“Turkey denies the Armenian Genocide” goes a jingle. Yes,
the Turkish state’s official policy towards the Armenian Genocide was and is
indeed characterized by the “three M’s”: misrepresentation, mystification, and
manipulation. But when one gauges what place the genocide occupies in the
social memory of Turkish society, even after nearly a century, a different
picture emerges. Even though most direct eyewitnesses to the crime have passed
away, oral history interviews yield important insights. Elderly Turks and Kurds
in eastern Turkey often hold vivid memories from family members or fellow
villagers who witnessed or participated in the genocide.
This essay is based on countless interviews conducted
with the (grand-)children of eye witnesses to the Armenian Genocide. The
research results suggest there is a clash between official state memory and
popular social memory: The Turkish government is denying a genocide that its
own population remembers.
Oral history in Turkey
Oral history is an indispensible tool for scholars
interested in mass violence. A considerable collection of Armenian and Syriac
oral history material has been studied by colleagues.1 The existing body of
oral history research in Turkey, though gradually developing, has hardly
addressed the genocide. A potential research field was politicized by
successive governments and the Turkish Historical Society. Several
documentaries about the victimization of Ottoman Muslims in the eastern border
regions have included shots of elderly Muslims speaking about their
victimization at the hand of Armenians (and presumably Cossacks) in 1918. It
seems unmistakable that the Turkish-nationalist camp fears that the local
population of Anatolian towns and villages might “confess” the genocide’s
veracity and disclose relevant details about it. For example, the 2006 PBS
documentary “The Armenian Genocide” by Andrew Goldberg includes remarkable
footage of elderly Turks speaking candidly about the genocide. One of the men remembers
how his father told him that the génocidaires had mobilized religious leaders
to convince the population that killing Armenians would secure them a place in
heaven. Another middle-aged man recounts a recollection of his grandfather’s
that neighboring Armenian villagers were locked in a barn and burnt alive.2
In the past decade, I have searched (and found)
respondents willing to relate their personal experiences or their family
narratives related to the war and the genocide. In the summers of 2002 and
2004-07, I conducted up to 200 interviews with (grand-)children of
contemporaries in eastern Turkey, all semi-structured and taped. Needless to
say, oral history has its methodological pitfalls, especially in a society
where the memory of modern history is overlaid with myth and ideologies. Many
are unwilling to reflect about their family histories because they have grown
accustomed to ignoring inquisitive and critical questions, not least on their
own moral choices in the face of their neighbors’ destruction. Others are
reluctant to admit to acts considered shameful.3
But while some were outright unwilling to speak once I
broached the taboo subject, others agreed to speak but wished to remain
anonymous, and again many others were happy to speak openly, with some even
providing me access to their private documents. Even though direct eyewitnesses
to the crime have most probably passed away, these interviews proved fruitful.
Elderly Turks and Kurds often remember vivid anecdotes from family members or villagers
who witnessed or participated in the massacres. My subject position as a “local
outsider” (being born in the region but raised abroad) facilitated the research
as it gave me the communicative channels to at once delve deeply and recede at
the appropriate moments. It also provided me with a sense of immunity from the
dense moral and political field in which most of this research is embedded.
Turkish and Kurdish eyewitness accounts
A.D., a Kurdish writer from Varto (Muş), recalled a
childhood memory from 1966 when an earthquake laid bare a mass grave near his
village. The villagers knew the victims were Armenians from a neighboring
village. According to A.D., when the village elder requested advice from the
local authorities on what to do, within a day military commanders had assigned
a group of soldiers to re-bury the corpses. The villagers were warned to never
speak about it again.4
Interviews with elderly locals also yielded considerable
useful data about the genocide itself. For example, a Kurdish man (born 1942)
from Diyarbekir’s northern Piran district, had heard from his father how fellow
villagers would raid Armenian villages and dispatch their victims by slashing
their throats wide open. As they operated with daggers and axes, this often led
to decapitations. After the killing was done, the perpetrators could see how
the insides of the victims’ windpipes were black because of tobacco use.5
Morbid details such as these are also recorded by the following account from a
Kurdish man from the Kharzan region, east of Diyarbekir:
My grandfather was the village elder (muhtar) during the
war. He told us when we were children about the Armenian massacre. There was a
man in our village; he used to hunt pheasants. Now the honorless man (bêşerefo)
hunted Armenians. Grandpa saw how he hurled a throwing axe right through a
child a mother was carrying on her back. Grandpa yelled at him: “Hey, do you
have no honor? God will punish you for this.” But the man threatened my
grandfather that if he did not shut up, he would be next. The man was later
expelled from the village.6
Here is another account from a Turkish woman (born 1928)
from Erzincan:
Q: You said there were Armenians in your village, too.
What happened to them?
A: They were all killed in the first year of the war, you
didn’t know? My mother was standing on the hill in front of our village. She
saw how at Kemah they threw (döktüler) all the Armenians into the river. Into
the Euphrates. Alas, screams and cries (bağıran çağıran). Everyone, children
and all (çoluk çocuk), brides, old people, everyone, everyone. They robbed them
of their golden bracelets, their shawls, and silk belts, and threw them into
the river.
Q: Who threw them into the river?
A: The government of course.
Q: What do you mean by ‘the government’?
A: Gendarmes.7
These examples suggest that there still might be
something meaningful gained from interviews with elderly Turks and Kurds.
Needless to say, had a systematic oral history project been carried out in
Turkey much earlier, e.g. in the 1960’s or 1970’s, undoubtedly a wealth of
crucial information could have been salvaged. Besides the excellent research
conducted in Turkey by colleagues such as Leyla Neyzi, Ayşe Gül Altınay, and
others, interviews by individual researchers are at best a drop in the ocean. A
measured research project with a solid book as output would be a memorable
achievement for the centenary of the genocide.
Discussion
When I was traveling from Ankara to Adana in the summer of
2004, I stopped by the friendly town of Ereğli, north of the Taurus mountain
range. My friend, an academic visiting his family, had invited me along.
Strolling through the breezy town, we came across one of my friend’s
acquaintances, an “Uncle Fikri.” The old man looked sad, so we asked him what
was wrong. He said, “My father has been on his deathbed for a few days now.”
When we tried to console him, he answered: “I’m not sad because he will die, he
has been sick for a while now. I just cannot accept that he refuses to recite
the Kelime-i Shehadet before he passes on.” (Shahadah, the Muslim declaration
of belief: “There is no God but Allah and Muhammed is his Prophet.”) The man
looked deep into our eyes, there was an awkward silence for four seconds, we understood
each other, and we parted.
In this example, only two generations separated us from
the eyewitness generation. Therefore, I believe there might still be avenues
for oral history research on the genocide. Father Patrick Desbois is a French
Catholic priest who travels to Ukraine in a concerted effort to document the
Shoah through the use of oral history. His team locates mass graves and
interviews contemporary witnesses about the mass shootings of Jews, which often
took place just outside the Ukrainian villages they visit. The elderly
respondents usually remember the slaughter in vivid detail.8 Desbois’ work on
Ukraine has proven helpful in completing the already comprehensive picture
historians have of Nazi mass murder in that region. During a private
conversation, Desbois intimated that he would be interested in launching a
similar project in Turkey, if a viable initiative was proposed.9 It might be
worthwhile to gauge what place the Armenian Genocide occupies in the social
memory of Turks and Kurds, even after nearly a century. The conclusion would
undoubtedly warrant my introductory comment: The Turkish government is denying
a genocide that its own population remembers.
Endnotes
1. Donald E. Miller and Lorne Touryan-Miller, Survivors:
An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide, Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993; David Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian
Relations in Eastern Anatolia during World War I, Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias
Press, 2006, appendix; Ayşe Gül Altınay and Fethiye Çetin, Torunlar (Istanbul:
Metis, 2009).
2. Andrew Goldberg, “The Armenian Genocide,” Two Cats
Productions, 2006.
3. For parallel problems in Russian history, see Orlando
Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia, London: Penguin, 2007,
p. XXXV.
4. Interview conducted with A.D. (from Varto district) in
Heidelberg, Germany, Nov. 24, 2009.
5. Interview conducted with M.Ş. (from Piran district) in
Diyarbakır, July 15, 2004.
6. Interview conducted with Erdal Rênas (from the Kharzan
area) in Istanbul, Aug. 18, 2002.
7. Interview conducted with K.T. (from Erzincan) in Bursa
on June 28, 2002 and Aug. 20 2007, partially screened in the documentary “Land
of our Grandparents” (Amsterdam: Zelović Productions, 2008).
8.Patrick Desbois, Porteur de Mmémoires: sur les Traces
de la Shoah par Balles, Paris: Michel Lafon, 2007. Also, see
www.shoahparballes.com.
9. Personal communication with Patrick Desbois at the
conference “The Holocaust by Bullets,” organized by the Amsterdam Center for
Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the Nationaal Museum Vught (Netherlands),
Sept. 11, 2009.
(*)About the Author
Uğur Ümit Üngör is Assistant Professor at the Department of History of
Utrecht University and at the Institute for War and Genocide Studies in
Amsterdam. He specializes in genocide, mass violence and ethnic conflict. His
recent publications include Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk
Seizure of Armenian Property (Continuum, 2011), and The Making of Modern
Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913-1950 (Oxford University
Press, 2011).
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