, a member of the sanitary commission in charge of burying Armenians who had
been killed, later held high positions in Ankara: he was foreign minister from 1925 to 1938.

Thus Mustafa Kemal used people from the Ittihad ve Terakki party wanted for crimes against the
Armenians and Greeks, as well as notables who joined the resistance for fear of revenge by these
two minorities, to conduct the war of national independence. For the wanted party members, in
particular those from the Special Organisation which actually committed the massacres, joining
the war of independence was a matter of survival. Their choice was between surrendering and
receiving heavy sentences, even execution, or joining and organising the resistance. Falih Rifki
Atay, a close friend of Mustafa Kemal, summed up the situation: "When, at the end of the war,
the British and their allies decided to ask for explanations from Ittihad ve Terakki party officials
for the massacre of the Armenians, all those who could be in trouble took up arms and joined the
resistance" (6).

All this makes it easier to understand why the genocide became a taboo subject. Admitting that
there were thieves and murderers among those heroes who saved the country would, most
certainly, have had a shattering effect. Negation is an easier path for those who fear shaking the
Turks' belief in the republic and national identity. But there is a third option: in the name of
democratic values, the country could distance itself from its past.

http://www.csuchico.edu/mjs/center/teaching_resources/armenia/articles/Taner_Akcam/Turkeys%20carefully%20forgotten%20history.pdf