Turkey After The Armenian Genocide Conference
9-29-2005
Assyrian International News Agency
By Dogu Ergil
[...]
The speakers, or better deliberators, were all Turkish scholars serving at domestic or foreign universities to avoid prejudice against ill-willed foreigners. Among a sundry of topics some like, 'An Identity Squeezed Between the Past and the Present', 'Examples of Forgetting and Remembrance in Turkish Literature: Different Breaking Points of Silence', 'The Armenian Issue and Demographic Engineering', 'Scenes of Conscience through a Bitter History', 'From Heranush to Seher: A Story of "Salvation"', 'Mother Fatma, the Child of Deportation' and 'Thinking About the Stories of the Survivors of Deportation', suggest that the issues were not limited to just historiography and document rattling. That has been taking place for a long time. Both the Armenian and Turkish nationalists and 'official historians' have unfortunately narrowed down the discussion of this important matter to the acceptance or denial of "genocide". This radical stance has not only impoverished scholarship but has politicized the matter forcing individuals to take sides. In this ado, unfortunately the human side of the matter, the suffering of real human beings, no matter who they were, has been neglected. Indeed what we ought to start discussing is the human condition at the turn of the last century.
A multicultural society existed with different ethnic, linguistic and confessional groups. They were torn apart, their age-old relations were severed, an economy was shattered, the lives of ALL were changed irreversibly and forever. The majority of them had little to do with the fate they were forced to live through if they had not lost their lives in the chaos of World War One years.
[...]
[...] All of these are parts of the wider truth. But the truth is larger than that and larger than the lives of individuals or groups that were caught up in the turmoil of the decade between 1910-1920. [...] WW1 [...] ended with the dissolution of three major empires of the time, the Ottoman being one. [...] a rough estimate is that five million Turks or Muslims identifying themselves as Ottoman had to migrate into present Turkey and remaining territories. They left behind dead family members, their property and a life that had taken root on European soil in the past centuries.
They were frustrated, impoverished, uprooted and bitter. However, they had come to a friendly land where they were welcome and the government of the day compensated their loss to a certain degree. That is why they chose to forget. Did they forgive? Obviously not. [...] the ruling cadre in the last Ottoman decade was the government of the Committee of Union and Progress, better known as the Young Turks. The leading group, including the dictating triumvirate, Talat, Enver and Cemal Pashas of the Young Turks were basically of Balkan stock. [...] they brought their feelings of loss, betrayal (by the non-Muslim peoples of the empire who had attained their independence through painful struggles for national liberation by fighting against Ottoman officers and officials who were mainly members of the Union and Progress.
[...]. They made a conscious effort to prevent a second catastrophe by adopting the method of demographic engineering. There were two aspects of this engineering: 1) Removal of the Christians; 2) Mixing of the non-Turkish Muslims. The first method was territorial; the second was demographic engineering. [...].
Territorial mopping concerning the Armenians was put into effect with the official policy of deportation. It was an announced and acknowledged government policy of the time. However, territorial sterility was not only directed to these largest Ottoman peoples, it encompassed all Christian peoples, large or small including the more peaceful Assyrians in the southeast.[...].
[...] Armenians faced the harshest fate of all because there was no receiving state willing to compensate for their loss like the Bulgarians and the Greeks.
The present Turkish government bears no responsibility to what the adventurous Young Turks who led the Ottoman State into demise had done to the peoples whom they ruled over. They did not only deport Christian subjects, they sent armies totaling two million recruited from among Muslims to three continents and watched them perish in pursuit of their ambitious scheme of creating a Turanian Empire out of Turkic peoples. [...].Their Machiavellian political methods justified the means they used for their exalted end that never succeeded but consumed the lives of millions as well as their own.
[...]
What befalls on us is to acknowledge what happened to the Ottoman peoples of the time and why? [...]. Those days are left behind, not to be forgotten though. We must remember what has taken place; what ambitions, policies or impossible dreams have led to such large scale suffering then, so that we do not commit the same mistakes again. However, our primary duty is to understand what role our forbearers played and what we can do to ease the pain of those who still suffer today because they feel that their wounds are psychologically bleeding.
[...]
Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.
Assyrian International News Agency
By Dogu Ergil
[...]
The speakers, or better deliberators, were all Turkish scholars serving at domestic or foreign universities to avoid prejudice against ill-willed foreigners. Among a sundry of topics some like, 'An Identity Squeezed Between the Past and the Present', 'Examples of Forgetting and Remembrance in Turkish Literature: Different Breaking Points of Silence', 'The Armenian Issue and Demographic Engineering', 'Scenes of Conscience through a Bitter History', 'From Heranush to Seher: A Story of "Salvation"', 'Mother Fatma, the Child of Deportation' and 'Thinking About the Stories of the Survivors of Deportation', suggest that the issues were not limited to just historiography and document rattling. That has been taking place for a long time. Both the Armenian and Turkish nationalists and 'official historians' have unfortunately narrowed down the discussion of this important matter to the acceptance or denial of "genocide". This radical stance has not only impoverished scholarship but has politicized the matter forcing individuals to take sides. In this ado, unfortunately the human side of the matter, the suffering of real human beings, no matter who they were, has been neglected. Indeed what we ought to start discussing is the human condition at the turn of the last century.
A multicultural society existed with different ethnic, linguistic and confessional groups. They were torn apart, their age-old relations were severed, an economy was shattered, the lives of ALL were changed irreversibly and forever. The majority of them had little to do with the fate they were forced to live through if they had not lost their lives in the chaos of World War One years.
[...]
[...] All of these are parts of the wider truth. But the truth is larger than that and larger than the lives of individuals or groups that were caught up in the turmoil of the decade between 1910-1920. [...] WW1 [...] ended with the dissolution of three major empires of the time, the Ottoman being one. [...] a rough estimate is that five million Turks or Muslims identifying themselves as Ottoman had to migrate into present Turkey and remaining territories. They left behind dead family members, their property and a life that had taken root on European soil in the past centuries.
They were frustrated, impoverished, uprooted and bitter. However, they had come to a friendly land where they were welcome and the government of the day compensated their loss to a certain degree. That is why they chose to forget. Did they forgive? Obviously not. [...] the ruling cadre in the last Ottoman decade was the government of the Committee of Union and Progress, better known as the Young Turks. The leading group, including the dictating triumvirate, Talat, Enver and Cemal Pashas of the Young Turks were basically of Balkan stock. [...] they brought their feelings of loss, betrayal (by the non-Muslim peoples of the empire who had attained their independence through painful struggles for national liberation by fighting against Ottoman officers and officials who were mainly members of the Union and Progress.
[...]. They made a conscious effort to prevent a second catastrophe by adopting the method of demographic engineering. There were two aspects of this engineering: 1) Removal of the Christians; 2) Mixing of the non-Turkish Muslims. The first method was territorial; the second was demographic engineering. [...].
Territorial mopping concerning the Armenians was put into effect with the official policy of deportation. It was an announced and acknowledged government policy of the time. However, territorial sterility was not only directed to these largest Ottoman peoples, it encompassed all Christian peoples, large or small including the more peaceful Assyrians in the southeast.[...].
[...] Armenians faced the harshest fate of all because there was no receiving state willing to compensate for their loss like the Bulgarians and the Greeks.
The present Turkish government bears no responsibility to what the adventurous Young Turks who led the Ottoman State into demise had done to the peoples whom they ruled over. They did not only deport Christian subjects, they sent armies totaling two million recruited from among Muslims to three continents and watched them perish in pursuit of their ambitious scheme of creating a Turanian Empire out of Turkic peoples. [...].Their Machiavellian political methods justified the means they used for their exalted end that never succeeded but consumed the lives of millions as well as their own.
[...]
What befalls on us is to acknowledge what happened to the Ottoman peoples of the time and why? [...]. Those days are left behind, not to be forgotten though. We must remember what has taken place; what ambitions, policies or impossible dreams have led to such large scale suffering then, so that we do not commit the same mistakes again. However, our primary duty is to understand what role our forbearers played and what we can do to ease the pain of those who still suffer today because they feel that their wounds are psychologically bleeding.
[...]
Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.
posted by Vahe Balabanian at 11:59 AM
1 Comments:
I will be more at ease with the present day Turkish state if they stop honouring Talat pasha as a national hero. Their prime minister Erdogan visits his mausoleum every year to commemorate his assassination. It is like Germany building a mausoleum for Hitler and the German chancellor paying his respects. Good will starts here prime minister Erdogan, not by political manoeuvring to establish a joint commission with Armenia to revise the history of the region.
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