Reckoning with the Armenian Genocide. The Politics of Memory in Turkey

The filiation of ideas and praxis between the Ottoman era politics and modern Turkish politics is remarkable when it comes to the politics of memory. It is as if time has stood still, so striking and constant are the similarities. This is because the foundations are still there, untouched and untouchable insofar as they conceal a great crime, the Genocide of the Ottoman Armenians and its aftershocks, comprising all non-Muslim citizens as well as non-Turk and non-Sunni groups. 

The crime seems to have no guilty party, and is therefore anonymous. It remains unpunished, deliberately and collectively unlearned. Nevertheless, its ghost is everywhere, not only in the skies but embedded in the modern Turkish polity. Its power of disruption is phenomenal, almost supernatural. It is justice in reverse, retributive, in the sense that a century after the Genocide, Turkey is exhausted and de-institutionalised to a staggering degree. It seems that the unpunished crime has led to an indirect cathartic process that neither the Ottoman nor the Turkish polity was willing or able to undertake.

The question that remains is whether Turkey, currently in a state of moral, societal, economic, and political breakdown1, will finally be able to look at itself in the mirror and examine its conscience in order to save itself from its founding evil, to cleanse its soul as well as its being.

If so, it needs to build on the pioneering work of remembrance that has been done in recent years by the civil society, but which has been silenced for the time being by the unfeasibility of revealing extensively the founding crime. Any attempt to do so has the potential to challenge the very foundation of the nation.

However, throughout the last two decades the jinn of memory has come out of its bottle to discover the difficult paths of reconciliation between the peoples of the Ottoman Empire. Fortunately, these remembrance efforts, which originate in civil society, will remain.

Let’s explore Turkey’s multiple paradoxes and dilemmas deriving from its knots of memory.

1.   Modern Turkey and the Turkish nation were built on a catastrophe, namely the ethno-religious cleansing and annihilation of the non-Muslim communities of the late Ottoman Empire.

The Ottoman Empire collapsed, for the most part, under the blows of the emerging nations seeking to emancipate themselves from imperialism and cosmopolitanism. Beginning with the Greek uprising in 1821, various ethnic groups in the Balkans and Egypt, with the military support of the European big powers, succeeded in creating their own nation-States through warfare.

For the Turks, who were the last to attempt to create their own, a national soul was a necessity. It had to be invented to ensure the survival of the State inherited from the Ottomans and to continue to be part of the new concert of nations under construction. It was imperative that this nation be built on an optimal foundation capable of cementing the potential participants in the national project.

Alas, in the late Ottoman Empire, there was no motivation capable of uniting the majority other than the Muslim religion (obviously Sunni) which met this criterion; neither the ethnicity, nor the language, nor the history, nor the culture, nor a customs union (Zollverein), as was the case with the German unity.

Thus the new nation, whose main cement for its nationalist ideologues could only be Islam, could not and should not embrace or contain non-Muslims. The ethno-religious cleansing that began in 1894 with the first mass killings of Armenians lasted for thirty years, until 1924, when it was “crowned” by an exchange of populations with Greece, based on the religious faith.

In the end, circa three million citizens, Ottoman and then Turkish, which corresponds to around twenty per cent of the population of Turkey in the 1920s, were eliminated through various means: genocide, pogrom, forced exodus and population exchange. They were Armenians, Greeks, Jews and Syriacs.

2.  Paradoxically, the generalized decadence stemming from the founding evil, which helped build the nation, economy, socio-political ethics, politics and culture for over a century, has achieved an undermining work that is now decomposing the Turkish polity. This decomposition is, in fact, a kind of retributive justice for the atrocities of the past. To cope with this state of affairs and to start a healing process, a nation-wide memory work seems imperative.

On the other hand, the recognition of the Genocide and other atrocities as the founding acts of the nation seems teleologically infeasible, since it would be tantamount to questioning the very foundations of the nation. The dilemma appears far-reaching.

We know from experience that nations which have not acknowledged the atrocities and injustices of their past are condemned to live with them, with their ghosts, and will constantly be in the process of paying the price, however belatedly and indirectly.

Of course, retributive justice did not apply to the Ottoman Empire and Turkey. Turkey has not gone through its ‘Nuremberg’. The unique exception was the 1919 War Crimes Tribunal in Istanbul, which was under occupation of the victors of the Great War. These trials had no effect on justice: only two officials were convicted and their death sentences carried out. On the contrary, the perpetrators of the crimes committed against their fellow citizens got away with the mass slaughter and its material bounties. Even the two penalized officials were restored post-mortem, and their families were granted property.2

But did they really get away with it? It’s safe to assume that thirty years of intensive State-sponsored crimes (1894-1924) were retributed in another way, by perverting the entire polity, the State and society alike.

Indeed, how else can we understand the descent into hell of Turkey, not so long ago the region’s rising star? Is it not the country afflicted by a kind of curse stemming from a century-old untruth? Is it not the imprecation of men and women deprived even of coffins, of those unarmed Armenians as well as Greeks of the Pont-Euxin and Syriacs who perished on their own land?

Wouldn’t the inhabitants of present-day Turkey be traversed by interminable storms in their souls, caused by the ghosts that have been hovering in their skies for a hundred years, escorted by those of the Greeks and Syriacs, and later the Alevis and Kurds, of all their fellow citizens whom a dark destiny has struck down?

Because it doesn’t seem possible that a nation-State founded on a series of atrocities that led to the annihilation of twenty percent of its citizens, without any accountability for what happened, can continue to function normally.

From the point of view of socio-political ethics, unpunished crimes have given rise, on the one hand, to a public norm of non-accountability in the sense of ‘unaccountability’ and opacity and, on the other hand, to a culture of amorality, oblivion and lack of questioning. These patterns have become the dominant features of social behaviour, the modus operandi of political and social ethics. They have penetrated the life of the polity, the State, society and individuals alike, without them being aware of it. It is also thanks to the habitus of impunity and all the distortions it implies that the present regime through kleptocracy and the hyper-concentration of executive power, has managed to create in a few years an unprecedented institutional and moral graveyard.

At the macroeconomic level, with the disappearance of non-Muslim citizens, the non-Muslim bourgeois class, its production and trade skills, as well as the entire economic division of labour have dried up.

Historically speaking, the seizure and plundering of the property and capital of non-Muslim citizens by the State constituted the original basis of the national economy.

But then spoliation had a dreadful consequence for the polity: a culture of extortion and plunder became customary, often justified by the law of conquest (jihad), which allows for spoliation.

To make the long story short, a polity that has got away with a massive crime against its fellow citizens without any sense of responsibility, guilt, shame, accountability and memory is capable to digest any future evil of much lesser significance.

So the cathartic work does not appear merely as soul-searching or post-facto remorse, it constitutes the premises of an overall healing encompassing the polity. It seems increasingly imperative that without a cathartic work, Turkey will not be able to reconcile itself with the Armenians, the Greeks, the Kurds or anyone else, and above all not with itself in the form of a “social contract” in the noble sense of the idiom. Untying the knot of memory appears as a conditio sine qua non.

3. For the first time, a constructive work of remembrance was undertaken by a fringe of civil society in the early 2000s, yet the founding evil prevents its extension.

At the beginning of this millennium, it was fair to ask whether Turkey was on the threshold of constructing a new narrative for the Genocide and other crimes committed during the painful nation-building of the late 19^th and early 20^thcenturies. A language that would include more than just the victims themselves, thus paving the way for a shared memory between Turks and their Ottoman compatriots.

Indeed, in order to be substantial, coherent and lasting, memory works should be part of a societal dynamic, which would guarantee its capacity to influence lawmakers by prefiguring their action.

In this context, the Turkish politics of memory display three essential characteristics.

First, an amnesiac society like Turkey’s cannot reasonably be cured by the State, which has literally lobotomized it and silenced the past.

Secondly, whole swathes of Ottoman and later Turkish society have willingly embraced the work of de-memorizing imposed on them by the authorities in order to retroactively legitimize the spoliation of victims’ property, sometimes after having been the armed wing of ethnic cleansing, as in Central and Eastern Anatolia as well as the Pont-Euxin. It is no coincidence that the idiom “Armenian” or “Ermeni” in Turkish is an affront.

And thirdly, introspection only makes sense if it is rooted in the core of society, certainly more so in Turkey than in other countries with comparable pasts.

A powerful example of this pattern can be found in German Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt’s 1970 apology, the genuflection before the Warsaw Ghetto monument (Kniefall von Warschau), which was aloofly received by a Germany that was officially responsible for Nazi crimes, moreover, very active in the compulsory education about the Nazi past. The same reticence was observed during the construction of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, which caused profound public controversy. Similarly, the former East Germany, where Nazi crimes were buried under the leaden blanket of scientific socialism, still finds it difficult to revisit its past, and remains vulnerable to the ghosts of Nazism to a far greater extent than West Germany.

In Turkey, under the impetus of the country’s bid to join the European Union, a number of initiatives related to the politics of memory emerged in the early 2000s, exclusively from the civil society. The following is a non-exhaustive compilation.

Academic and scientific memory was called upon. A significant example is the historical conference held in November 2011 in one the sites of the crime, the Kurdish city of Diyarbekir, with the theme “Economic and social history of Diyarbekir and surroundings - 1838 to 1938”,3 which brought together the grandchildren of victims and perpetrators to evoke a shared memory. This was followed in November 2012, this time in Mardin, by another conference on the same theme, focusing on the Syriacs.

Under the heading of individual memory, many citizens started to dig deep to discover or rediscover non-Muslim ancestors in their families, who were converts, willingly or by force, or female orphans whose parents and male kinship were massacred. The end of the century-old silence has thus been transcribed in numerous books of testimonies.

In terms of public and collective memory, the December 2008 apology campaign4, which I had the honour of initiating, is just one of many examples. This appeal, launched on December 15 on the Internet by some 350 intellectuals and opinion leaders, has received 32,454 signatures. Along these lines, the public commemorations of the Genocide, the first of which took place on April 24, 2010 in Istanbul at the open air, should also be mentioned.5

Similarly, in 2005, at the fiftieth anniversary of the September 6/7, 1955 pogrom targeting all non-Muslim minorities in Istanbul, meetings, commemorations and various public activities were organized for the first time. In 2014, an international conference was held to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the expulsion of Greeks from Istanbul. The public use of the word “genocide”, although still indirectly forbidden by the penal code, has become increasingly audible.

As regards cultural and religious remembrance, numerous restoration projects were undertaken, often by local municipalities, on Armenian monuments and buildings ( Surp Kharch in Aghtamar, Surp Giragos in Diyarbekir, Surp Krikor Lusavorich in Kayseri, Surp Vortvots Vorodman in Istanbul) as well as Greek (Sumela Monastery) and Jewish (Great Synagogue in Edirne) holy sites.

In places of worship such as the celestial Greek monastery of Sumela on the Black Sea coast, masses were celebrated, often for the first time in almost a century.

Travelling exhibitions on Istanbul’s Armenian and Greek architects toured the country and abroad.

In fact, almost all the taboos were fractured in record time, paving the way for people to speak freely about their memories.

But in today’s liberticidal environment, all these actions are a thing of the not-so-distant past. One need only recall the denialist outburst of April 24, 20216, following President Biden’s utterance of the word ‘genocide’ in connection with the massacres, to lament the 180-degree twist.

However, it seems to me that ‘the jinn is out of the bottle’, never to return back, and that Turkey’s civil society will not give up, come what may, in order to uncover the truth, recover its memory and, by the same token, save its soul as well as the country’s future. One day, perhaps...

But today the fact remains that the failure is very tangible, and the founding evil prevents the archaeology of its genesis. Taken in the Greek sense of μνησικακία (grudge, resentment), the founding evil rots public consciousness. However, paradoxically, the less Turkey knows about the Genocide and other atrocities, the more it tries to ignore them, the sicker it becomes of them, so much so that the truth is ‘liberated’ when the rest of the world states the exact opposite of the Turkish taboo.

4. Today, the question is whether an extensive cathartic work could take place. How can Turkey act to reconcile its inner and outer selves? The consciousness of the civilizational loss due to ethno-religious cleansing could motivate an extensive search for the past, thereby facilitating a widespread memory travail.

Although an extensive cathartic work in the region is not panned for tomorrow, it is important to think about it now. The Armenian Genocide remains a profound and shared tragedy in the history of Anatolia—one that is still remembered in many villages as a devastating and unparalleled loss. The destruction of a rich and vibrant civilisation left a lasting impact. The events of 24 April 1915, when prominent Armenian intellectuals were rounded up in Constantinople, marked the beginning of this dark chapter and remain a powerful symbol of what was lost.

It is also important to reflect on the resilience of the survivors and the cultural and intellectual contributions they made in the countries where they found refuge. Yet, despite the depth of these endeavours, there remains a notable absence in Turkey of comprehensive academic work on the economic and cultural consequences of the Genocide within Anatolia itself. Survivor testimonies offer crucial insight, but scholarly engagement within Turkey has often overlooked these broader impacts. In many cases, Turkish economic history begins with the founding of the Republic in 1923 from ground zero, neglecting the substantial and complex economic life that thrived during the 19th century and was disrupted so abruptly.

Within this framework, the concept of genocide is not sufficient to cover all the consequences of the demented decision inflicted on the whole of Anatolia. In any case, the concept does not seem sufficient to explain what happened afterwards.

From the moment that the history of the Armenian disaster was, in a sense, uprooted, exported and revived outside Turkey and around the world, by the Diaspora, it lost a part of its narrative: it no longer speaks of post-1915 Anatolia. In this sense, shared memory is perhaps inscribed in the catastrophe that encompasses the ‘during’ and the ‘after’. Perhaps the designation of Mets Yeghern or Great Catastrophe needs to be reworked and redefined on the basis of shared memory, going beyond its original meaning in Genocide lexicology.7

The gulf between the term ‘genocide’, with which absolute terror is associated, and the present-day degeneration, is as wide as the gulf between the morbid decision taken in Istanbul by State authorities to deport and exterminate their Armenian citizens and the immense human tragedy that ensued in Anatolia.

In fact, countless grey areas remain between the victims of the genocide and the perpetrators. The fates are manifold: many Armenians had to change their identity to survive, some converted to Islam and remained Muslims, many others saved the lives of their Armenian neighbours, and all those who survived suffered the consequences of the Genocide as mentioned earlier. The catastrophe is theirs too.

The family and individual stories uncovered by Turkey’s nascent historical research reveal new dimensions of Anatolia’s catastrophe every day. They bear witness to a disaster that goes beyond the Genocide. In this sense, if the recognition of the Genocide is a matter of justice, the study of the Catastrophe can, for its part, cover the whole field of suffering. Consequently, it can help the modern polity to grasp the extent of the loss of civilization and incite for more memory works.

By the same token, remembrance work is needed for all the other ethnic groups and peoples massacred and displaced, who became victims of the emerging nations in the region that were conceived so to become homogeneous. The path to reconciliation between the citizens of the fading Ottoman Empire and its heir, Turkey, obviously lies here.

All things considered, the memory travails, even though hazardous for the survival of Turkey’s foundations, seem compulsory to save the country from moral, human, political and social disintegration stemming from their absence.