Nationalism rears its ugly head amidst ‘genocide’ debates

A republic that still, unfortunately, reflects an adolescent depression that doesn’t befit the experience of almost nine decades and that stems from both a lack of self-confidence and a lack of confidence vis-a-vis the entire world. The thorniest issues the government has dared confront are the Armenian and Kurdish issues. The government’s Kurdish initiative was launched last summer in order to find a solution to Turkey’s long-standing Kurdish problem through the expansion of the rights and freedoms of the country’s Kurds, who were long deprived of their fundamental rights.

As for the Armenian issue, following closed-door talks that were held through Swiss mediation for more than a year on ways to restore diplomatic relations and open their mutual border, Ankara and Yerevan announced on April 22, 2009, that they had reached an agreement on a roadmap to normalize their relations.

Leaving aside what has happened with the Kurdish initiative and looking to today’s situation regarding the Armenian process of normalization in the wake of the adoption of a resolution by the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs recognizing the atrocities against Anatolian Armenians under Ottoman rule during World War I as genocide earlier this month, some commentators have even suggested that the Turkey-Armenia normalization process is dead and that a funeral should be held for the protocols.

Mehmet Altan, a chief columnist for the Star daily, greatly appreciates the government’s courage in dealing with both of the issues.

“Ancient remnants are preventing the government from making further progress,” Altan told Sunday’s Zaman. “In its first three years, the government chose the world as its counterpart. By doing so, it carried the periphery of the country to the center and then the center to the world. But as soon as they faced a general election, it turned to the opposition parties, the Republican People’s Party [CHP] and the Nationalist Movement Party [MHP], as its counterparts and sacrificed its assertive policies to local politics,” Altan said.

The AK Party came to power in the fall of 2002 and was re-elected with overwhelming support in the July 2007 elections.

‘Persuading ourselves’

According to Associate Professor Mensur Akgün, the director of the foreign policy program at the İstanbul-based Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation (TESEV), right from the beginning of the normalization process with Armenia, the matter was a domestic policy issue.

“Since we couldn’t discuss what happened to Anatolian Armenians during the Ottoman Empire era among ourselves, we found ourselves in an awkward situation,” Akgün told Sunday’s Zaman.

“With its retaliatory messages either against the US or Armenia, the government is actually creating a mutual understanding on the issue. It is not easy to break long-held taboos in one go. On the other hand, there is an opposition bloc that is not rational at all. However, it is obvious that recalling envoys every time a country’s parliament makes a decision on the 1915 tragedy is not a way out, it leads to isolating yourself from the rest of the world,” Akgün went on to say.

As of Friday, Turkey’s ambassador to Sweden had arrived in İstanbul after being recalled on Thursday upon the Swedish parliament’s labeling of the World War I killing of Armenians by Ottoman forces genocide.

The Swedish vote came only a week after Ankara called its ambassador to the United States home after a US House committee approved the aforementioned resolution.

“The easiest and shortest way to end these complications is to hold a full-fledged debate on the issue inside the country. If we can persuade ourselves about what did or did not happen during those times of killings, then the issue in the international arena will not be as thorny to deal with as it is now,” Akgün said.

Earlier this week, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Turkey would not send its ambassador back to Washington until it gets a “clear sign” on the fate of the US resolution. Turkey’s message has already been received by the Obama administration, which displayed a “clumsy performance” with its delayed intervention regarding the issue, İlter Turan, a professor of international relations from İstanbul Bilgi University, told Sunday’s Zaman. “But Turkey should not keep its ambassador here any longer than necessary since Ankara will apparently have to exhaust much of its energy -- at least until April 24 -- on preventing US President Barack Obama from calling the Anatolian Armenians’ killings ‘genocide’ in an annual White House statement on the day marking Armenian Remembrance Day,” Turan added.

‘Race of nationalism’

“There is an opposition bloc that turned the issue into a race of ‘nationalism,’ and this doesn’t make life easier for the government,” Turan said, noting that from the start of this normalization process, the government should have tried obtaining the support of the opposition and made this a “national policy.”

Upon the US vote, the two main opposition party leaders, CHP leader Deniz Baykal and MHP leader Devlet Bahçeli, earlier this week called on the government to annul the protocols. However, also earlier this week, a senior Turkish diplomat desperately tried to explain that the US resolution, which Ankara expects will not reach the House floor, and the normalization process “must” definitely be dealt with as two separate processes that are independent of each other.

Fethiye Çetin is a middle-aged lawyer living in İstanbul. When Çetin was in her mid-20s, her devout Muslim grandmother, Seher, let her know a closely held family secret, the fact that Seher was actually born an Armenian Christian and was stolen from her parents by a Turkish cavalry soldier who went on to raise her.

A few years after Seher’s death in 2000, Çetin wrote a book titled “My Grandmother” and told of the sufferings of her grandmother, whose original name was Heranoush. Her book encouraged many other Muslim Turks to step forward and tell of their family’s similar stories during World War I.

Her remarks in an interview with Sunday’s Zaman held in August 2007 foreshadowed what Turkey actually needs to debate nowadays.

“The priority is about our history in breaking taboos. One cannot clear himself by saying that, for example, ‘The Armenian emigration took place during the Ottoman Empire era, and that as children of the Turkish Republic it is not our responsibility to face this reality.’ Because one should not make the mistake of placing the blame on the entire Ottoman state for the understanding of the İttihat and Terakki Party [Party of Union and Progress], whose ideology was that of purifying all Anatolia through the ‘Turkification’ of all its segments and whose understanding was embraced by the founding ideology of this republic,” Çetin said at the time, noting that the understanding of the party has cast a long shadow that continues to extend into the present day and has been embraced by today’s pro-establishment forces.