Turkey, Nationalism and the hidden bodies...

The Armenian Genocide has ceased to be the forgotten genocide. Its shape, form and the endless horrors it contained have been increasingly examined by historians and social scientists in the last 40 years. The facts outside of the borders of Turkey are clear. In 1915-16, the dying Ottoman regime carried out mass deportations of Armenians from Anatolia towards Northern Syria. The aim cannot be doubted either. There were no areas set up for relocation at the end of these marches, no supplies and no pity. Those who failed to succumb to brutality of the Guards, special sections and local scavengers, who did not expire in the gruelling heat, were shot and staved to death. Any such numbers games are by their very nature contentious but most agree that 600 thousand (McCarthy) to one and half million men, women and children (Rummel, Kevorkian and others) were killed on those marches or in various pogroms around the crumbling empire. Along side this vast charnel house took place simultaneous massacres of Assyrian Christians and the Pontic Greeks (an additional butcher’s bill of nearly 600 thousand).

This was truly the triumph of death

Two issues need addressing. Firstly and primarily…why?

For the observers at the time and there were many (There was a considerable American relief effort), it seem to be an extension of the very nature of the ‘Terrible Turk’. The reports of Ottoman brutality against their Christian subjects had been a moral lightening rod for Europeans throughout the 19th century. Indeed the pressure to bring the Porte (the term used for the Sultan’s government) to ‘order’ over such mass killings (and the increasingly feeble nature of the Empire) had helped create a host of new nations in South-East Europe. The Armenians were merely the latest in a series of outrages by an Asiatic and Islamic power on its subjugated Christian peoples.

This narrative has been taken on by some of the Dhminitude labelling Manicheans of the west today, arguing the continuity between Ottoman repression, the Armenian genocide and the Islamist movements of today. In this re-telling, the wrath visited on the Armenians in 1915 stems solely from the sectarianism within the Koran. For others, Hitler’s opinions on the ‘success’ of the Armenian Genocide and his perceived emulation of this obscenity are taken as proof of Islam’s prescient role ‘establishing’ genocide as a ideological tactic.

There is a connection and a similarity between the NSDAP and the CUP (Committee of Union and Progress), the loose organisation that controlled the Ottoman state in 1915, but it doesn’t lie particularly with Islam. The CUP were seeking to reverse the long decline of Ottoman power. They contended that Ottoman society was backwards and inefficient, that the Porte could never bring about this revival. Their diagnosis and their prescription for the sick man of Europe increasingly revolved around nationalist ideas and pressing on with modernising the rump empire into a ‘mono-identity’ nation state. For the Ittihadists of the CUP, this involved creating an identity that would attain the dominance of German or French national identities. Various formulas of Ottomanism (Influenced by Persia), Turkish Cultural awareness and fantasies like Turanianism basically defined the body politic in terms of primary identity. This identity was by no means based on religion. There were many Ottoman Jews and even Christians within the CUP, Tekinalp being a Salonikan Jew. It was about perceived loyalty and subsuming other sources of collective belonging.

The CUP were in many ways ultra-modernizers, their very name is owed to the writing of Comte. Gökalp, one of the foremost intellects behind the movement was clearly indebted to Durkheim and Tönnes. His own sociological work echoes Spencer. Islam was only useful if it buttress their national project, as a contour of identity. If not, then it was hapless bulk. The CUP’s main opponents during the pre-war period were not the minorities of the empire (indeed Bulgarian and Armenian Socialists were allied with them in parliament). The main force of resistance came from traditionalists and monarchist who looked aghast at the progress of these modernising secularists.

The divergent nature of the western model for modernisation, Liberal democracy along with nationalist indoctrination began to unravel soon after the 1908 revolution that saw the CUP move into government. The ‘traditional’ brutality of ottoman rule, of mass murder as a tool for maintaining social stability had already poisoned intra-ethnic relations. Indeed Armenians had been the repeated victims of horrific pogroms in the preceding 30 years. As such there was a widening chasm between a centralising CUP agenda and the Armenian community’s leadership aim of autonomy within the empire. Djemet, one of the troika who lead the events of 1915 was a keen critic of schemes of autonomy, seeing them as a waypoint before foreign intervention and their loss to the Empire. One of the most notorious proponents of Armenian Genocide, Dr Nazim declared, ‘The Ottoman State must be exclusively Turkish. The Presence of Foreign elements is a pretext for European intervention’. He then adds euphemistically, ‘They should be forcible Turkicized’ (M Mann, 2005, pg. 132)

By 1915, the threat of a Russian invasion of Anatolia, evidence of very small scale Armenian collaboration with Russia and the strains of a war that was defeating the Empire’s ability to carry on coincided. Convicted of both the potential for widespread Armenian rebellion and the collapse of their nationalist ambitions, the CUP sought to solve this ethnic ‘question’ once and for all. After the genocide of the Armenians, the Assyrians and the Pontic Greeks, came another extremely brutal clash over identity as Greece pursued the Great idea and the Kemelists took their revenge. This left Turkey as an ethnically ‘pure’ state.

These events were about a project of creating a nation, an identity and pushing these templates to a modern future onto an ethnically diverse and increasing fractious empire. These delusions were driven by nationalist ideas, by a nation made sacred and deified. Islam may have inspired many an act of brutality and been used to justify inhuman crimes, but in the case of the Armenian genocide, it was the idea of nationhood that lead to murder.

Secondly – Turkish denial of Genocide is a crime against itself. Having been to Turkey briefly and lived near the Turkish community on Blackstock Road in London, I am quite and hopelessly enamoured by its people (Only Iranians have a more wicked sense of humour). Don’t even get me started on the food either, Aubergine mezes, Apple Tea, Sujuk. But Turkey has to face up to what happened in Der-I-Zar and what that means about its subsequent history. Kemel (a member of the CUP) was in mild bureaucratic disgrace in 1915 and posted to a seemingly unimportant post in Galipoli. He thus avoided being involved in the events to the east. How would he have reacted? His project of Turkish modernisation is directly linked to Ittihadist visions for a modern Ottoman empire, what does that say about the roots of the Kemelist revolution? Can you separate the Triumvir of Enver, Talaat and Djemet from Kemel? Given the bloody history of Greco-Turkish relations since 1917, how far has the Kemelist state (and indeed Greece) been able to move on from a body politics defined by the ethnos, towards one by the demos?

Kemel is deified to an extraordinary extent even today. I remember a tour guide describing his life and breaking down into tears when she reached the point of his death. Every village has some monument to him, indeed this cult rivals Islam for its geographical universality. Yet given the violent activities of the ‘deep state’ and the ongoing contest between liberalising and nationalist parties, would admitting that the state and nation needn’t be eternal moral paragons in the face of historical evidence, that the state and the nation you make today are what matters be ‘insulting Turkishness’. I say no.