Street theater scares children, shocks nation

Wednesday, March 5, 2008
TDN

Celebrations in Aşkale, Erzurum, include workers dressed up as Armenians acting out hanging an imam and murdering a family before being killed themselves by high school students playing the Turkish militia. While the mayor defends the event as educational, experts, commentators and newspapers call for an end to such displays of animosity

ANKARA – TDN with wire dispatches

The 90th anniversary of the liberation of the eastern province of Erzurum's Aşkale region was celebrated there Monday, with municipality workers – in a staged event – dressed as members of an Armenian gang sending the imam to the gallows, torching the mosque and bayoneting a doll in a crib, to the alarm of many locals.

The daily Sabah described the story as “shocking” on its front page yesterday, and Hürriyet's headline read, “The mentality in this day and age.”

The daily Radikal's front page headline was, “This disgrace should end.”

The celebrations began with town administrator (kaymakam) Zeyit Şener, Mayor Ahmet Yaptırmış and Regional Commander Captain Ertuğrul Yavuz laying a wreath at the Atatürk statue in the town square.

Just like in previous years, celebrations continued with municipality workers dressing up as Armenians and playing out a massacre committed by Armenians over 90 years ago. The workers first sat around a table and drank alcohol – actually cold tea – before acting out torching the local mosque. Murat Billur, a barber who played the imam in the play, was hung from the makeshift gallows in the town square as he recited the call to prayer.

The workers then acted out the murder of a family and bayoneted a doll in a crib to screams from the town's children.

The play ended with Aşkale High School students, who played the Turkish militia that freed the town from occupation, attacking and “killing” the workers.

Yaptırmış, of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), defended the play. They repeat the event every year, he said, so children will always remember what happened. “Keeping these sentiments alive will give us an honorable future,” he said.

“There are no bans. I don't think children will be affected adversely,” he said.

‘We are ashamed'

Municipality workers who played the Armenians said the mayor issued orders and they obeyed.

One worker, Celal Akar, said his family, friends and neighbors criticized him for playing an Armenian. “Sometimes they even make fun of us. We don't want to be part of the play, but when the mayor says it we can't object. We have been doing this for at least 20 years,” he said. The municipality is responsible for the organizing the event, but Şener was upset when he saw the play. “Next year's celebrations will be without Armenians,” he said.

Media, experts criticize the event:

Burning and stabbing people in front of children is very harmful for young and impressionable kids, said psychologist Alanur Özalp, speaking to Hürriyet. “We all saw teenagers being exploited in the murder of Hrant Dink and priest (Andrea) Santoro. When asked, these teenage murderers said, ‘He was Turkey's enemy. They told me to go and kill him.' Such scenes should not be repeated when we are trying to rid ourselves of the image of barbarian Turks,” she said.

Celebrations portraying Turkey's neighbors as enemies have ended in many regions in Turkey, said Erdun Babahan, editor-in-chief at Sabah, in his column yesterday. “As long as your children grow up watching things like this, it will never be hard to find teenage triggermen to do bad jobs,” Babahan said.

There is a difference between teaching history to children and becoming ugly and rude while doing so, said Hürriyet's Oktay Ekşi in his column yesterday. “Isn't there a more civilized way of teaching history to children? Which is right? Teaching civilization and peace, or animosity to future generations?”

Ekşi asked how teachers and parents could make their children, who were obviously shocked and scared, watch such scenes. “Now do you see how those who murdered Dink and Santoro grow up? Now do you understand what Rakel Dink meant when she said, ‘Nothing can be done without questioning how a baby can become a murderer,'” he said.

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.

The horrible legacy of genocides

By Fawaz Turki, Special to Gulf News
Published: October 27, 2007, 01:07

Recep Tayyip Erdogan: call your lobbyist in Washington. Congressmen there, choosing a bad time to pick a fight with Ankara over a century-old dispute, are determined to put Turkey and the US on a collision course.

Early this month, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives voted to declare the massacres of roughly a million Armenians by Young Turks in 1915 to be genocide.

The full House has yet to vote on the resolution, but the Turkish government, reacting angrily, immediately recalled its ambassador, hinted at denying the American military use of its vital supply line at Incirlik airbase, and threatened to launch a major ground offensive in northern Iraq in pursuit of guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), who in the past two weeks have killed well over two dozen Turkish soldiers. A messy situation was about to get messier.

Turkey considers the question of Armenian genocide not only a sensitive issue, virtually taboo in the public debate, but places it under the rubric of "insulting Turkishness" in the penal code, for which a conviction will get you three years in jail.

To this day, 92 years after the incidents, Turkey continues not only to obfuscate the facts surrounding the massacres but to deny them outright. Very simply, you don't bring up the issue, but if you must do so, accept the official version: a "mere" 300,000 to 600,000 "died" at the time, and their deaths were "the unfortunate consequence of war".

That is the version modern day Turks learn at school from their sanitised textbooks, which barely mention the tragedy. They thus grow up with little comprehension of its scope.

Turks must own up

It's a mystery why Turks do not want to own up to their past and why they persecute those intellectuals and academics in their midst who do.

The novelist Elif Shafak, author of the critically acclaimed The Bastard of Istanbul, and Orhan Pamuk, the 2006 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, have both faced charges of (you guessed it) "insulting Turkishness" when they spoke up.

And Taner Akam, a prominent professor of history at the University of Minnesota, opted not to return to his homeland after writing his seminal work Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, in which he meticulously chronicled the destruction of the Armenian community whose members where hunted down and slaughtered throughout their habitat by the Ottoman military.

Hundreds of thousands of others were deported to what was then called Greater Syria or, in Arabic, Bilad Al Sham. For what are these Armenian enclaves that exist in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine and Iraq today, but the survivors of that dreadful act?

If this narrative is not factual, and these figures are wrong, and the killing of Armenians was indeed the "unfortunate consequence of war", then the Turkish authorities have nothing to fear of an open debate at academic conferences and panel discussions devoted to exploring the issue.

By silencing or incarcerating those who have something to say, you make a pact with the devil who will shield your history and your name from shame. But the devil will return one day asking for his fee to be paid.

Turks should exercise their right to throw a backward glance at their past without fear of retribution, in the name of intellectual integrity of nothing else.

Congressmen on Capitol Hill, however, opting to probe another nation's historical experience and pass judgment on it, is another story. If these folks are such titans of moral rectitude, guardians of the truth, why not pass a resolution, say, identifying the mass killings and deportations of Chechens by Stalin's regime in 1944 as genocide?

At the time, in February that year to be exact, in the dead of winter, Russian troops, after slaughtering thousands who resisted, deported virtually the entire population of Chechnya to the Kazakh steppe in Central Asia.

About half a million Chechens were loaded on trains, like cattle, and expelled. As many as 78,000, men, women and children, among them the elderly, the sick and the infirm, died on the road from starvation and the cold.

Or a resolution condemning Israel for its genocidal acts in Deir Yassein in 1948 and the ethnic cleansing it mounted against the entire population of the twin cities of Lydda-Ramlah that same year? Or the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 against 500,000 Tutsis, whose misfortune was that they belonged to the wrong tribe?

Why not, you ask? Because Chechens, Palestinians and Tutsis do not have large, organised communities with arm-twisting lobbies in Washington.

And, yes, I do share the Turks' anger, indeed their outrage, at Congressmen, pandering to constituents in California, who feel entitled to dig into the long-gone past of a country half way around the world and issue it a report card.

Here's how it should be done. Instead of souring their relationship with the US or embarking on an ill-conceived military adventure in Iraq (heaven knows we don't need another of these over there!), Turkish parliamentarians should give their counterparts in Washington a taste of their own medicine: they should pass a resolution, in the same cavalier fashion, condemning the United States for the genocide it inflicted on Native Americans and African Americans almost two centuries ago. And leave it at that. Deal?

Fawaz Turki is a veteran journalist, lecturer and author of several books, including The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile. He lives in Washington D.C.

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.

Turkish PM: There was no Armenian genocide

Sep 29, 2007
Jerusalem Post, Israel
By MICHAL LANDO, JERUSALEM POST CORRESPONDENT
NEW YORK

Isn't this a big surprise that the Turkish PM denies the Armenian Genocide by the Ottoman Turks? The whole issue by Turkey's PR is to change the fact of the Armenian genocide into a debate. It is also so clear how the pressure put by Turkey on Israel and the US is allowing Erdogan to deny the genocide with impunity. The genocide denial is a matter for all people. It is not a question between Armenia and Turkey. So please stop pulling the wool on the eyes of the readers.

In a meeting with representatives of the Jewish community, Turkey's prime minister rejected allegations that the massacre of Armenians during WWI was an act of genocide.

Speaking with officials from the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish American Organizations, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Congress and other groups, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said the genocide claims were not supported by any scientific or historical documentation.

Erdogan also reiterated Turkey's call to Armenia to establish a joint commission to study historical facts, and asked the Jewish representatives to continue to support good relations between Turkey and the US Jewish community, according to a statement released following the meeting.

After disagreement between its New England chapter and national headquarters, the ADL in August recognized the massacres of Armenians as "tantamount to genocide," reversing the organization's longstanding refusal to do so. ADL's recognition stopped short of supporting two congressional resolutions that would call on the US to formally recognize the genocide.

ADL national director Abraham Foxman reiterated Wednesday that the issue should not be the subject of congressional resolution, according to MSNBC.

"We believe that a matter between Turkey and Armenia related to history should be tackled between the two parties, not in the US Congress or the parliament of any other country," he said. "This is not a political matter and those in the Congress are not historians."

"I believe that we should focus on the future, not the past. If the Jewish community, the United States and the Congress are willing to assist, they should bring together Turkey and Armenia for the [sake of the] grandchildren of the two parties," Foxman said.

ADL's national policy-making body is expected to discuss the congressional resolutions at its annual meeting on November 1.

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.

BREAKING INTO A MAN'S WORLD

Jan 27th 2005
The Economist

TURKISH industry is dominated by two vast family businesses, both of which have recently handed over their top jobs to a new generation of 40-somethings. The Europeanised Koc group passed the reins to Mustafa Koc, the eldest of the chairman's three sons, in 2003. But before Sakip Sabanci died last year, he let it be known that he wanted neither of his two brothers nor any of their numerous male offspring to succeed him as head of the far more traditional Sabanci family business. Rather, he chose his niece, Guler. It was a choice that he had been hinting at for at least a decade.

Running a sprawling conglomerate with annual sales of $12 billion and interests ranging from banking to cars, and from energy to food, is a challenging task that comes at a particularly challenging time. In December, EU leaders finally agreed to begin accession talks with Turkey on October 3rd this year.

Behind her unconventional lifestyle--she lives alone and mixes with painters and popstars--lies a tough, conservative businesswoman who takes only carefully calculated risks; one reason, say her business associates, why her uncle anointed her as his successor. Some of her male cousins were so offended that one of them, Demir Sabanci, is rumoured to have sold all his shares in the company last month, because he could not stomach being bossed by a woman.

Her toughness came to the fore recently when she withstood pressure from the state to fire Halil Berktay, an eminent Ottoman historian at the university. He had dared to suggest that Turkey's Armenian minority may have been slaughtered in large numbers by Ottoman forces during the first world war.

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.

Turkey begins self reflection over Armenia

Jan 21, 2005
Yahoo News

ISTANBUL (AFP) - While an exhibition in Istanbul devoted to the daily life of the Armenians in Anatolia at the start of the 20th century is breaking attendance records, Turkish society is beginning to reflect on the Armenian question, erased from official history for the past 90 years.

"In Turkey, history has always been taught about one people -- the Turks, as if there had never been any other people on the territory. When we speak of Armenians, they are not described as an integral group of society but as a source of problems," explained Osman Koker, exhibition director.

"It's to fill this void, because I have an 11-year-old daughter who is getting this kind of education at school, that I have decided to publish a book and put on this exhibition," said Koker, an historian turned editor.

"Without this realisation, it will remain impossible to discuss the events of 1915," he said, referring to the Armenian massacres committed between 1915 and 1917 by the Ottoman armies.

Several state-subsidised organisations continue to conduct research aimed at showing that if there was a genocide, it was more likely committed by Armenians against the Turks.

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.

Turkish Historical Society Chairman Says He Can Provide Documents On How Armenians Massacred More Than 519,000 Turks

12/17/2004
Turkish Press
Anadolu Agency

ANKARA (AA) - Turkish Historical Society (TTK) Chairman Prof. Dr. Yusuf Halacoglu has stated that there is no document that could lead to accusation of Turkey with the so-called Armenian genocide. ''However, I can easily provide documents how 519,000 Turks were massacred by Armenians along with the names of villages these Turks lived in,'' said Halacoglu.

Halacoglu remarked that the issue of the so-called Armenian genocide must be discussed extensively and in details by a committee of scholars from Turkey, Armenia, Great Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Russia and the United States who will convene to study Russian, British, American, French and Armenian confidential and classified documents. ''Those who continuously talk about genocide should reveal what they had in their own archives. Lets see what they have in Hinchak archives. We will possibly see in that archive how the Armenians massacred Turks, and how they planned such brutal acts, and why they massacred Turks,'' told Halacoglu.

Halacoglu said that they opened Ottoman archives and they even put it into internet. Halacoglu further expressed that based on their studies in the archives worldwide, they have not come across even with a single document that may prove Armenian claims of a genocide. ''Did the Armenians suffer difficulty which could be termed as a tragedy? Yes. Yet the Turks suffered more than the Armenians. The Muslims suffered a true tragedy. Armenians constantly claim that there was a genocide committed by Turks. We must note that the Armenians can not refer to any document which may prove that there was indeed a genocide. The bottom line is that the Armenians are lying.''

''The meeting between Turkish and Armenian delegations were planned to be held in Vienna in 2005 after two processes of document exchange. But this meeting seems not certain. If they do not show up in this meeting, we will make public the documents we have.''

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.