Mea Culpas, Negotiations, Apologias Revisiting the “Apology” of Turkish Intellectuals1

Mea Culpas, Negotiations, Apologias Revisiting the “Apology” of Turkish Intellectuals1 AYDA ERBAL “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Stephen Dedalus JAMES JOYCE, ULYSSES The long nineteenth century of the Ottoman Empire’s dismantling that star- ted with the Serbian revolt of 1804 culminated in a series of events leading to the years 1915-1918 during which the Christian populations of the Em- pire, among them Armenians, Assyrians and Pontic Greeks, were annihilat- ed in their homelands. Justified by the official narrative both as a response to the deportation and ethnic cleansing of Muslims from the Balkans and Russia and as a structural necessity to save the remains of the Empire, the last thirty years of Ottoman policies in the imperial territories that will be- come contemporary Turkey still remain a taboo. Even though since the 1990s there has been considerable change in the Turkish state discourse and policy,2 the Armenian Genocide and its institu- 1 I thank Marc Mamigonian and Axel Bertamini Çorluyan for their valuable cri- tiques and comments for several versions of this paper. I cannot thank Birgit Schwelling enough for her comments and patience during the editorial process. Lastly I would like to thank the participants of the Political Reconciliation and Civil Society in 20th Century Europe Workshop for their inputs. 52 | AYDA ERBAL tional and political/economic repercussions occupy the center-piece of this taboo. Among other things, contemporary street names and boulevards, schools and memorials honoring key figures in the planning and perpetra- tion of the Armenian Genocide3 offer testimony to the lack of the Turkish state’s institutional commitments regarding gross human rights violations. However, the Turkish state has not been the only enforcer of the taboo surrounding the issue of the Armenian Genocide. Turkish civil society and the academic and intellectual establishment within that civil society have also been either actively in denial or in some cases in service of a denialist state agenda or standing passively silent – another form of denial – for over 90 years. As a result, all late Ottoman historiography and the social scien- ces and related high school curriculum in Turkey4 have been highly proble- matic in their evident obscurantism in both historical and economic data concerning the late Ottoman and early Republican periods. Historical soci- ologist Taner Akçam’s pioneering work on the Armenian Genocide5 has been the first crack in the long history of silence in Turkey, yet its trickling down to the popular journalistic discourse in Turkey is still very limited. 2 For an elaborate take on the history of the change of the Turkish state discourse since the 1970s see Seyhan Bayraktar, Politik und Erinnerung: Der Diskurs über den Armeniermord in der Türkei zwischen Nationalismus und Europäisier- ung (Bielefeld: transcript, 2010). 3 Ahmet 0nsel, Katilden Milli Kahraman Olur Mu?, Radikal, 26 April 2004, http://www.radikal.com.tr/Default.aspx?aType=RadikalYazar&ArticleID=1047 371&Yazar=AHMET%20%DDNSEL&Date=26.04.2011&CategoryID=99. Un- less otherwise mentioned, all internet sources are accessed on 12 April 2012. All translations from Turkish by the author. 4 For an extensive debate on Armenian Genocide and Turkish high school curriculum see Jennifer M. Dixon, Education and National Narratives: Changing Representations of the Armenian Genocide in History Textbooks in Turkey, The International Journal for Education Law and Policy, Special Issue: Legitima- tion and Stability of Political Systems: The Contribution of National Narratives (2010), 103-126. 5 Taner Akçam wrote a series of books from Turkish National Identity and the Armenian Question (0stanbul: 0leti2im, 1992) to The Young Turks Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Em- pire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). MEA CULPAS, NEGOTIATIONS, APOLOGIAS | 53 The apology campaign initiated by four Turkish scholars in December 2008 and endorsed by over thirty thousand Turkish citizens, the subject matter of this chapter, might be considered as another “crack” in the long history of silence. I argue that despite the apology initiators’ presentation of the apology as a purely “personal” gesture, framing it as a matter of “con- science”, the campaign nonetheless cannot be viewed as falling outside the domain of political apologies. But their potentially important place in seem- ingly solving contemporary political crises aside, what are political apologies? Are they empty rhetorical tools with which states or citizens try to score public relations points in situations where there is neither the possibil- ity of a direct remedy because of passage of time, nor the willingness to fol- low a transitional democratization process with direct economic and/or political consequences including retribution and reparation? Do contemporary apologies rather “signify the death twitches of expiring moral systems”, and do those who complain about “disingenuous,” “inauthentic” or “commodi- fied” apologies suffer from nostalgia for a more principled age that proba- bly never have existed”?6 Are apologies new ways of “imagining”, hence transforming the “nation”? What kind of institutional or civil societal nor- mative commitments does the language of the state-to-state, state-to-many, or many-to-many apologies communicate, if any? What differentiates a successful apology from a pseudo or non-apology? What is the difference between apologia and apology? In order to analyze the apology campaign with regard to these ques- tions, I will first clarify the term apology by touching upon its evolution from the Greek word apologia (speech in defense) to the current word apology (a speech act of contrition), then very briefly go over the literature itself and possible political pitfalls both in the literature and actual acts of state-to-many and many-to-many apologies, the latter being a rarity itself. Secondly, I will also revisit the context and text of the Turkish intellectuals’ I Apologize campaign to position and analyze it within the parameters of the present literature on apologies. I argue that although the I Apologize 6 Nick Smith, I Was Wrong: The Meanings of Apologies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 2. 54 | AYDA ERBAL campaign is a move in the right direction for changing the lens7 of society by informing the public sphere of the necessity for recognizing that there is something grave to apologize for8, it falls short in too many aspects to be considered a successful apology that would lead to conciliation9. I also claim that the passive, unclear and negotiationist language of the text makes it more of an apologia in the old sense of word rather than an apology. While doing so I problematize the one-sided, top-down elitist/Jacobinist and preemptive/vertical politics of the preparation process of the “apology” text in which horizontal, large-scale deliberation clearly was lacking in at least two separate contexts: neither the necessity for nor the meaning of a personal apology, nor the wording of the text was widely discussed in the Turkish public sphere, nor were any Armenian representative organizations consulted about many issues ranging from whether they expected a personal apology to whether they approved the text of the “apology”. I also posit that this preemptive public negotiation, lacking deliberative input from the offended party, is offensive itself in its re-creation of historical vertical power politics once again to the detriment of the offended party.10 The non- 7 I thank Hella Dietz for the “changing the lens” metaphor she came up with during the discussions at the Political Reconciliation Workshop at the University of Konstanz. 8 This may not be a problem if one perceives apologies as repetitive performative actions to be bettered over time. In a parallel way Elazar Barkan argues in his The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (New York: Norton, 2000), xxix: “An apology doesn’t mean the dispute is resolved, but it is in most cases a first step, part of the process of negotiation but not the satisfactory end result. Often, lack of apologies, demands for apologies, and the refusal of them all are pre-steps in negotiations, a diplomatic dance that may last for a while, a testimony to the wish and the need of both sides to reach the negotiations stage.” 9 I use the term conciliation instead of reconciliation in this context. Turks and Armenians never dealt with equal terms neither during Ottoman nor Republican times. The period leading to genocide recognition and post recognition will be the first where they will overcome animosity, hence conciliate. 10 Aaron Lazare dedicated Chapter 10 of On Apology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 205-227, to the complex negotiation process between the offended and the offender before the actual apology gets publicized. MEA CULPAS, NEGOTIATIONS, APOLOGIAS | 55 deliberated public nature of the apology is offensive in the present because if the offended party does not accept the apology, it will look non-coope- rative and hostile. I finally argue that Armenians as a party not only disap- peared from the historiography and the land itself but also from what should have been a non-preemptive, dialogical process of apology. APOLOGIES IN PROCESSES OF (RE-)CONCILIATION Apologia or Apology? Most of the introductory courses in Western philosophy start with Plato’s Apology – a philosophical work in which Socrates could not be farther from being apologetic, as the term has come to be understood later. Instead he provides an apologia as was customary in the classical Greek system in rebuttal to the prosecution’s accusations. Its Greek root apologos means a story, from which apologia, an oral or written defense, will emerge and later be transformed into what we know as apology today. The Oxford English Dictionary11 omits any reference to apologos as a story and begins from the Greek apoloyia (apo, away, off; loyia, speaking), which is defined as a defense or speech in defense.

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