Letters from Istanbul The Schism in the Turkish Left

“The Ittihadists committed a cruel genocide,” wrote Ahmet Altan without putting the word in quotation marks, on the day the president of Turkey visited Yerevan. “Don’t ever say they also killed us,” he continued. “What did the Armenian woman in Bursa, the old man in Adana, the baby in Sivas have anything to do with the Armenian fedayis on the Russian border, apart from being Armenian?”

He then invited his readers to put themselves in the place of Armenians, to imagine that they were all of a sudden taken from their homes, forced to set off on a death march where they witnessed their people die, witnessed their own family members get killed, some shot dead, some drowned in rivers, just because they were Armenian. He tells how their properties were usurped and their belongings looted. “And we, for long years, have forbidden the grandchildren of these people to mourn for their beloved ones,” he continues. He asks, “If it were your grandparents or parents who got killed, wouldn’t you want to cry this out loud? Wouldn’t you feel you owe this to your grandparents?”

Apologizing for my rough translation, which certainly lacks the poignancy of Altan’s own words, here is how he ends his column:

“Now we are going to their country. I don’t know if we can, but is it that impossible to look at them with tears in our eyes and softly say, ‘Forgive us’? If we do, perhaps the heavy burden on our shoulders will be relieved and we will see up there, that place where we will all go, a momentary smile on the face of a heavily mustached old Armenian.”

Ahmet Altan is one of the two founders of Taraf, a relatively new newspaper in Turkey. Taraf has become a parameter of the deepening schism in the Turkish socialist left. One of the two sides of the Turkish socialist left doesn’t like Taraf. Some of them even declared the daily as their enemy on the grounds that Taraf writers have “waged a war against socialists.” The reason is that a number of columnists systematically criticize socialist/communist tradition in Turkey for being nationalistic and ignoring the complexity of life by sticking to the old paradigms of class struggle. Some others think that by taking a firm position against the military at a time of escalating tension between the military and the AKP government, Taraf is practically siding with the government and giving in to the neo-liberal ideology.

Now, given the fact that the same Ahmet Altan who is accused of siding with the neo-liberal AKP government takes a clear stand on the so-called “Armenian question,” where does Altan’s position on the Armenian Question stand in the schism in the Turkish left? Has this got anything to do with the ongoing confrontation between the two camps of the Turkish left—the orthodox Marxists and the so-called “liberals”?

With some exceptions, the orthodox Marxists would never openly object Altan’s stance in this context. But their silence, or their dealing with the issue only in the context of, for instance, Hrant Dink’s assasination, is a definite stand in its own right.

It was not until the 1990’s that part of the Turkish left realized that the complexity of life included issues which cannot be reduced to manifestations of class conflict. However, this realization was never put into words and never articulated as such, because it would mean abandoning the conviction that class relations determined everything in life. Yet, the recognition was there, because the truth made itself so visible, that what was happening was so real, so hurtful, so obvious: a war was going on for more than 20 years now, shedding so much blood, changing the demography, the socio-economic structure, and even the topography of part of the country.

The Kurdish issue liberated some of us from party lines and the orthodox Marxist class approach, giving rise to an awareness of the nationalist essence of the traditional left in Turkey and how it helped the establishment cover up certain truths about our past—the terrible demographic engineering and its consequences manifested in ordinary everyday racism, to which we had become so accustomed that we weren’t even aware of its existence. Then we were able to notice that we were living side by side with the victims of this commonplace racism without really seeing them.

At first, this handful of people were marginalized by the left. But as “minority rights” became part of the public knowledge, primarily by means of the EU Progress Reports on Turkey and EU projects awarded to awareness raising programmes, a public awareness emerged. In parallel to this process, certain groups on the socialist left included “minority rights” issues in their agenda. Yet, they still did not deal with the matter as a question central to democracy and human rights but rather as a specific field of interest, just like environmental issues or sexual orientation questions or the rights of the disabled.

In order for the Turkish socialist left to see the real size of the issue and the link between the established system and denialism, Hrant Dink had to be assasinated.

This ability to overlook what was going on was because the whole structural problem that prevents Turkey from being a real democracy and being a country respectful of human dignity—i.e. the “Turkishness” of the state—is reduced to “minority rights.” They are still unable to see that this is an inseparable element, thus an essential part of the Turkish way of ruling the country.

I had read a hair-raising war cry in Aram Andonian’s unforgettable book The Balkan War, published in Turkish by Aras Yayinlari in Istanbul. With an amateurish translation it goes as follows:

“Let blood spout out from every inch of ground I step on, let the spring flowers under my claws turn into desert and desert into a dungeon.

If I leave a stone on top of another, let my own hearth be extinguished forever.

I swear that my bayonet will turn rose gardens into cemeteries and that I will leave this land in complete ruins so that no civilization will be built thereon for ten centuries.

If I leave a leaf on a branch and a flag on a bastion, let a black stamp be affixed on my breast. My breath will spread fire, my gun radiate death, my steps create precipices.

I will smear every white color with black gunpowder and every trace of gunpowder with a handful of blood. I will hang the feeling of mercy on the blade of my sword, ideals on the barrel of my gun, and civilization on the shoe of my horse’s hind leg.

Hollows in the mountains, shadows of forests, the wrinkled face of ruins will forever tell the story of the Turk passing through this land.”

This was how Aka Gunduz, whose real name was Enis Avni Bey, a member of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), swore before the grave of Mehmet the Conqueror upon hearing the reports that four small Balkan countries had declared mobilization against the Ottoman Empire for their independence, leaving aside the conflicts among themselves. The passage is from his article published in the daily Tanin, dated Oct. 21, 1912.

The Turkish socialist left has to see that here in Turkey, there are hundreds and thousands of people who may not have Enis Avni Bey’s literary skill or may not share his choice of words but feel more or less the same way towards the people they think are the enemies of their country. These people are mostly wage-earners, laborers, the unemployed, and the unpropertied. Without dealing with this racism and chauvinism, generated by the ruling elite but put into practice by the poor masses, not even one single socialist goal—let alone a victorious revolution—can be achieved.