• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The Kebab Conflict

MELINE TOUMANI

IN ADDITION to the population exchange, the other two major controversial issues in Turkey today also involve people: the Armenians and the Kurds. To write a book on Istanbul and not mention them is equivalent to writing a book about a city in Germany and not mentioning the Holocaust, or writing a book about France and not mentioning the collaboration and resistance. So while I knew I had to present these subjects, I struggled with how I would deal with them. Again, because I am not a historian, I decided to provide a springboard for readers to jump off of and explore further if they wish.

“Since the 1920s, at least officially, no Armenians exist in Eastern Turkey. One may find an occasional village or valley which maintains traces of an Armenian past, but the passing tourist is unlikely to run into one.” So states the current Insight Guide to Turkey. Most of the (very small) Armenian population in Turkey (about seventy thousand) is found in Istanbul. According to the group Armenians of Istanbul, there are ten Armenian churches in Istanbul, and there is the Armenian Patriarchate, which can be visited and is very interesting (Şarapnel Sokak 2, off Kennedy Caddesi in the Bazaar district). It’s one of the smaller patriarchates in the Armenian church—there are only four: in Armenia, Lebanon, Istanbul, and Jerusalem—but it is greatly respected, and also unique: it marks the first time in history that a Muslim Sultan, namely, Mehmet the Conqueror, established a Christian center.

In their very good book Turkey Unveiled, Hugh and Nicole Pope explain that “historians cannot say whether the gradual eviction of the great majority of Armenians, Greeks and other Christians between 1890 and 1923 was accidental or a premeditated attempt to make Anatolia into a ‘Turkey for the Turks,’ a phrase which is still the masthead motto of the nationalist newspaper Hürriyet. The Turks often say, with justification, that they were provoked, and Talaat’s speech in 1918 [by Mehmed Talaat, minister of the interior] is as close as any senior Turkish official has come to an apology for the excesses. Armenian leaders, likewise, seldom admit to any fault.” The Popes also discuss a book entitled The Turkish National Identity and the Armenian Problem, by Taner Akçam, who wrote the book as a political exile in Germany. In that book, Akçam explained that he preferred the Turkish word kırım, or “deliberate slaughter,” to the modern word “genocide.” “He also pointed to differences between the Turkish action and the genocide inflicted by Nazi Germany on the Jews. The Ottoman administration, for instance, had no ideology of racial purity, whatever the beliefs of the Young Turk leaders in the cabinet. He also pointed out that in Germany ordinary people have usually pleaded ignorance of the Jewish holocaust, while the state has admitted collective guilt. In Turkey, many older Turks know full well what happened to the Armenians and will privately admit it; it is the state which denies it.”

Conversely, a character in Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul, Auntie Cevriye, represents another type of denial: “Twenty years in her career as a Turkish national history teacher, she was so accustomed to drawing an impermeable boundary between the past and the present, distinguishing the Ottoman Empire from the modern Turkish Republic, that she had actually heard the whole story as grim news from a distant country. The new state in Turkey had been established in 1923 and that was as far as the genesis of this regime could extend. Whatever might or might not have happened preceding this commencement date was the issue of another era—and another people.”

The current state of affairs is that there are no formal diplomatic relations between Armenia and Turkey, and in 1993 Turkey closed its borders with Armenia because of the Nagarno-Karabakh War between Armenia and Azerbaijan, a Turkic nation with close ties to Turkey. In 2007, Hrant Dink, editor-in-chief of the newspaper Agos, advocate of Turkish-Armenian reconciliation,