Nationalism and space in Southeast Turkey in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Nations and Nationalism 10 (4),2004, 559-578. Copyright ASEN 2004
KEREM OKTEM
University of Oxford, School of Geography and the Environment, Oxford, United Kingdom
This paper aims to develop a model for the ethno-nationalist incorporation of [...] ethnies considered as ‘others’ by [...] an emerging nation-state. It contends that one of the reasons for the recurring power and emotive force of nationalist discourse and practice stems from the disjunction between the complex history of a locality [...]. Based on the analysis of the empirical evidence of the case of the city of (Sanli) Urfa in Southeast Turkey, it argues that a ‘spatial perspective’ focusing on the locale might facilitate unveiling hitherto understudied aspects of local nationalisms, as well as the rather dark sides of most nation-building projects such as large-scale population exchanges or ethnic cleansing.
[...]
First, fervent minority nationalisms are provoked among non-dominant ethnies remaining in the incorporated territories, which often mirror the ideology of the nationalism of the dominant ethnie, and tend to be just as exclusionary. Second, unforgiving and sometimes revengeful versions of nationalist outlooks on the ‘other’ proliferate among the expelled ethnies in the Diaspora (e.g. in the case of Diaspora Armenians from Turkey).
[...]
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the mutual processes of nationalist incorporation and reproduction of space have worked towards the transformation of Turkey from a multi-ethnic territory into a mono-ethnic ‘homeland’. The logic of the nationalist project demanded that traces of the non-Turkish, and by extension non-Muslim (Armenian, Syriac Orthodox and Jewish) heritage should become invisible.
The disjunction between the nationalist vision of ethnic homogeneity and the material reality of Turkey’s vast territories presented the nationalist elites of Nationalism and space in Southeast Turkey the early republic, namely the Kemalists, with a serious predicament, even after deportations and large-scale population transfers had led to an ethnic homogenisation of most of the country. How was hegemony to be established over territories, hitherto populated by Kurds or Armenians, and just saved from being lost to other nation states and imperial powers? These were the questions the ideologues of Turkish nationalism such as Go¨ kalp (1968) tried to answer in the early 1920s.
Following analysis of the case of Israel, it is to be suggested that the Kemalists tried to strengthen their control of territory through employing the strategies and instruments of ethnocratic regimes. Ethnocratic regimes are usually supported by a cultural and ideological apparatus which legitimises and reinforces the uneven reality. This is achieved by constructing a historical narrative that proclaims the dominant ethno-nation as the rightful owner of the territory in question. Such narrative degrades all other contenders as historically not entitled, or culturally unworthy, to control the land or achieve political equality. Yet, the aim of this process of ethno-nationalist incorporation could not be achieved solely by adjusting the territory’s history to that of the dominant ethnie. The peripheral territory had to be incorporated materially as well. [...].
[...]
Strategies of destruction and neglect are directed at exterminating the ‘other’ as a material and historical entity and to render its traces in space and time invisible, or as Mann ( 2001: 216) specifies, they aim at wiping out ‘the cultural memory of a group’. Above all, the strategy of destruction is employed during times of war, when the apparent barbarism of warfare tends to provide an apology for large-scale evictions and ethnic cleansing. The Armenian pogroms of 1895 and the large-scale deportations and massacres of 1915, as well as the destruction of the houses, churches and cemeteries of Armenians and Syriacs, are examples of such a strategy.[...].
Capital accumulation through dispossession is not alien to the logic of capitalist development, yet a closer examination of how this has been done in Turkey might reveal how significant this dispossession was for the country’s future development. While the transfer of capital took place on several occasions, the infamous law of deportation and the subsequent Armenian massacres of 1915 was probably the most significant turning point in this respect. Virtually all immobile and most mobile possessions of the Armenians and Syriac Christians of East and Southeast Turkey were expropriated by the state, literally the moment they were evicted. Keyder summarises the role of the state in this process: ‘As the non-Muslim population was eliminated, their properties and position became part of the dowry of the new state, which could now distribute them to the population’. Special commissions rewarded this ‘dowry’ to resettled Muslim refugees from the Balkans, to local notables, or to the leaders of Kurdish tribes, whom the state hoped to urge to sedentariness. In many cases, the houses of leading Armenian families or clergymen were given to the tribal leaders, who had been at the forefront of the deportations and massacres. As local Kurdish and Muslim families benefited from this transfer of capital, they gained the political and intellectual power to defend their newly acquired status of wealth, while they remained indebted to the state.
[...]
[...] three [...] interrelated strategies, namely the ‘creation and dissemination of a hegemonic historiography’, ‘toponymical strategies of renaming’ and the ‘inscription of ethno-nationalist symbols’ into the geography [...] reassemble the multi-faceted longue-dure´e of geography and nature along the lines of the temporality of the nationalist project. [...]. Hegemonic historiographies are central components of nation-building projects. They render the historical vision of the dominant ethnie authoritative, and devalue the ‘other’, while they exalt the self. The Turkish History Foundation (Tu¨rk Tarih Kurumu) has been the principal institution in canonising the official historical discourse, which has been reproduced by many scholars of contemporary Turkey. According to these orthodox scholarly accounts (Shaw and Shaw 1976; Mango 1999; Lewis 2001), the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923 under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal, leader of the War of Independence, meant a complete break with Ottoman/Islamic history. The republic, according to these accounts, opened a blank page for a new nation, aspiring to reach the ‘level of contemporary civilisation’ through substantial modernising reforms, albeit under the supposition of a perennial Turkish territory. In the foundation’s publications, conservatively religious Turks, non- Turkish speaking Muslims and non-Muslims appear as the internal ‘other’. Armenians and Greeks are mentioned, if at all, as traitors and enemies in theWar of Independence, Kurds are euphemistically referred to as mountain Turks, while Syriac Christians are mostly ignored. The contributions of members of non-Muslim communities to Ottoman civilisation and culture are completely disregarded.
Toponymical strategies to rearrange the historicity of places are a logical consequence of this vision of history. During and after World War I, the change of place names was seen as an important strategy in the ‘language-battles of peoples’, and was widely employed in Europe in order to ‘preserve the language of the Volk’. When the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) declared the deportation law for ‘the ones opposing the government in times of war’ (27 May 1915), probably more than a million Armenians, Syriac Christians, and even some Kurdish communities were forced into exile and destruction. In only a few weeks, the government initiated the name change of evacuated villages. At the same time, these villages were swiftly resettled with Muslim refugees, pouring into the country from the Balkans and the easternmost provinces under Russian occupation. In a directive, the Chief of the General Staff and one of the three leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress, Enver Pasha, declared: It has been decided that provinces, districts, towns, villages, mountains and rivers, which are named in languages belonging to non-Muslim nations such as Armenian, Greek or Bulgarian, will be transformed into Turkish. . . . In order to benefit from this suitable moment, the goal of name change should be achieved as soon as possible. The campaign, however, had limited success as the CUP government collapsed and its leaders were tried for the atrocities committed during World War I. Yet, this first attempt to incorporate a multicultural geography into an ethnocratic national state might also be understood as a precedent for future policies. Attempts to change place names were repeated throughout the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. In 1956 the ‘Expert Commission on Name Change’ (Ad Degistirme Ihtisas Komisyonu) was established under the auspices of the Ministry of the Interior. [...]. It thus far has been demonstrated that the incorporation of the multicultural territory associated with the Kurdish and Armenian ‘other’ into an ethnically and religiously homogeneous Turkish homeland, worked through a number of interrelated strategies on the material as well as the discursive level. [...]. {In} the case of Urfa Up until the 1920s, Urfa, was a polyglot town with thriving Muslim, Armenian, Syriac and Jewish communities. Today it is an exclusively Nationalism and space in Southeast Turkey Muslim-cum-Turkish-cum-Kurdish city. [...]. Many Armenian and Syriac families owned the gardens and vineyards that the surroundings of Urfa have been famous for until recently, as well as land in the fertile Harran plain. The artisan sector was dominated by Armenian and Syriac Orthodox craftsmen. Probably even more consequential was the fact that almost the entire architectural production was in the hands of Syriac architects. As an elderly local of Urfa readily explained, ‘everything which has been built in this city before the 1920s is the work of Syriac craftsmen, be it houses for Muslims, Armenians or Syriac Christians, be it churches or mosques’.
After the pogroms of 1895, during which thousands of Armenians are believed to have died, the city witnessed material destruction and a serious economic and demographic decline. Yet, the turning point came when the nationalist government of the Committee of Union and Progress declared the ‘Deportation Law’ in 1915. The Unionists arguably designed the deportations and massacres as a pre-emptive measure to counteract the designs of the Entente powers to divide the empire into national territories along ethnic lines, as already implied in the Berlin Peace Treaty of 1878. The law was not implemented in Urfa until 10 August, when the Unionists sent two representatives to the city to supervise the deportations. Yet, even before the expulsion of great parts of the Christian community started, the city witnessed horrid moments. The law prescribed the deportation of all Armenians to the Syrian desert. However, as the main road between the northern provinces, which had large Armenian populations, led through Urfa, several hundred deportee-convoys passed through the city on their way to Syria.
[...]
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.
KEREM OKTEM
University of Oxford, School of Geography and the Environment, Oxford, United Kingdom
This paper aims to develop a model for the ethno-nationalist incorporation of [...] ethnies considered as ‘others’ by [...] an emerging nation-state. It contends that one of the reasons for the recurring power and emotive force of nationalist discourse and practice stems from the disjunction between the complex history of a locality [...]. Based on the analysis of the empirical evidence of the case of the city of (Sanli) Urfa in Southeast Turkey, it argues that a ‘spatial perspective’ focusing on the locale might facilitate unveiling hitherto understudied aspects of local nationalisms, as well as the rather dark sides of most nation-building projects such as large-scale population exchanges or ethnic cleansing.
[...]
First, fervent minority nationalisms are provoked among non-dominant ethnies remaining in the incorporated territories, which often mirror the ideology of the nationalism of the dominant ethnie, and tend to be just as exclusionary. Second, unforgiving and sometimes revengeful versions of nationalist outlooks on the ‘other’ proliferate among the expelled ethnies in the Diaspora (e.g. in the case of Diaspora Armenians from Turkey).
[...]
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the mutual processes of nationalist incorporation and reproduction of space have worked towards the transformation of Turkey from a multi-ethnic territory into a mono-ethnic ‘homeland’. The logic of the nationalist project demanded that traces of the non-Turkish, and by extension non-Muslim (Armenian, Syriac Orthodox and Jewish) heritage should become invisible.
The disjunction between the nationalist vision of ethnic homogeneity and the material reality of Turkey’s vast territories presented the nationalist elites of Nationalism and space in Southeast Turkey the early republic, namely the Kemalists, with a serious predicament, even after deportations and large-scale population transfers had led to an ethnic homogenisation of most of the country. How was hegemony to be established over territories, hitherto populated by Kurds or Armenians, and just saved from being lost to other nation states and imperial powers? These were the questions the ideologues of Turkish nationalism such as Go¨ kalp (1968) tried to answer in the early 1920s.
Following analysis of the case of Israel, it is to be suggested that the Kemalists tried to strengthen their control of territory through employing the strategies and instruments of ethnocratic regimes. Ethnocratic regimes are usually supported by a cultural and ideological apparatus which legitimises and reinforces the uneven reality. This is achieved by constructing a historical narrative that proclaims the dominant ethno-nation as the rightful owner of the territory in question. Such narrative degrades all other contenders as historically not entitled, or culturally unworthy, to control the land or achieve political equality. Yet, the aim of this process of ethno-nationalist incorporation could not be achieved solely by adjusting the territory’s history to that of the dominant ethnie. The peripheral territory had to be incorporated materially as well. [...].
[...]
Strategies of destruction and neglect are directed at exterminating the ‘other’ as a material and historical entity and to render its traces in space and time invisible, or as Mann ( 2001: 216) specifies, they aim at wiping out ‘the cultural memory of a group’. Above all, the strategy of destruction is employed during times of war, when the apparent barbarism of warfare tends to provide an apology for large-scale evictions and ethnic cleansing. The Armenian pogroms of 1895 and the large-scale deportations and massacres of 1915, as well as the destruction of the houses, churches and cemeteries of Armenians and Syriacs, are examples of such a strategy.[...].
Capital accumulation through dispossession is not alien to the logic of capitalist development, yet a closer examination of how this has been done in Turkey might reveal how significant this dispossession was for the country’s future development. While the transfer of capital took place on several occasions, the infamous law of deportation and the subsequent Armenian massacres of 1915 was probably the most significant turning point in this respect. Virtually all immobile and most mobile possessions of the Armenians and Syriac Christians of East and Southeast Turkey were expropriated by the state, literally the moment they were evicted. Keyder summarises the role of the state in this process: ‘As the non-Muslim population was eliminated, their properties and position became part of the dowry of the new state, which could now distribute them to the population’. Special commissions rewarded this ‘dowry’ to resettled Muslim refugees from the Balkans, to local notables, or to the leaders of Kurdish tribes, whom the state hoped to urge to sedentariness. In many cases, the houses of leading Armenian families or clergymen were given to the tribal leaders, who had been at the forefront of the deportations and massacres. As local Kurdish and Muslim families benefited from this transfer of capital, they gained the political and intellectual power to defend their newly acquired status of wealth, while they remained indebted to the state.
[...]
[...] three [...] interrelated strategies, namely the ‘creation and dissemination of a hegemonic historiography’, ‘toponymical strategies of renaming’ and the ‘inscription of ethno-nationalist symbols’ into the geography [...] reassemble the multi-faceted longue-dure´e of geography and nature along the lines of the temporality of the nationalist project. [...]. Hegemonic historiographies are central components of nation-building projects. They render the historical vision of the dominant ethnie authoritative, and devalue the ‘other’, while they exalt the self. The Turkish History Foundation (Tu¨rk Tarih Kurumu) has been the principal institution in canonising the official historical discourse, which has been reproduced by many scholars of contemporary Turkey. According to these orthodox scholarly accounts (Shaw and Shaw 1976; Mango 1999; Lewis 2001), the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923 under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal, leader of the War of Independence, meant a complete break with Ottoman/Islamic history. The republic, according to these accounts, opened a blank page for a new nation, aspiring to reach the ‘level of contemporary civilisation’ through substantial modernising reforms, albeit under the supposition of a perennial Turkish territory. In the foundation’s publications, conservatively religious Turks, non- Turkish speaking Muslims and non-Muslims appear as the internal ‘other’. Armenians and Greeks are mentioned, if at all, as traitors and enemies in theWar of Independence, Kurds are euphemistically referred to as mountain Turks, while Syriac Christians are mostly ignored. The contributions of members of non-Muslim communities to Ottoman civilisation and culture are completely disregarded.
Toponymical strategies to rearrange the historicity of places are a logical consequence of this vision of history. During and after World War I, the change of place names was seen as an important strategy in the ‘language-battles of peoples’, and was widely employed in Europe in order to ‘preserve the language of the Volk’. When the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) declared the deportation law for ‘the ones opposing the government in times of war’ (27 May 1915), probably more than a million Armenians, Syriac Christians, and even some Kurdish communities were forced into exile and destruction. In only a few weeks, the government initiated the name change of evacuated villages. At the same time, these villages were swiftly resettled with Muslim refugees, pouring into the country from the Balkans and the easternmost provinces under Russian occupation. In a directive, the Chief of the General Staff and one of the three leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress, Enver Pasha, declared: It has been decided that provinces, districts, towns, villages, mountains and rivers, which are named in languages belonging to non-Muslim nations such as Armenian, Greek or Bulgarian, will be transformed into Turkish. . . . In order to benefit from this suitable moment, the goal of name change should be achieved as soon as possible. The campaign, however, had limited success as the CUP government collapsed and its leaders were tried for the atrocities committed during World War I. Yet, this first attempt to incorporate a multicultural geography into an ethnocratic national state might also be understood as a precedent for future policies. Attempts to change place names were repeated throughout the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. In 1956 the ‘Expert Commission on Name Change’ (Ad Degistirme Ihtisas Komisyonu) was established under the auspices of the Ministry of the Interior. [...]. It thus far has been demonstrated that the incorporation of the multicultural territory associated with the Kurdish and Armenian ‘other’ into an ethnically and religiously homogeneous Turkish homeland, worked through a number of interrelated strategies on the material as well as the discursive level. [...]. {In} the case of Urfa Up until the 1920s, Urfa, was a polyglot town with thriving Muslim, Armenian, Syriac and Jewish communities. Today it is an exclusively Nationalism and space in Southeast Turkey Muslim-cum-Turkish-cum-Kurdish city. [...]. Many Armenian and Syriac families owned the gardens and vineyards that the surroundings of Urfa have been famous for until recently, as well as land in the fertile Harran plain. The artisan sector was dominated by Armenian and Syriac Orthodox craftsmen. Probably even more consequential was the fact that almost the entire architectural production was in the hands of Syriac architects. As an elderly local of Urfa readily explained, ‘everything which has been built in this city before the 1920s is the work of Syriac craftsmen, be it houses for Muslims, Armenians or Syriac Christians, be it churches or mosques’.
After the pogroms of 1895, during which thousands of Armenians are believed to have died, the city witnessed material destruction and a serious economic and demographic decline. Yet, the turning point came when the nationalist government of the Committee of Union and Progress declared the ‘Deportation Law’ in 1915. The Unionists arguably designed the deportations and massacres as a pre-emptive measure to counteract the designs of the Entente powers to divide the empire into national territories along ethnic lines, as already implied in the Berlin Peace Treaty of 1878. The law was not implemented in Urfa until 10 August, when the Unionists sent two representatives to the city to supervise the deportations. Yet, even before the expulsion of great parts of the Christian community started, the city witnessed horrid moments. The law prescribed the deportation of all Armenians to the Syrian desert. However, as the main road between the northern provinces, which had large Armenian populations, led through Urfa, several hundred deportee-convoys passed through the city on their way to Syria.
[...]
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.
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