Since its birth in 1923, the republic of Turkey has been engaged in a war of words with the Armenian diaspora, with the latter insisting that what Anatolia's Armenians suffered in 1915 was genocide. The Turkish state has put a lot of effort into denying that claim, both at home and abroad. Its allies have traditionally agreed not to "make an issue of it." For 82 years, the Turkish intelligentsia did the same. But in February 2005, the novelist Orhan Pamuk broke the taboo. The hate campaign to which he was then subjected was widely reported, both in Turkey and abroad, as was his prosecution for insulting Turkishness. In the nationalist press in his own country, he was branded a traitor. In the west, he was cast as a lone voice, and that is how most people here continue to see him.
In fact, Pamuk is not alone. I know this because I grew up in Istanbul, and many members of my family still live there. In the late 1960s, I attended an American-owned lycée in Istanbul. Orhan Pamuk, who is my exact contemporary, and whose books I now translate, attended our brother school, which has since merged with my alma mater to become Robert College. Though we can thank these schools for giving us a world-class education, it carried contradictions that continue to mark us all. For example, Turkish nationals at the colleges were required to study certain subjects—history, geography, Turkish literature, and military science—in Turkish, and to study them as the ministry of education decreed. This involved memorisation and discouraged the intellectual inquiry that was so encouraged in the lessons taught by Americans. This meant that my classmates had almost to change personality several times a day.
By mid-afternoon, we would have left our beautiful, secluded campus to return to a city that was ever more virulently anti-American. By the late 1960s, universities had become war zones, with leftist students fighting daily pitched battles with the police. There were also repeated attacks against US personnel, especially those working on its 17 military bases.
In the days that followed, just about everyone at that university who was associated with the student left was imprisoned. Many were tortured. Most were freed in an amnesty in the mid-1970s, but those who remained politically active were back in prison, or forced into exile, after the military stepped in again in September 1980.
I wrote about all this ten years ago (Prospect, December 1996). The essay was reprinted in Turkey, and it lost me several friends. I fear they may have misunderstood my motives, and I hope that they will understand that the trunk murder in my new novel, Enlightenment, exists only in fiction. In real life, the murder remains a mystery. We will never know if the perpetrators were acting alone, or if they were aided, abetted and encouraged by an agent provocateur in league with one or more intelligence agencies. But in the real world, as in my novel (which is anchored in the present), the abiding mystery is my classmates' resilience. Like so many others of their generation, they did not just survive two bouts of imprisonment and torture; they picked themselves up, continued their lives and flourished, not just as professionals but as Turkey's leading pro-European democrats. For these are the people who—together with Pamuk—broke Turkey's 82-year ban on open discussion of the Armenian question.
Who are they? They come for the most part from the urban bourgeoisie. Most are Turkish Muslims, with the complex family histories that are the legacy of Ottoman multiculturalism. The rest belong to Istanbul's Greek, Jewish or Armenian minorities. Whatever their background, they were all required by law to attend Turkish primary schools. Most moved on to study at one of the foreign lycées that were established during the Ottoman empire, in the mid to late 19th century, and that remained in place after the founding of the republic to educate its westernising elites. Many from this generation went on to further education in Europe or the US. Some returned to take up university posts in Turkey. Others stayed in the west.
Seven years ago, a sociologist and former classmate of mine named Muge Gocek established a network of Turkish and Armenian scholars that aimed to open up a space wherein the intelligentsia from both sides of the divide could settle the Armenian question through debate and research. Although the organisation was based at the University of Michigan, many academics and writers living in Turkey were on its list and attended its conferences, which at first were held only abroad. But by 2005, a series of EU-driven reforms had given Turkey a new and democratic face. A cultural renaissance was under way; the streets of Istanbul were full of Greek and Kurdish and Armenian music, and its bookstores were packed with memoirs that, however gently, belied the official line on Turkishness. So Gocek joined with her colleagues and old classmates to organise a conference, the first in Turkey's history to allow Turkish scholars to engage with serious genocide research on Turkish soil, in Turkish. There was an outcry in the right-wing press, and in the national assembly, the justice minister accused the organisers of "stabbing the country in the back." But, after many attempts to shut it down, the conference went ahead, and for the 700 participants it was a cry not just for truth, but for reconciliation.
But for Kemal Kerincsiz and the ultranationalist Grand Union of Lawyers, who staged protests outside, it was treason. We will never know if Kerincsiz acted alone or if he enjoyed the protection of ultranationalists inside the state, but we do know that he initiated most of the high-profile prosecutions of Turkish intellectuals for insulting Turkishness, organs of the state or the memory of Atatürk. Having attended a few of these trials, I can tell you that Kerincsiz and his colleagues have used each one as an opportunity to hammer home the ultranationalist line, on prime-time television. Many of his targets—the human rights activist Murat Belge, the novelist Elif Shafak and the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink—were speakers at the Armenian conference.
Since 2005, according to some sources, there have been 172 prosecutions under the infamous article 301 (insulting Turkishness) and related laws. In the beginning, it was difficult for western observers to see the point of them, because most defendants were acquitted or had their cases dropped on technicalities. My own view was that we were seeing the first stage of a larger strategy. After Turkey's leading intellectuals had been publicly named and shamed for treason and subjected to a stream of death threats, we were being told, worse would follow.
And so it did. But when Hrant Dink was assassinated outside his office in January, Istanbul took to the streets in record (and, I suspect, unanticipated) numbers. One hundred thousand people attended Dink's funeral, many of them carrying placards that read, "We are all Hrant, we are all Armenians." A backlash followed, with nationalist rallies and headlines declaring, "We are all Turks" and that anyone who wasn't should "clear out." At present, ultranationalists lack an electoral base: the Nationalist Action party (MHP) does not have a single deputy in the national assembly. But this could change when Turkey goes to the polls in the autumn, for the sustained campaign in the press against the traitors who have "sold the country to Europe for their own gain" has had its effect. A recent opinion poll found that 81 per cent disapproved of the democrats who took to the streets after Hrant Dink's murder.
After one man arrested in connection with the assassination used the cameras outside the courthouse to advise Pamuk to "be smart," Turkey's first Nobel laureate chose to leave the country. Though he intends to return, it may not be safe for him to do so in the short term: most of the other article 301 high-profile defendants remain under police guard. In the meantime, even those who live abroad are not immune to harassment or worse. The Turkish scholar Taner Akcam has been repeatedly harassed during the US publicity tour for his recent book on 1915 (A Shameful Act), and he was detained for four and a half hours at Montreal airport.
A small band of columnists—some of them with strong establishment links—are urging Turkey to stop fighting the genocide resolution that the Armenian diaspora have introduced in the US legislature. Others are calling for the opening of Turkey's border with Armenia. Several hundred writers are taking part in a co-ordinated civil disobedience campaign, in which groups present themselves to prosecutors, repeat the statements for which Dink was prosecuted and ask to be prosecuted also. Many have chosen to write for Agos, the Turkish-Armenian newspaper that Dink edited. Though its primary audience is Turkey's 70,000 Armenians, it now serves as the symbolic centre of Turkey's democracy movement.
In the west, Dink was known mainly as a campaigner for Armenian rights. Inside Turkey, he was known as a campaigner for all suppressed minorities, Muslim and non-Muslim. In the months to come, we can expect the democracy movement to carry on his work. And we can expect counterattacks from the ultranationalists. The death threats will continue. Those under police guard will continue to wonder just how far they can trust their protectors. There will be more rumours and more assassinations. As the Kurdish problem deepens, we can expect more democrats to be denounced as PKK sympathisers and terrorists, and perhaps prosecuted under Turkey's newly strengthened anti-terror law. These are scary times—particularly for those of us who remember how the army marched in to smash the intelligentsia following the coups of 1971 and 1980. But these democrats are not naive. They know what a prison cell looks like. They have had their principles tested by the electric truncheon. Like the characters in my novel, they understand the game. So the story isn't over. Despite the rise of ultranationalism, there is still hope.
