Rubina Peroomian, UCLA, [email protected] "Truth is Not Only Violated by Falsehood; it May be Equally Outraged by Silence" or The Suppression of the Memory of the Armenian Genocide in Turkey Beginning from the inception of the Turkish Republic, the CUP (Committee of Union and Progress, also known as the Young Turk party) policy of Turkification resumed full force and was implemented upon ethnic and religious minorities, among them the Armenian remnants of the 1915 Genocide. The Armenian cultural revival in Constantinople, between 1918 and 1923, was cut short by the encroachment of the Kemalist army and Mustafa Kemal’s eventual control over the entire country. The CUP ideology of “Turkey for the Turks only” was revived but camouflaged by a less threatening and inherently more inciting notion of “One Nation, One Language, One Religion!” The goal was achieved not only by impositions on the Republic’s infrastructural domains, especially the educational system and media, but also by the implementation of special laws and regulations, such as the abolition of non-Turkish surnames in 1934,1 denying Armenians, among others, who could claim Armenianness by a name that related to their ancestors. This was followed by the 1942 wealth tax (varlik vergisi), extreme and disproportionate taxation levied on non-Muslims, stripping them of their belongings, driving them out of business. The 1955 pogroms, 6-7 September, against Greeks spreading over Armenians as well, was another show of intolerance against non-Muslim ethnic minorities. The policy of Turkification was accelerated by the 1960s campaign highlighting the 1928 slogan “Fellow citizen, speak Turkish! (Vatandaş, Türkçe Konuş!) prohibiting the use of any language but Turkish.2 1 Even before the promulgation of The Law on Surnames, No. 2525, June 21, 1934, which prohibited surname suffixes denoting a minority ethnic identity, non-Muslims chose to change their surnames to avoid discrimination and harassment in schools and in the society as their names betrayed their ethnic identities. Changing of surnames, voluntarily or forcibly under the law, did not, however, prevent the discrimination and persecution. 2 Significantly, beginning in 1965, the State Institute of Statistics omitted the question from the census concerning a person’s mother tongue, the presumption being that Turkish is the only mother tong in the country with no other option. 1 Conversion to Islam, forced or voluntary, was always an open option for minorities to escape ongoing discrimination, harassments, and persecutions —most of the times unrewarding however. Another option was to leave everything and get out. In any case, the winner was the process of homogenization of the Turkish society and the forging of Turkish national identity, idealized in a society of Turkish citizens across the Republic of Turkey whose language was Turkish and whose religion was Islam. The policy of forced Turkification was coupled with the suppression of the memory of the pre-Republican era which signified, on the one hand, the enforcement of a nationalistic and selective historiography and educational policy to achieve a prescribed Turkish national identity for all; on the other hand, it portended a conspicuous Silence over the atrocities committed against Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Speaking or writing about this subject became a taboo, a punishable transgression. This Silence was enforced both on the Armenian community, mainly in Istanbul,3 and on the Turkish society at large. Unable to speak and write freely and to express the lasting pain of the recent past, Armenians in Istanbul refrained from speaking out or writing at all. They were always cautious to stay within the boundaries of tolerated ethnic expressions. In my latest work,4 I have shown the alternative literary direction chosen by Turkish-Armenian literati to be that of universalism, singing the love, hope, dreams, yearnings, pains and sufferings of mankind and the struggle for equality and justice in this unjust world. The county’s tight censorship, however, did not tolerate even these expressions of universal dimension. Armenian writers along with their Turkish counterparts, modernized intellectuals struggling for the realizations of a freedom and justice in Turkey, were persecuted as leftist elements. 3 Istanbul became the only locale in Turkey where Armenian life still persisted. This occurred gradually as the survivors of the Armenian Genocide were not allowed to return to their hometowns and villages; then, in the 1930s by the orders of Mustafa Kemal another wave of deportation drove Armenians out of the interior of the country; and again, as living in the hostile and discriminatory environment, surrounded by intolerant Turks and Kurds, forced Armenian remnants to leave their belongings and migrate abroad or to Istanbul. The successive governments of the Republic of Turkey were able to accomplish what the CUP had begun, and that is the cleansing of the Armenian element in the interior. 4 Rubina Peroomian, And those who Continued Living in Turkey after 1915, The Metamorphosis of the Post-Genocide Identity as Reflected in Artistic Literature, (Yerevan: Published by the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute, 2008). 2 In the sphere of education of Armenian youth in Istanbul, the Turkish government pursued a policy of control over the Armenian schools and their curricula, eliminating sensitive subjects such as Armenian history, especially history of the recent past, geography of historic Armenia, literature of nostalgia or patriotism. Using the name Western Armenia and speaking about the pre-Republican massacres and deportations of Armenians was not tolerated. The Government’s policy aimed at obstructing the transmission of historical memory from a generation to the other. However, this does not mean that the silence dominating public expression was not broken by an audacious teacher, or a parent at home, or by skilled writers and poets who circumvented direct expressions by using symbols and allusions, ambiguity and double meaning to let out their cries of suffering past and present. Hagop Mintzuri (1886 Armadan, Agn – 1978, Istanbul) describes his village and the thriving Armenian life before the War, as if to provoke the question, where are these Armenians now. He speaks of his own family, who were “driven away from their home” in 1915. Note the cautious way of putting it, instead of using the word exile or deportation. And this is in 1950s, after a long silence.5 Gourgen Terents (1888, Hajen – 1972, Istanbul) laments the impossibility of returning to his hometown and to the joys of his childhood. The subtle and hesitant echoes of pain, of nostalgia, and the cries for justice beginning in the late 1950s gradually gain momentum in Migirdic Margosyan's and later in Hrant Dink's writings. In a fairytale fashion, Margosyan (b.1938, Diyarbakir) tells the story of the kingdom of Aghajan Dayi, actually Aghajan’s house with many rooms rented out to Armenian families in the Khenchebek quarter of Tigranakert or the Gâvur Mahalle of Diyarbakir. These Armenians are all gone now, Margosyan notes, and other people live in their stead. The pomegranate and mulberry trees have dried up, and “We, the living remnants are yearning for our house, our pomegranate and mulberry trees and the shadow they used to cast.” 6 No mention of how and why they were gone! 5 Apparently, the memoirs of this old man and reminiscences of an old village published in Armenian papers did not arouse suspicion. They were for limited Armenian readers. Mintzuri’s works are only recently being translated into Turkish for the pre-war stories of Armenian life in Turkey to reach the Turkish audience. 6 This story was published in Marmara, an Istanbul Armenian newspaper, then as a collection of stories in Mer koghmere (In those places of ours) in 1984. The book was translated in Turkish and published in 1992, titled Gâvur Mahallesi. Margosyan has also published stories of the same genre in Turkish: “Söyle Margos 3 The imposition of Silence went smooth and uninhibited within the mainstream culture, education, and media. According to Ömer Türkeş, this was a result of the Turkish successive governments’ insisting on one and only one “national history,” in line with the official discourse, in which many socio-political issues were left out among them the Armenian issue. Indeed, Turkish writers have always been under pressure and dispossessed of their right to write history. The historical knowledge and the Turkish past for the generations of the Republican era began from 1923 with no awareness of the role or even existence of Armenians in the Turkish past history and culture. This phenomenon translated into silence in the Republican literature on the existence of Armenians as players and as a component of Turkish society; or it echoed at best in insignificant passing remarks. Moreover, the government policy of changing Armenian geographic names and the destruction of Armenian cultural and religious edifices throughout the country worked hand in hand with the enforcement of Silence over Armenian past and helped erase the memory of Armenians ever existing in the Turkish past. They were evidences of the Truth denied and had to be eliminated. In the atmosphere of government’s hostility and intolerance towards minorities and Armenians in particular, Armenian survivors of massacres and deportations were cautious not to speak about their traumatic experience and especially share them with their closest Turkish friends. That was the case in Constantinople which boasted having a cosmopolitan multiethnic, multi-religion society and a thriving cultural life. From the fear of discrimination and persecution and for the sake of the future of their offspring, Islamized Armenians as well as the many thousands of Armenian young women serving Muslims as servants, wives, concubines, or sex-slaves and thousands of orphans taken into Muslim households and Islamized kept silent. They tried in vein to forget their Armenian identity—name, language, and religion—and live with their new identities.