To forget or to remember, that is the question

Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Turkish Daily News

By Işıl SARIYÜCE, Istanbul

Is Turkey's national identity built on amnesia? What are the biggest difficulties for Turkey when the country is confronted with its own history? Can facing history open the way for societal peace?

Sunday afternoon at Bilgi University Turkey's leading academics debated ways to sort out the country's relationship with its past by discussing if Turkish national identity is based on forgetting the past before 1923, when the republic was founded.

It is normal that in the periods of transition, during the Bolshevik revolution for example, systematic amnesia plays a role in identity-building because people identify themselves with the rupture, said Ahmet Insel from Galatasaray University. However in Turkey, it goes one step further, he added. “In our case, there is a big denial of the past and of events that happened before the republic, which is different than the experiences of other countries where rupture does not include denial and ignorance,” he said.

While Turkey's policy is to systematically forget the past, the West constructs its history by systematically remembering, he claimed. Efforts in Turkey to face its past are met with bad reactions, he said. "Instead of trying to understand, to criticize or to excuse the realities of the past, we have tried to circumvent them. We have never debated whether the execution of Adnan Menderes, a former president killed after the 1961 coup, was a right decision or not or if the court was null and void, but instead we have given the name “Adnan Menderes” to Turkey's third largest airport and to a university."

According to Turkish perception, he said, “All the good in history belongs to the Turks and all the bad to the ‘others.'” This view does not bring any advantage, he argued. “Writing a new history that includes the good as well as the bad is very important,” he emphasized. “This would make it possible for society to reach a level of real self-reliance.”

While Insel insists on the importance of re-writing history, Altan Öymen, a journalist and writer, underlines the importance of evaluating the facts in the historical context. I have listened to both sides on the Armenian massacres, he said, but could not decide whether it was genocide or not. I want to find out who is responsible, he argued, because I do not want to carry what Enver Pasha or Talat Pasha - the ones who decided on the Armenian forced migration - did on my shoulders my whole life. However, he also insists that while discussing 1915, the date the genocide is believed to have begun, one must not ignore that it was a time of war.

Some historians warn that “wrong” attitudes about history can create pathology in society. When people try to deny the realities of the past, this refutation builds up society's relation with history in a way that is askew, said Murat Belge, a historian from Bilgi University. This ignorance can open the road to paranoia and its results are pathological, he emphasized. “Just as denying the past is traditional, like denying an Armenian genocide, pathology is also traditional,” he said.


Turkey is already in the process of facing with its history:

While Belge refers to medical science discussing society's attitudes, doctor and clinic psychiatrist Murat Paker is more optimistic about Turkey's process of facing its history. There is no regime change, no external drive, no losing a war but bit-by-bit, Turkey is facing its history, he said. "That's why nationalism is on the rise. This society has begun to talk about the Kurdish issue - we could not pronounce the word Kurd 10 years ago - the Armenian issue, the 1980 military coup and the military's role in politics, and even if it is not sufficient, it is a step forward." Turks are beginning to understand what kind of lies they are confronting, he said “What we must do is to systematize these non-official and non-systemic efforts of facing history and to try to realize them in official platforms as well."

Underlining that there are wars and crimes in history involving all of humanity helps Turkey to get rid of its phobia of facing its history, said Ayşe Hür, a sociologist from Boğaziçi University. According to her, Turkey's intelligentsia is also stuck in the nationalism paradigm. Every “proposition” about historic facts, such as the Armenian question or the Kurdish question, coming from outside is considered as an imposition and the reaction is “we can solve our problems inside our house.” It is not possible to solve them internally anymore, she said, because these subjects, from now on, are global. She agrees on the view that the concept called “Sevres paranoia,” the feeling that the other countries are trying to divide Turkey derived from the Treaty of Sevrés of 1920, is one of the biggest obstacles to Turkey facing its history.

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.