“The great Turk is governing in peace twenty nations from different religions. Turks have taught to Christians how to be moderate in peace and gentle in victory.”Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary
Anyone who tries to see or instill a measure of balance or open mindedness in the Western media on the question of Armenian “genocide” will soon discover he/she is out of luck. For the phenomenon, which I call the “Settled History Syndrome,” is not only palpable, but also widespread. It runs deep in the media across Europe and America. It is not new, but deserves special recognition under a name of its own – hence the term coined here. It is the product of year-in, year-out incessant propaganda perpetrated by the Armenian lobby on the so-called “Armenian genocide.”
The syndrome explains how a group of certain historians or scholars, supposedly open minded, gather to discuss Armenian “genocide,” but colleagues who disagree are kept away as misguided renegades.
It explains why anyone who challenges the Armenian version of history is labeled “Genocide denier,” often citing a self-appointed group called ”The International Association of Genocide Scholars“ as the infallible arbiter.
It explains how minds are frozen, debate is stifled, and freedom of opinion is trampled upon – truth being the ultimate casualty.
It explains how money and influence, fed by prejudice, create a cadre of ill-informed politicians and general public. The media, itself thrown into deep freeze, commonly plays the role of the facilitator.
Turks who want to fight unfounded accusations from the Armenian side must first deal with this mindset affecting the media.
Examples are myriad. I will first relay an anecdote, then continue with a recent example, both from America. No doubt, what goes on in America also goes on in Europe, with some mutations.
The PBS Episode
Time is early 2006. PBS, the national Public Broadcasting Service in America, is planning to air on April 17 a supposed TV documentary called “Armenian Genocide.” The film, directed by Andrew Goldberg and bankrolled by more than 30 largely Armenian foundations in America, will surely be an anti-Turkish diatribe based on distorted history. I and a small group of Turks and Turkish Americans contact the PBS headquarters in Alexandria , Virginia, to protest the screening of a one-sided story. (As it turned out, the film shamelessly started with a macabre scene of human skulls taken from a 1871 painting by a Russian artist. For a fuller account, see F. Demirmen, Turkish Daily News, April 24, 2006). We argued that, if PBS decides to go ahead with the screening, it should also show, as a balancing act, “The Armenian Revolt,” a newly released documentary directed by Marty Callaghan.
The PBS headquarters did not change its mind. And the screening of “The Armenian Revolt” was out of consideration.
I then took my case to the affiliate of PBS in Houston Texas, which was also planning to air “Armenian genocide.” Commenting on the film, the channel’s website carried the statement: “The International Association of Genocide Scholars affirms that the number of Armenian deaths at the hands of Ottoman Turks …” It was a reminder to the viewers that the “genocide” was a shut case.
Nonetheless, I thought I should still try to educate the Houston channel, that what they would be airing was a prejudiced and distorted story. To that end, I contacted the programming director and sent him some archival material. After back-and-forth correspondence, I had my fingers crossed. At the end, the channel didn’t change its plans, but the programming director made an admission, which was revealing. He remarked that until I contacted him, they had assumed that “genocide” was a “settled history.”
It was a Lilliputian victory. But it showed what the Turkish side is against: a mindset more or less frozen on its track.
Pasadena Star Episode
Fast forward 9 years. On January 15, 2015, the Pasadena Star in California published a news article titled: “Ground broken on Pasadena Armenian Genocide Memorial.” It was an announcement that the monument would be completed on April 18, ahead of the “100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide on April 24.” Pasadena happens to be next door to Los Angeles, a hotbed of Diaspora activism.
As the Star put it, the monument would take “the form of a 16-foot-tall tripod … with water drops dripping … to represent each of the 1.5 million lives cut short by the Ottoman Turks in the Armenian Genocide of 1915 to 1923.” The droplets would “fall every 21 seconds, so that 1.5 million drops will fall annually.” The tripod would represent “similarly shaped structures which Armenian leaders were hanged from during the Armenian Genocide.” Surrounding the tripod and stonework would be “12 pomegranate trees, representing each of the 12 lost provinces of Armenia.”
Pictures of Armenian clerics solemnly praying at the ground breaking ceremony and an artist’s rendition of the tripod-shaped monument were included in the news.
The description and symbolism were chilling; but infused in all was a prejudiced and distorted history. Particularly notable in the article was the absolutist tone in the language. “Genocide” was treated as a fact, with no hint as to its disputable character.
Considering their mindset, I hesitated contacting the Star to express my disagreement that Armenian “genocide” is a fact. But the invitation at the end of the article, for readers to engage in “insightful conversations,“ was too good to resist. I also thought that, instead of sending a short blog, I should lay out my arguments in a full article so as to enlighten them. I informed the Star of my intention to submit a dissenting view, and proposed that they publish it as a stand-alone contribution by a guest writer. Their initial reaction was encouraging. They asked me to send in my article.
In the article I took special care to acknowledge Armenian sufferings and losses, but also mentioned sufferings and losses on the Muslim side. I pointed to certain facts, and made corrections to some of the allegations in the article. I also tried to strike a conciliatory note, referring to the calls of Armenian religious leaders in Turkey, and pointed to the poisoning effect such a monument would have on the Armenian-Turkish relations in America. It was an appeal for “peace.” While I did not expect they would agree with my views, my expectations were high that the Star would publish my article – if for no reason than journalistic curiosity and respect for dissenting views.
The response from the Star was an eye opener:
“Yes. We don’t print op-eds by Holocaust deniers, nor articles denying the settled history of the Armenian genocide, recognized now by 23 countries and by the vast majority of scholars and historians not in the pay of the Turkish government.”
So, I was a “Genocide denier,” and Armenian “genocide” was a settled history, the arbiter presumably being the all-knowing International Association of Genocide Scholars. Case shut. Opinions and facts brought forward by others will not change anything.
The response was the embodiment of a frozen mind. Frozen in time, frozen in space. Here was another example of the “Settled History Syndrome.”
Pan-Armenian Declaration on the Centennial of the Armenian Genocide as a Crime Against Humanity
MEHMET SUKRU GUZEL
(Switzerland Representative of Center for International Strategy and Security Studies)
On 29 January 2015, Armenian State Commission on the Coordination of Events Dedicated to the 100th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, in consultation with its regional committees in the Diaspora, gave a declaration. [1]
This declaration is in fact a crime against humanity based on racial and religious discrimination. This declaration is a crime against humanity by non-mentioning the killings of more than 500.000 Turks by Armenian non-state armed groups between the years 1914 -1921. As all historian and international politicians knows that for a specific date and specific place of historical events based on religious and racial issues, if only a portion, or one side of the specified events is to be mentioned and only one side is side to be accused of the same actions, this is a discrimination on religion and racial origin. And this is the legitimization of crimes of the other side on religious and racial reasons which is a crime by itself.
No normal person can believe then more than 500.000 civilians Turks could be killed including children, woman and older people on self-defense actions of Armenian non-state armed groups. By not mentioning of the killings of more than 500.000 Turks in the declaration, this should be accepted as the legitimation of the war crime acts of Armenian non-state armed groups and this is a crime against humanity.
International Court of Justice gives the definition of Crimes against Humanity as:
Include any of the following acts committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack: murder; extermination; enslavement; deportation or forcible transfer of population; imprisonment; torture; rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity; persecution against an identifiable group on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious or gender grounds; enforced disappearance of persons; the crime of apartheid; other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering or serious bodily or mental injury. [2]
Armenian non-state armed groups made many acts of this definition and the Declaration itself is persecution against the Turkish people on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious or gender grounds.
In the paragraph 4 of the declaration, it is written that “recalling the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 10 December 1948, whereby recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”
In the paragraph 5 of the declaration, it is written that “ guided by the respective principles and provisions of the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 96(1) of 11 December 1946, the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 9 December 1948, the United Nations Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity of 26 November 1968, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 16 December 1966 as well as all the other international documents on human rights,”
As mentioned in the declaration paragraph 4 and 5, all other human rights international documentations, we can give examples of the International Committee of the Red Cross study on customary international humanitarian law rules made a significant contribution to the process of identifying fundamental standards of humanity by clarifying, in particular, international humanitarian law rules applicable in non-international armed conflict. Furthermore, adoption by the Human Rights Committee of general comment 31 on article 2 of the International Covenant Civil and Political Rights as well as the International Court of Justice’s Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and its judgment in the Case Concerning Armed Activities on the Territory of the Congo reaffirmed the applicability of international human rights law during armed conflict and addressed the relationship between international humanitarian law and international human rights law. [3]
Also the International Court of Justice in the 1985 Nicaragua case recognized that certain minimum humanitarian standards apply during internal armed conflict. [4]
On February 26, 2007, the International Court of Justice issued its judgment in Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The International Court of Justice did conclude that Serbia, through its continued support of Bosnian Serbs in light of the probability that some of them would commit the crime of genocide, had “violated the obligation to prevent genocide in respect of the genocide that occurred in Srebrenica in July 1995. [5]
We have to remember that Bosnian Serbs were a non-state armed group and they committed crime of Genocide.
In fact, if the word “ Genocide “ is to be used for the 1st World War period, Armenia should accept that the 1st Genocide of the 1st World War was made by non-state armed Armenian groups in the 1877-78 Ottoman-Russian War lost territories of the Ottoman Empire Kars, Ardahan and environs. Ottoman sources reported some 30,000 Muslim civilians killed; more recent scholarship has pointed to an even higher number, as many as 45,000 in the Chorokhi valley alone in. Traveling the Ardahan-Merdenek road in Ardahan province in early January 1915, an Azeri Duma deputy, Mahmud Yusuf Dzhafarov, witnessed “mass graves of unarmed Muslims on both sides of the road.” Whatever the exact number of victims, the wave of Christian vengeance killings against Caucasian Muslims was serious enough that the long-serving viceroy of the Caucasus, Count I. Vorontsov-Dashkov, issued a series of decrees forbidding further atrocities while also ordering the deportation of about 10,000 Muslims from sensitive areas near the front lines to the Russian interior. [6]
When we think of Srebenica and the International Court of Justice confirmed that genocide had been committed in Srebenica. If a single massacre satisfies the criterion of Article 2 of the Genocide Convention, certainly the Armenian massacres against the Turks in Russian control territory before the deportation decision of Armenians in Ottoman Empire would qualify as the 1st Genocide of the 1st World War. Non-state armed Armenian groups made more massacres to the Turks at the back of the war frontier in different parts of Anatolia as well should be recognized as Genocides also.
In the article 8 of the Declaration, it is written that “Calls upon the Republic of Turkey to recognize and condemn the Armenian Genocide committed by the Ottoman Empire, and to face its own history and memory through commemorating the victims of that heinous crime against humanity and renouncing the policy of falsification, denialsm and banalizations of this indisputable fact” forms crimes against humanity.
Article 8 of the declaration was written with the concept of racial and religious discrimination. Armenian State and Armenian Diaspora deny the fact of the war crimes of Armenian non-state armed groups and their genocides to Turks as Genocide and afraid to face in fact their own history and memory through commemorating the victims of that heinous crime against humanity and renouncing the policy of falsification, denialsm and banalization of this indisputable fact forms crimes against humanity.
A demand of blaming only one side for what had happened in the past means a demand from international community to accept acts of so-called in an orientalist understanding as superior civilized Armenian non-state armed groups acts against to Muslims Turks, as a Holy Christian War as was in the old times of the Crusades by which no one can blame the Armenian non-state armed groups acts of genocides against the Turks.
The logic of Armenian State and Armenian Diaspora Declaration is a threat to world peace and security.
Someone can use the same logic of religious and racial discrimination as an example for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) and try to legitimize the war crimes acts of ISIS by not mentioning in a written text and blame some wrongful acts Iraqi Government as genocide or war crimes in the same text.
If Armenian State and Armenian Diaspora condemn Ottoman Empire without mentioning war crimes acts of Armenian non-state armed groups, this is a crime against humanity. This is also valid for all other states and other racial politicians or historians. Without mentioning the killings of more than 500.000 Turks by the Armenian non-state armed groups, to recognize so-called Armenian Genocide is a crime against humanity.
Turks and Armenian share a “common pain” inherited from their grandparents. A joint commission composed of Turkish and Armenian historians can be formed to study the events of 1915. The findings of the commission, if established, would bring about a better understanding of this tragic period and hopefully help to normalize the threat to world peace and security. If not, by only blaming the Turks of the past events means approving the killings of more than 500.000 children, women and older Turks by Armenian non-state armed groups can only be described as a crime against humanity.
For example, if US President Obama is to recognize so-called Armenian Genocide without mentioning the killings of the more than 500.000 Turks by Armenian non-state armed groups; this will be a crime against humanity. Turkey can go in such a condition to the United Nations Security Council as this act should be described as a threat to world peace and security as this one sided recognition of the so-called Armenian genocide is illegal according to Article 103 of United Nations Charter.
Mehmet Sukru Guzel
Switzerland Representative of Center for International Strategy and Security Studies
[1] Pan-Armenian Declaration on the Centennial of the Armenian Genocide, 01.02.2015
[3] United Nations Document. E/CN.4/2006/87, paragraphe 30
[4] Case Concerning Military and Paramilitary Activities In and Against Nicaragua, pp. 101-102, , 01.02.2015
[5] Dermot Groome, “Adjudicating Genocide: Is the International Court of Justice Capable of Judging State Criminal Responsibility?”, Fordham International Law Journal, Volume 31, Issue 4 2007, pp-912
[6] Sean McMeekin, The Russian Origins of the First World War, Harvard University Press, Cambridge 2011, p.160
I have read your article “Armenia’s Jewish Community Leader Lashes out at Pro-Azeri Propagandists” of January 27, 2015, and once again feel compelled to respond!
I have a distinct feeling that you would prefer to see a world war rather than peaceful coexistence among nations. Why should Israel, more democratic than Armenia, not have good relations with the Turcic world? For tens of years excellent relations in every field existed between Israel and Turkey. Interestingly enough, Turkey had recognized the State of Israel long before Armenian and Greece.
What you will never be able to explain is; how come the Armenian and Jewish Communities in turkey, are the richest members of Turkish society! Come on Mr. Sassounian, tell us, don’t be shy.
Furthermore, it is indeed laughable that, of all people, you Sir should be complaining about President Aliev’s manipulation and molding opinion I the West. If the Armenian Diaspora which you are wrongly leading had spent half of her funds and influence in helping poor Armenia, unemployment and poverty would be halved the very least.
May I also remind you Mr. Sassounian that, recently the Parliaments of the UK, Germany and Australia have spoken out against that Armenian myth of “Genocide”. Why don’t you write about those democratic decisions of conviction rather than those of convenience for you?
FYI: 1). German Bundestag: “Gedenken an das Leid der Armenier”
https://dub122.mail.live.com/mail/ViewOfficePreview.aspx…
2). Australia does not recognize the events of 1915….
3). The UK Position
” Following Mr Robertson’s report (In November 2009, following instruction by The Armenian Centre, Geoffrey Robertson QC published a legal opinion entitled “Was there an Armenian genocide?” ) and the publicity it attracted we have updated our public lines to make clear that HMG does not believe it is our place to make a judgment (historical or legal) on whether or not the Armenian massacres constituted genocide. Instead our lines focus on the need for the governments of Turkey and Armenia to adopt some form of truth and reconciliation process. We believe that this issue can only be resolved through a process owned by those directly engaged. We have rejected the claim that Ministers or officials have misled Parliament”
Book Review: The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey, A Disputed Genocide
Fatih Balci and Arif Akgul
There could be some mistakes in the history, but it should be more objective to enlighten those mistaken events with the helping of the historians. Guenter Lewy’s book, The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey, A Disputed Genocide, mainly focuses on the massacres in Ottoman Turkey, and he strongly stands on the way of the truths which he finds from the historical documents. After all, he mentions that trustfully the deaths of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey can not be called “genocide”. There were some deaths but they can not be called as genocide. For calling genocide, it is needed to have a look at the definition of genocide which is mostly accepted to intention to annihilation of one group. To use or say genocide for an event it has to involve an intention of annihilation. In the Armenian case the main aim was not based on the intention of Armenian annihilation. The only thing was deporting· the Armenians from some places only for security purposes, because the Armenians became a big problem for the Turks during World War I with the rebellions and armed guerillas inside the country.
It is seen to the massacres as the only culpability was the Turks, but with Lewy’s book, it is understood clearly that the Armenians had many problems for the Turks at their worse situation during the wartime. At the war time, Turks had in troubles in different reasons, and at that position the Armenians also had problem to Turks. The Armenians wanted to establish their independent state and they wanted to get some more help from the Christian world with using their Christian identity. They gave ways to the Turks to make some plans against the Armenian problem, and the Turks found the best way to deport them, but they did not foresee some problems such as the geographic conditions and some other issues that caused mass killing while making their decisions. These kinds of unintended things caused the deaths of the Armenians. Lewy’s argument about the massacres of the Ottoman Turks against the Armenians can be clarified with one of the Turkish proverbs: “Okay, the burglar has culpability but does not have any culpability of the house holder?”
Guenter Lewy, in his book, approaches Turk-Armenian conflict from the historical perspective. He shows the events that happened in the late 19thcentury and the beginning of the 20th century in the Ottoman Empire between the Turks and the Armenians. He gives information from the sources and explains that it was not genocide, it was only massacres. · Lewy uses deportation, but may be it could be used relocation, because deportation is used for taking out of the frontiers, whereas relocation means mostly changing places into the frontiers. The places of Armenians changed their residential were still in the Ottoman frontier.
The book, The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey, includes four main parts with fourteen chapters. In the first part, with its four chapters, the author mostly looks at the Turk-Armenian problem from its beginning with historical events. His main argument in this part is that the characteristics of the conflict were based on religious background. The Armenians have approximately two thousand years history and they were the first Christian state in the world history, whereas the Turks are one of the major states among the Islamic world. The author argues that the Armenians tried to get attendance of the Christian world with provoking the Turks to attack themselves. Different courtiers with different purposes tried to help Armenians (For example, Russia helped to reach the south which had been its main desire for years, while Great Britain did not want that Russia to reach its desire), and the Armenians wanted to get their independence after political events. On the other hand, all the responsibilities were given by the Armenians to the Ottoman Sultan, Abdul Hamid II, because, for the Armenians, he was preventing the aims of the Armenian committees. Only because of this, the Armenians tried to kill him on Friday, July 21, 1905 with planting dynamite in his carriage, but Abdul Hamid II delayed his departure only a few minutes which saved his life; however, twenty six people died while fifty eight were wounded (p.32). The other events, which caused the Armenian massacres, were seizing the Imperial Ottoman Bank by Armenian revolutionaries on August 26, 1896 (p.24) and a shot assumed by an Armenian outside a mosque in Bitlis on a Friday while the Muslims were in the mosque for their ritual Friday praying (p.23). From the resources the author collected, the range of death of Armenians only of the 1895-1896 events is between twenty thousand and three hundred thousand (p.26).
In the first part of the book, Lewy generally explains the causes of the differences, occurred between these two nations which had been living together for centuries. He focuses on the causes, which started after the Russian war, and the Armenians intended to establish their own states at the region, and they wanted to use their Christian identity to get supported by the Christian world. The best way of doing this was also provoking the Ottoman Turks, which they did well at the end of the nineteenth century. The best way to get support from the Christian world is to provoke and cause the Ottomans to attack the Armenians.
In part two, the author mostly focuses on the Armenians’ genocide plans and the Turks positions against them. Ziya Gokalp, a Turkish sociologist and educator, is shown to be the responsible person of the massacres because of his argument of Turkification, which is based on blood and race for some scholars. From an Armenian perspective, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) premeditated the massacres of Armenians, and they played their role in this plan. “The Ten Commandments” (p.48) was the Armenians’ main argument to express the CUP’s main aim on the Armenians. For Armenians those Ten Commandments show the CUP’s plan clearly. Another source to make stronger this thesis about Armenians is Armenian author Aram Andonian’s book named The Memoirs of Naim Bey. This book is about one of the Ottoman chief’s secretaries telling during the deportation of the Armenians. However, there could not be found any documents about Naim Bey to be hired in the Ottoman army. The other important point also the real document that Andonian argues about the book (Naim Bey’s telling) does not exist in any archives. Andonian says that he sent all the original documents to the Armenian patriarch and later he never learned anything about what happened to them. (p.67) He also says that in a different time about his book that he wrote that book for doing Armenian propaganda (p.70). The sources of Armenian sides have not any real genuineness as the author explains in this part of the book.
From the Turkish perspective, even the Turkish sources are biased; their main argument is that the relocation of the Armenians from many main places was necessary, because Armenians were getting armed with the help of Russia. During the wartime, the Armenians were a big problem to the Turkish military and the Muslim people in the region. According to the information supplied by the Ministry of Interior, thirty thousand armed Armenians were at the east region of the country (p.92). Fifteen thousand of them joined the Russian army, while the other fifteen thousand were helping the Russian army behind the Turkish army. The enemies were inside according to the Turks and it was needed to find any solutions. The revolts also were major problems for the Turkish army during the wartime.
On the other hand, the Turks also had real economic, military, and social problems at that period. The refugees from the other provinces where the places conquered by the winner countries at the war were coming to the country, and they needed places to live. There was a civil war within a global war for the Turks. Under these conditions, the Turks decided to relocate the Armenians to different provinces for both to make safe its back yard and to open new provinces to the Muslim refugees.
Another important issue to make a decision of relocation was the Armenians’ brutality against the Muslim people of some cities and towns in the region. The Armenians were attacking the Turkish people with Russian support, because they knew that Russia was at their side. It also was known that they got their weapons from Russia. For example, the Russians took Diyarbakir, led by advance guards of Armenian volunteers in January 1916. The Muslims who were not able to escape were put the death. When the Turkish forces entered the city of Erzincan in February 1918, they found a destroyed city, fell upon the Turkish homes and committed extraordinary acts (p.118-119).
In some places in the Ottoman Empire, Armenians rebelled against to the Turks while the war was ongoing and especially near the end of the war. For example, the Armenian volunteers joined the fighting against the Turks in Palestine and Syria (p.108). Because of all these reasons, from the Turkish perspective, the deportation was needed to secure the east part of the Empire. Turks had to make a secure place in the east cost of the country and the best way to do this is to relocate the Armenians to different places. The main purpose did not punish the Armenians. Relocation was the prevention of Armenian activities against the government which had some troubles at this time also. The decision was not intended to destroy innocent people.
The third part of the book is mostly focuses on the sources to light the history, because the author’s main argument is to bring up the events is mostly the duty of the historians. Historical memories can enlighten history better according to Lewy. From this perspective, Lewy explains the events with the sources from every side, which begins with the Turkish archives and goes on the way of who did a small part from the puzzle of this unclear event in the history. The missionary reports, the foreign countries official and unofficial reports and even eyewitnesses’ statements are seen in Lewy’s book. He shows the ways which and what conditions happened from these sources and he writes some of his critiques with historical explanations. He gives a major importance to the Turkish archives but he has some problems about the opening of the archives; only 9%, but now all the Turkish archives are open to the research. He compares his findings and he shows so many different explanations of the same events. For example, Lewy mentions that one of the German missionaries, Johannes Lepsius’s, book involves a collection of 444 documents, but Wolfgang Gust argues that only a few of these 444 documents corresponded fully to the originals (p.134). One of the British sources, a parliamentary Blue Book shows the massacre story, but it also involves a lot of narratives by eyewitnesses, which are mostly based on hearsay (p.138).
Lewy expresses an important result from the sources that he follows to understand that historical event between the Turks and the Armenians that “when Armenians used guns it was always strictly for self-defense, while Turkish troops using force were usually described as engaged in murderous activities” (p.144). He also does not give more reliability to the survivors’ testimony. His main argument on this issue is that the survivor’s testimony is mostly under the pressure of the historical events and their personality, perceptions and experiences.
Lewy’s main concern about the historical document is there are not many Turkish scholars who are specialists of the Armenian events. He gives more spaces to the Turkish archives than the scholarly resources. On the other hand, he does not give more reliability to the Armenian scholars who have scholarly sources about the issue, because he sees that most of them are not truly explaining the events. To answer the question of why there are not any Turkish scholars, while there are many more Armenian scholars in this issue, it could be said that Diaspora Armenians are mostly studied on this issue, so it is easy to find some sources from different languages. He can reach more Armenian sources than Turkish because Diaspora Armenians have more interest on this issue and they wrote books in different languages, whereas the Turks have not this chance.
After giving the historical perspective which shows the positions of the Empire especially during the war time, he expresses the specific events during the cities and towns in which deportation happened. He shows the readers that the main purpose was not based on the intention of annihilation of the Armenians. But he gives some responsibility to the governmental authority not to predict what should have-happened during the deportation. For him, the government had to make some prevention activities for the possibilities, however, one of the important points also needed to be on our eyes is that the government had little authority at that time period, even to help its soldiers, because so many soldiers died at that period without any war. From this perspective, more things were not wanted from the government, but it also does not throw its responsibilities from its shoulders.
Lewy separates the causes of the massacres of the Armenians during the deportation of 1915-1916, and he gives the most important clue to the geographic situations. Later he focuses on the Kurds, Circassians, brigands (cetes), irregulars, and the gendarmes as the causes of the mass killing. The Turks tried to protect the deportees from these unexpected causes, but most times and most places they could not achieve success. Lewy asks this question: Who killed the Armenians? He could not find the exact answer, because several culpabilities shared the massacres.
Nobody can say anything about the number of the victims during that period, because each side mentions the amount from their perspectives. The main problem is that the exact populations of the Armenians are not known. The estimated amounts also do not give any clue about the amount of the killed people, because some Armenians lost their lives as the result of the guerilla wars, some lost at the rebellions and some joined the Russian army. Lewy gives the amounts from the sources he investigated, and he gives a number as an average of the Armenians in the Empire in 1914 as 1,750,000. For the amount of the survivors after the events, he again gives an estimated number which is 1,108,000. So, for Lewy, 642,000 were killed, which is about 37% during the World War period.
In the last part of his book, Lewy explains the controversy of the massacres of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. While he gives the examples of the Armenian side, who mostly argue that it is premeditation, the Armenians try to take a picture of Turkish responsibility with the Turkish national character, which is called barbaric for by them. On the other hand, the Turkish view focuses on the necessity of the deportation and actually both sides had many deaths which should be accepted; the events were not genocide, it was a war between the Turks and the Armenians (p.248).
Lewy’s strongest argument is that the central government of Turkey has not more culpability because there no authentic documentary evidence exists (p.250). He says that the deaths were an intended outcome of the deportations. Lewy’s main concern is based on shaping this world on the events that happened in the first quarter of the last century. He says that the massacres began to play a role on the politics, which was seen at some countries’ parliaments. But Lewy advises that which is the most important issue to lighten the historical events, is not the job of the politicians, but the historians. The politicians should give up these kinds of historical events to the historians to get more reliable results.
The main argument about the Armenian problem in the Ottoman Empire was that they wanted to establish their own independent state and so they became more nationalist as they saw from some other nations into the Empire. On the other hand, they mostly sought to get support from the Christian world as being the first Christian state. They wanted to get a reputation for themselves. If they rebel against the governmental authority, it can be thought that they could have thought what could have happened to them if they could not achieve success.
Geunter Lewy denies genocide and claims that the Armenian deaths in the Ottoman Turkey at the end of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth century were massacres. He wrote his book to enlighten one of the biggest problems for the last one hundred years. His approach is mostly based on the memory of the historical events. He investigates the literatures from each side and he concludes his research with saying that the historical events should be given to the historians to enlighten them. If those events go to the politicians, the problems could not be solved easily.
While the Turks and the Armenians were living together on the same lands for centuries, after the Ottoman Empires were getting weaker and losing the war against Russia, the Armenians got more wishes to establish their own independent states at the east provinces of the Ottoman Empire. They better knew that they needed to get some foreign help to achieve their ambitions. They used their Christian identity versus Muslim Identity to get more support from the Christian world. But they needed something to pull the Turks towards them, so they used some important activities in both Istanbul and Anatolia like the bombing events and rebellions. They achieved their aims of getting the Turks against them, and they did not see these specific events enough, so they got armed during the wartime. The Turkish government had to do something immediately, and decided to relocate the Armenians from their provinces to be less threatened by the government.
The deaths of most Armenians happened during these relocations, but the conditions, both geographic and other causes like Kurdish groups or the Circassians or the chettes, were not predicted by the Turkish government. Most of the Armenians died because of several reasons like starvation, illness and also with some other groups mentioned above. So, Lewy argues that it is not genocide that happened by the Turks, because there were not any intentions to annihilate the Armenians. The Turks’ main concern was to make the country safer. The sources also show this truth according to Lewy, even though there were many sources in which people complained about the Turks, but Lewy does not find these reliable.
Fatih BALCI, University of Utah
Arif AKGUL, Washington State University
Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Australia released internal communication documents about the “Events of 1915” under the Freedom of Information request made last month.
The letter requests DFAT to disclose “ANY” correspondence about “Armenian Genocide” and or “Armenian Massacres” from 1 January 2014 onward. . .
A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond
by Meline Toumani
Hardcover, 286 pages, Henry Holt & Co, List Price: $28 | purchase
NPR Summary
Documents the author’s experiences as an Armenian-American who was raised in a close-knit community and her provocative decision to move to Istanbul to learn the realities of Turkish citizens she was taught to hate.
Read an excerpt of this book
Excerpt: There Was And There Was Not
1
When We Talk About What Happened
I had never, not for a moment, imagined Turkey as a physical place. Certainly not a beautiful place. But it was all I could do to get through my first taxi ride from the Istanbul airport into the city—the first of perhaps a hundred on that route, as I came and went and came back again and again over the span of four years before I was finished—without letting the driver see me cry. I shifted a bit so that my face would not be visible in the rearview mirror.
The sight of water was what did it. Istanbul is a city laced by three seas: the Marmara, the Bosphorus Strait, and the Black Sea. This struck me as utterly absurd. From as early as I knew anything, I had known Turkey only as an idea: a terrifying idea, a place filled with people I should despise. Somehow, through years of attending Armenian genocide commemorations and lectures about Turkey’s denial of the genocide, of boycotting Turkish products, of attending an Armenian summer camp whose primary purpose seemed to be to indoctrinate me with the belief that I should fight to take back a fifth of the modern Turkish state—somehow in all of that, it never occurred to me to wonder what Istanbul, or the rest of Turkey, looked like. And here it was, a magnificent, sea-wrapped city, as indifferent to my imagination as I had been to its reality.
Was it anger I felt, something like what James Baldwin described when he recalled descending in a plane to the American South for the first time and seeing the stunning red hills of Georgia below him? “This earth had acquired its color from the blood that dripped down from the trees,” Baldwin wrote. I felt something like that, and the thought that now formed in a place I didn’t know I still had within me was: how, after everything they’ve done, do they get to have a place that looks like this?
No, that’s not true. Anger was only what I was supposed to feel, what I perhaps even hoped to rekindle, when I arrived in Turkey, alone, looking out the window as the water chased the road all the way to my hotel. What I actually felt was loss. Not the loss of a place, of a physical homeland—that was for others to mourn. This had never been my homeland. The loss I felt was the loss of certainty, a soothing certainty of purpose that in childhood had girded me against life’s inevitable dissatisfactions; a certainty that as a college student and later as a journalist in New York City had started to fray, gradually and then drastically; a certainty whose fraying began to divide me uncomfortably from the group to which I belonged, from other Armenians. The embracing, liberating expanse of Istanbul’s waters, and the bridges that crossed them, and the towers on hills that rose up and swept down in every direction, made me realize upon sight that I had spent years of emotional energy on something I had never seen or tried to understand.
This was 2005. I had come to Turkey that summer because I am Armenian and I could no longer live with the idea that I was supposed to hate, fear, and fight against an entire nation and people. I came because it had started to feel embarrassing to refuse the innocent suggestions of American friends to try a Turkish restaurant on the Upper East Side, or to bristle when someone returned from an adventurous Mediterranean vacation, to brood silently until the part about how much they loved Turkey was over. I came because being Armenian had come to feel like a choke hold, a call to conformity, and I could find no greater way to act against this and to claim a sense of myself as an individual than to come here, the last and most forbidden place.
Does it sound like I’m exaggerating? Is there such a thing as nationalism that is not exaggerated?
* * *
WHEN WE TALK about what happened, there are very few stories that, once sifted through memory, research, philosophy, ideology, and politics, emerge unequivocal. But there are two things I know to be true.
One: I know that if your grandmother told you that she watched as her mother was raped and beheaded, you would feel something was yours to defend. What is that thing? Is it your grandmother you are defending? Is it the facts of what happened to her that you are defending, a page in an encyclopedia? Something as intangible as honor? Is it yourself that you are defending? If the story of the brutality that your grandmother encountered were denied or diminished in any way, you would feel certain basic facts of your selfhood extinguished. Your grandmother, who loved you and soothed you, your grandmother whose existence roots you in the world, fixes you somewhere in geography and history. Your grandmother feeds your imagination in a way that your mother and father do not. Imagination is farsighted; it needs distance to discern and define things. If somebody says no, what your grandmother suffered was not really quite as heinous as you’re saying it is, they have said that your existence is not really so important. They have said nothing less than that you don’t exist. This is a charge no human being can tolerate.
Two: I know that if somebody tells you that you belong to a terrible group of people, you will reject every single word that follows with all the force of your mind and spirit. What if somebody says to you that your history is ugly, your history is not heroic, your history does not have beauty in it? Not only that, you don’t know your history. What you have been taught by your mother and your father and your teachers, it’s false. You will retreat to a bomb shelter in your brain, collapse inward to protect yourself, because what has been said to you is nothing less than that your entire understanding of who you are is in danger. They will have said to you that your existence is without value. You, who wondered now and then what the meaning of your life was, who made a soft landing place for those worries by allowing yourself to feel a certain richness about where you came from and who and what came before you, will be left empty. The story you thought you were a part of does not exist. Neither do you exist.
Those accusations and their consequences are the first truths we must recognize when we talk about what happened between Armenians and Turks in the Ottoman Empire in 1915. A century after those events, Armenians and Turks—in Turkey, in Armenia, and especially in the widespread diasporas of both countries—believe in two radically different accounts of what happened. “Believe.” It is not a matter of faith, yet it might as well be for the power that these clashing narratives hold.
What did happen? I will tell you—but I am Armenian. It is almost impossible for me to talk about this history. Not because I find it painful to talk about—for me to claim that particular pain would be self-indulgent—but because the terms of the conversation have evolved to leave me no satisfactory options. To tell the Armenian version of the story goes against every instinct in me, not because I disagree with it—I do not—but because I know that even if I wanted to believe that the thing in question did not fit the definition of genocide, it would be impossible for me to find my way into that belief. Even if you wanted to believe that I am objective, it would be impossible for you to do so. I also know the pleasure of healthy contrarianism; so when I encounter an outsider who has been intrigued by the Turkish version of this history, I understand his desire to fancy himself open to an alternative point of view. But then I find myself inflamed, needing to convince him all the more. I am doomed to be what is known as an unreliable narrator. I hate the way it feels.
Newspaper articles dispense with the controversy in the first or final paragraph of any news report concerning Turkey and Armenia:
“Turkey denies that the deaths constituted genocide, contending the toll has been inflated and the casualties were victims of civil war. It says Turks also suffered losses in the hands of Armenian gangs” (AP).
“Turkey accepts that many Christian Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks but denies that up to 1.5 million died and that it amounts to genocide, as Armenia views it” (Reuters).
“The Turkish government says massacres took place in the context of clashes that related to Armenian groups supporting Russia against Turkey during World War I” (Bloomberg).
This expository shrug is the peace that copyeditors the world over have made with the issue that, more than any other, defines the collective psychology of Armenians and of Turks, defines their educations, the development of their cultures, their political horizons, and—let me not call it any less than it is—their souls. Because what else but your soul can we speak of when, one hundred years later in your otherwise liberal and tolerant life, the very sound of the name of a country makes your head blur and your limbs tighten?
Now and then governments get involved, by participating in what Armenians refer to as “recognition.” In my life, this general word, “recognition,” with its various potential applications in the vast and flexible English language, had by the time I was eleven or twelve come to denote, with Pavlovian consistency, only one thing: recognition of the Armenian genocide.
Recognition: It is sought and secured anywhere possible, from the city council of Milan to the parliament of New South Wales, Australia. It has been granted in the form of official resolutions, commemorative statements, and board decisions from institutions large and small, including the European Union and at least twenty countries, forty-three US states, various American cities from Santa Fe to Minneapolis, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and the New York Times. Their usage of the word genocide is tracked on lists that are ranked and counted each year in the run-up to April 24, Armenian genocide remembrance day.
For Armenians, recognition is not only institutional; tacit acknowledgment is expected on an individual basis, too. There was the thesis committee in college who reviewed my eighty-page paper about—what else could it be about?—the genocide; and there were friends (the subject has a way of coming up if you are Armenian) and boyfriends, too, and God help them if they tried to tease or argue.
Recognition means all of that, but what it really means is the United States Congress, that mysterious holdout, at once powerfully stubborn and surprisingly malleable and, as of yet, unwilling to fully appease the Armenians. Recognition means an official shift in terminology by the US president and the State Department, and one administration after another has withheld reprieve. On another level of importance, separated by an order of magnitude that straddles the realms of the possible and the inconceivable, recognition means Turkey.
To some Armenians, recognition means reparations from Turkey: to the true zealots, land; to the slightly more pragmatic, money. To most, it simply means the official usage of the word genocide. To me, it came to mean that I could no longer stand to attend any Armenian gathering, because it seemed that whether it was a poetry reading, a concert, or even a sporting match, it was always, ultimately, about the genocide.
Or was it? At some point I started to wonder. Not about what had happened, exactly, and not about whether the term genocide was applicable. It is clear that between 1915 and 1923, in Ottoman Turkey, a history-shifting number of Armenians, probably between eight hundred thousand and one million, were killed outright or driven to death on the watch of a government that was supposed to protect them; another million or so survived deportation to the Syrian desert or fled just in time to avoid it. These events echoed but exceeded earlier pogroms against Armenians, in the 1890s and 1909. The violence happened in fits and starts and was entangled with, though not fully explained by, the circumstances of World War I; and was complicated by the degrees to which different regional leaders throughout Turkey obeyed or defied central orders. In a few of the hundreds of towns and villages affected, Armenian nationalist committees seeking greater rights or independence staged violent resistance, and as a result, about thirty thousand Turks and Kurds were killed by Armenians, too. Of the 2.5 million Armenians then living in the Ottoman Empire, a few thousand men in border cities joined the Russian army against the Turks. When the fighting was over, only two hundred thousand Armenians were left in Ottoman lands, lands Armenians had called home for twenty centuries. Armenians had faced genocide. And the empire that had contained and then expelled them was itself dissolved and reborn as the Republic of Turkey.
What I started to wonder about was whether “recognition”—propagating the usage of the word genocide to every corner of the world like a smallpox shot—was what we really needed. Arguments for recognition spoke of “justice” or “honoring the memory,” but these had turned into hollow platitudes for me. Claims that human rights were at stake seemed disingenuous; and when Armenian lobbying groups yoked the cause to a platform of saving Darfur, it seemed motivated more by PR than conscience. Then there was that well-intentioned but unattainable promise, the favorite argument of first and last resort, repeated over and over by scholars and laymen alike: “Never again.” That if a tragedy were recognized by the world, if massacre were transfigured into punishment and compensation, such a horror would not be repeated. Doesn’t all evidence suggest that this is untrue?
Let me put it less coldly: I wondered whether our obsession with genocide recognition was worth its emotional and psychological price. I wondered whether there was a way to honor a history without being suffocated by it, to belong to a community without conforming to it, a way to remember a genocide without perpetuating the kind of hatred that gave rise to it in the first place. And as I questioned the underlying needs that drove my own community, I wanted to understand what drove Turks to cling to their view. Why couldn’t they admit it? This was the simple (or simplistic) question that took me to Turkey.
In both Armenian and Turkish, a particular phrase signals the start of a story: “There was and there was not.” In Armenian, Gar u chgar. In Turkish, Bir varmis bir yokmus. There was, and also there was not, a long time ago, in a place far away, an old man, a talking horse, a magical kingdom. Once there was, and once there wasn’t. It is an acknowledgment not only of the layers and complexities of truth in a given story, but of the subordination of a storyteller to the tale she tells. It is my way of saying that this is where we find ourselves now—locked in a clash of narratives that confuses outsiders, frustrates officials, stifles economies, and warps identities—and no matter what was or was not, this is where we must begin.
Earlier this year, protestors in Los Angeles called for recognition of, and reparations for, the 1915 Armenian genocide executed by Ottoman Turks.
David McNew/Getty Images
Writer Meline Toumani grew up in a tight-knit Armenian community in New Jersey. There, identity centered on commemorating the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during World War I, a history that’s resulted in tense relations between Armenians and Turks to this day.
In her new book, There Was and There Was Not, Toumani recounts her attempts to understand Turkey and the Turkish people — people she was always taught were her bitter enemy. She also explores what she calls the Armenian community’s “obsession” with genocide recognition, which she herself harbored.
“There would be moments where I felt almost embarrassed by a certain deep-seated prejudice in me,” Toumani tells NPR’s Eric Westervelt. “For example, if a friend comes back from vacation in Turkey and they’re talking about it and I’m kind of bristling or brooding and just waiting for that to be over because I know that I can’t say what I feel — which is, you know, ‘I would never go to Turkey. The Turks, you know, killed the Armenians in 1915.’”
Interview Highlights
There Was and There Was Not
A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond
by Meline Toumani
Hardcover, 286 pages purchase
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Read an excerpt
On why she decided to move to Turkey, a sort of forbidden place for Armenians
I’d have these feelings rise up in me and they didn’t fit anymore in the life that I had created, which was otherwise very progressive and intellectually oriented. And that was when I decided I kind of need to explore this. And through a series of events, it entered my mind that exploring it would mean going to Turkey, talking to Turks; not to try to take seriously the Turkish version of the history of the genocide, but just to understand how does it happen that another group of people have learned this history in a completely different way leading to a completely different conclusion? And is there any way that we can connect if I find the right way to talk about it, or the right way to listen about it?
On being attacked on Armenian-American news sites for taking on this project
It’s actually surprisingly painful given that I’ve just written a book that describes the kinds of attitudes that lead to that kind of criticism. … I knew that there would be people who would feel that way, and yet part of what my book is about is this incredible tension between belonging to a community and trying to individuate from it.
And it’s sad for me to see that some people are so threatened that they’re not even willing to engage, because most of the people publishing those attacks haven’t read the book. In fact, one of them celebrates the fact that he hasn’t read it and in the same breath calls for a boycott.
On how people in Turkey reacted when they learned she was Armenian
I was perhaps recklessly optimistic in thinking that things wouldn’t be quite as bad in Turkey regarding the Armenian issue as I had been taught to believe. … In some ways, they were even worse. The thing that shocked me the most was the fact that on a daily basis, you know and this is over the course of two and a half years of living there, people would find out that I was Armenian and sometimes the reaction would be so blunt: “Well, I guess you came here to prove that there was a genocide. I want you to know that I don’t believe that that’s what happened.” Or something like that. And those moments were really jarring and made it very difficult for me to ever really relax. There was a lot of stress in my daily life.
And I want to be clear, of course, that I also had the opposite reactions, you know. There was a young man who I met outside of a restaurant with some friends, just totally at random on a Saturday night, and when he found out I was Armenian he put his hand over his heart and he said, “I want to welcome you back to your country and I want to apologize on behalf of the Turkish nation.”
So I would have every manner of reaction, but to be honest, most of the reactions ranged from pretending I hadn’t said anything at all to saying something sort of blunt and harsh.
On where relations between Turks and Armenians stand today
It was a few years ago already that I left Turkey. And in the time since then, there have been some big changes. For example, on April 24, 2014 — which was the 99th-year commemoration of the Armenian genocide — in Istanbul you had several events commemorating the genocide openly and without any kind of the contorted language that you might have had in the past.
Also [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan made a statement that was very much falling short but at the same time really breaking new ground in acknowledging that something tragic had happened to the Armenians. And although he, you know, was very careful not to call it a genocide and to say everyone suffered and to use a lot of the same rhetoric that he has always used, I consider it a major step.
Born in Iran and ethnically Armenian, Meline Toumani grew up in a close-knit Armenian community in New Jersey, where the genocide of Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Turkish government in 1915 and hatred of the Turks were defining facts of life. In 2005, Toumani did the unthinkable and moved to Istanbul on a quest to understand how to remember a genocide without being crippled by it.
You went to Turkey because you “could no longer live with idea that I was supposed to hate, fear and fight against an entire nation and people.” Could you describe the process that led you to that position?
Coming from a family that was not directly involved in the genocide and that had a very strong sense of Iranian-Armenian ethnicity gave me a little bit of space to question and look from the outside. At home our identity was many things, but it wasn’t really about hating Turkey or being obsessed with the genocide. But when I participated in community activities, which was all the time, it came to me that this was a dominant part of our identity as a community. Since I didn’t have that direct experience and I didn’t have a grandmother who had told me some horrific story about what she had suffered, I had one foot in and one foot out.
So, without questioning the reality of the genocide, you began to wonder whether focusing on genocide recognition was helpful for your community?
I definitely wasn’t questioning what happened. When you’ve been immersed in something like that for your entire life, it’s a part of you. But it began to feel to me that the community was not psychologically well.
A lot of that manifested for me in looking at creativity and expression within the community. The [genocide] narrative was holding us hostage. As an Armenian, whatever you do has to serve that in some way–through your volunteer work or as a playwright or a musician or whatever. You’re not just addressing the history or the culture. You’re addressing this political impasse. A piece of writing that sets out with a political agenda is going to be limited from the beginning. You can’t explore its emotional and psychological dimensions freely.
Early on in my work I tried to frame it in a political way: “genocide recognition campaigns are bad for Armenia because it’s creating a climate in which diplomatic relations can’t be established.” I was trying to establish a geopolitical argument for why genocide recognition was problematic, but it’s more about an existential condition than it is about a political argument.
At one point you use the phrase “soft recognition”: the idea that you can make changes one person at a time. Is that where you started when you got to Turkey? I don’t think it’s where you ended.
I’m very glad that you understood that. That is where I started and that’s not where I ended. I had this vision that if there were just a certain way to portray the Turks to the Armenians and a certain way to portray the Armenians to the Turks, and if I could behave in a certain way as an Armenian among Turks, I could open up some speech where people would realize that the other side wasn’t so bad.
Then [Armenian journalist] Hrant Dink was assassinated. He was the ultimate case of someone really trying to connect and he was murdered because of it. Not in spite of it but exactly because of it. That moment had a huge impact on me. I was well into the project, and it really threw me for a loop as to what was I really doing here. Especially when I went back to Turkey and experienced discrimination and intolerance for Armenians every single day in so many ways large and small, spoken and unspoken. My intention was to be diplomatic and tactful and pleasant in talking to people and not offend anyone and not be too belligerent with Turks because I wanted to open up the pathway to communicate.
After two and a half years–this comes toward the end of the book–I realized I had to get out of there because I’d completely lost track of what I believe in. That led to a lot of self-questioning about what set me off into this project in this first place. The way I ended the book is that it really wasn’t about Turkey or Armenia or the genocide, but about how to find a way to individuate yourself.
Your title, There Was and There Was Not, has such a fairy-tale quality.
I’ve been waiting a long time to tell somebody about the title!
When I first started, the working title was “Silence and Madness.” The idea was that you have this overwhelming silence on the subject on the part of Turkey and this growing madness in the Armenian diaspora and these two things play off of each other. As I got further and further into the work, I realized silence wasn’t relevant any more in Turkey. Hrant Dink was murdered and suddenly there wasn’t silence anymore.
Then I was sitting with my parents at a café in Yerevan [Armenia]. We had been shopping in the outdoor market and my mom had bought a bunch of books. She opened one and started reading from it in Armenian: “There was and there also was not.” I heard that a million times growing up in stories. The previous week in Istanbul, in a Turkish class, we had been reading a story that started, “There was and there also was not.” I suddenly was struck that we started the stories in exactly the same way. I told my parents about having read that in my Turkish workbook. My dad said, “That’s your title!” We looked at each other–you can’t say that because that’s like you’re saying there was a genocide and there wasn’t a genocide. Then I realized it captured exactly what I was trying to do with the book in all sorts of ways.
I felt at first hamstrung by the fact that I’m an Armenian telling the story and [thus] expected to be an unreliable narrator. I was really attached to the narrative ambiguity of what happens when someone tells you a story and they tell you at the outset that there was and there was not. The storyteller puts that on you from the beginning and you have to sit with it the entire time.
What do you hope readers will take away from your book?
My biggest fear, to the extent that I want to reach Armenian and Turkish readers and have an impact on the conversation between the communities, is that the people who read only the first two chapters will completely misunderstand. Armenians who read the first chapters will think I’m some kind of traitor and hate me for it. And the Turks who only read the first two chapters will think, “Oh great, Armenians are just as crazy as we thought.”
You answered in terms of Armenian and Turkish readers. What about other readers?
Often the immigrant experience comes to us in a cute package, like My Big Fat Greek Wedding. “Oh look at the funny old grandmother in her black widow costume and the aunt who’s trying to feed you.” That’s a very real part of the immigrant experience in America in a lot of ethnic groups, but it underplays the extreme existential crisis that comes from having that kind of bifurcation in your life. This is not a cute clichéd thing about bringing egg rolls to school when all the other kids have sandwiches. There is crisis in a lot of different parts of your life and your psyche when you have that experience. Perhaps I darken it a bit? –Pamela Toler
In 2005, Armenian-American journalist Meline Toumani traveled to Turkey–a place she had previously known only as “a terrifying idea”–with the intention of studying Armenia-Turkey relations for a month or two, three at the most. She stayed for two years, with the help of regular “visa runs” over the border. The result of her immersion in a culture she had been trained to “hate, fear and fight” is There Was and There Was Not: A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia and Beyond, an engaging and deeply personal exploration of ethnicity, nationalism, history and identity.
The conflicting Armenian and Turkish narratives regarding the massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 defined the Armenian diaspora community of Toumani’s childhood. On the one hand, Turkey has historically denied that the massacre existed, or minimized the scale of the deaths. On the other hand, the Armenian community focuses substantial energy on campaigns designed to pressure the Turkish government to recognize the massacre as genocide. Toumani had reached the point where the dominance of the genocide narrative felt like an artistic and emotional chokehold. She set out to Turkey in an attempt to answer two questions: How could she honor her history without being suffocated by it, and why do Turks cling to their version of the events of 1915?
Toumani brings the reader along on a voyage of discovery that begins with her growing doubts about the emotional, psychological and political costs of the Armenian diaspora’s focus on Turkish recognition of the genocide; it ends with Toumani defying rules about neutrality in the press box by screaming her support of Armenia at a World Cup match between Armenia and Turkey in Istanbul. In between, she tells a story riddled with unreliable narrators, unreliable listeners, lost memories, lost history, false assumptions and real places transformed by the imagination. She establishes the constantly shifting ground of her experience at the beginning when her plane lands in Istanbul and she realizes she has never imagined Turkey as a physical place. She is stunned by the country’s beauty and charmed by what she describes as the “particular sweetness of Turkish manners”; she actively enjoys learning the Turkish language. (The contrast between Toumani’s phobia about speaking Armenian and her delight in learning Turkish is typical of her skilled use of irony and reversal to enrich her narrative.) At the same time, she is repeatedly dismayed and occasionally enraged by the ways in which Turkey erases traces of the Armenian past: the opening ceremony of a newly renovated Armenian church as a UNESCO world heritage site that makes no reference to Armenians; a museum visit in which she discovers that hundreds of years of Armenian civilization in Anatolia don’t appear on the time line or the map; brochures and travel guides that describe Armenian artifacts in southeastern Turkey but never identify them as Armenian.
Moving between Turkey and the Republic of Armenia, Toumani shares her experiences of events as important as the assassination of Turkish-born Armenian journalist and civil rights activist Hrant Dink and as small as the street vendors calling their wares on the street outside her apartment. She finds friends and allies among the Turkish activists, journalists, scholars and lawyers who have taken up the Armenian issue, often at the risk of prison or worse. She speaks to millionaires, dentists and cab drivers; Turkish scholars dedicated to cooperating across ethnic lines and Turkey’s official historian; Turkish-Armenians and Armenians from the former Soviet republic; Kurds, Turkish nationalists and an ethnic Turk who refuses to identify himself as Turkish. She encounters Turks who are uncomfortable with the fact that she is Armenian and Turks who struggle to find a point of connection (described by Toumani as the “narcissism of small similarities”).
Over the course of the book, the clear-cut oppositions with which Toumani begins her project become more nuanced. Even the unity of the Armenian community itself becomes more complex as she examines the different concerns of the diaspora; Turkish-Armenians (described by members of the diaspora community as Bolsahay–a term that avoids describing them as Turkish) and citizens of the Republic of Armenia; those whose families survived the genocide and those whose families were not directly involved; and the ideological divide between those who support the activist Dashnak Party of the Republic and those who do not.
There Was and There Was Not is neither a history of the genocide nor an examination of its political ramifications for the modern world. It is the story of one woman’s attempt to understand her community, its fundamental assumptions, and herself. Written in a conversational style that is by turns heart-wrenching and unexpectedly funny, There Was and There Was Not will appeal not only to those interested in questions of the Armenian genocide but to readers interested in the larger questions of how individuals define themselves within communities and how communities define themselves. –Pamela Toler
Metropolitan Books/Holt, $28, hardcover, 9780805097627, November 2014
