Lost in Commemoration: The Armenian Genocide in Memory and Identity - UNGOR UGUR UMIT
Abstract
The article addresses the prevalent notion that "Turkey denies the Armenian genocide" by exploring the complexities of Turkish social memory regarding the event. → “The Turkish state’s official policy towards the Armenian genocide was and is characterized by misrepresentation, mystification, and manipulation.”
The article argues that while the Turkish government denies the genocide, a segment of its population remembers it, indicating a clash between official state memory and popular social memory.
Mass Violence and Memory
The period from 1912 to 1922 in the Ottoman Empire was marked by intense mass violence, including war, genocide, forced migration, and famine, deeply affecting society and memory.
These events led to physical and psychological trauma for countless individuals, causing lasting damage to social, economic, and cultural development in the region.
The study of the Young Turk and Kemalist dictatorships lags behind that of Nazism and Stalinism in terms of research and analysis.
Memory is significant in the context of mass violence, as regimes often attempt to control or erase memorial practices related to those events.
Totalitarian dictatorships manage memory by erasing traces of crimes and intimidating the population, controlling knowledge and prohibiting information dissemination.
Totalitarian regimes use memory as a tool of power by seeking to introduce forced forgetting and depriving citizens of their memory to maintain mental enslavement.
Tzvetan Todorov → 2 strategies that totalitarian dictatorships use to manage and control memory
Erasure of the traces of crimes
Intimidation of the population
Democratic dissemination of narratives and free memorial practices are suppressed in totalitarian dictatorships, replaced by official propaganda that includes denial and cover-up.
Collective Memory 149
Discussion of collective memory requires disaggregation of cognate phenomena.
Aleida Assmann distinguishes three categories of collective memory: social, cultural, and political memory.
Social memory: the past as experienced and communicated within a given society. It is embodied and bottom-up, surviving through individual and generational lifespans.
Cultural and political memory: intergenerational and not self-referential, but rather the result of a top-down imposition.
Cultural memory: forms and techniques that preserve information fundamental for a group's identity, supported by symbols and signs.
Political memory: founded on durable carriers of symbols and material representations.
Clashes inevitably occur between these types of memories, both between and within societies.
The development of these clashes after mass violence depends on factors like literacy and transitional justice.
The article explores the Turkish memoryscape of the Armenian genocide, examining both the destruction and construction of memory.
It uses declassified Turkish archival materials and oral history research to argue that Turkish handling of the genocide's memory involves silencing high-culture and written texts while failing to suppress social and cultural memory.
“I argue that the Turkish handling of the memory of the Armenian genocide is characterized by a successful silencing of high-culture and written texts, but a failure of silencing the social and cultural memory of the perpetrator, bystander and victim communities” (149)
The Turkish attempt to establish a unitary political memory has failed in the face of Armenian social memory and Turkish cultural memory.
Turkish official historiography exhibits a denial syndrome with mechanisms of prejudice, risking dysphoric rumination.
The article examines the clash between the Turkish government's official narrative and the cultural memory of ordinary Turkish citizens, seeking to explain Turkey's denial and denial’s relation to identity.
Destruction of Memory
Turkish governments' policies regarding memory have fluctuated over time.
The representation of the Graeco-Turkish war illustrates the vicissitudes of Turkish memory politics.
Mustafa Kemal initially denounced Greek atrocities but later spoke of Greeks as esteemed guests as relations improved.
Friendly interstate relations took precedence over old grievances. → no closure or reconciliation
Armenians and Syriacs, lacking statehood, did not receive the same treatment as Greece and were either traumatized survivors or intimidated individuals.
The Kemalist regime continued the CUP policy of effacing physical traces of Armenian existence.
An important stage of erasure was razing Armenian cemeteries, exemplified by Müftüzâde Abdurrahman Şeref Uluğ's actions in Diyarbekir.
Armenian cemeteries were either neglected or flattened, with stones used for paving.
Armenian communities in Eastern Turkey were expelled, concentrated, and repressed throughout the 1930s and 1940s.
The collapse of Diyarbakır's Armenian church Surp Giragos marked another critical event in the erasure of memory.
The Turkish government constructed a master narrative that suppressed information on the 1915 genocide.
Memoirs by Garabed Kapikian, Marie Sarrafian Banker, and Armen Anoosh were prohibited from entering Turkey and ordered to be confiscated and destroyed.
History books, such as Arshak Alboyajian's, were also prohibited.
The regime's prohibitions were generally limited to the Turkish Republic, not caring much about memoirs circulated among Armenians outside Turkey.
The regime repressed and eliminated the mass violence of the early 20th century from public memory through silence, amnesia, and repression. (rather than reflection, discussion, assimilation, and memorialization)
The violence repressed included not only that in which Turks were perpetrators but also that in which they were victims.
A century of Ottoman-Muslim victimization in the Balkans was dismissed and forgotten in favour of “looking towards the future”
The Kemalist regime assumed that society was a malleable tabula rasa and that memories could be forgotten.
Minorities like Armenians, Kurds, and Syriacs were not allowed to mourn or be memorialized.
Much like the new identity, the new memory of the nation strived to be unitary.
Construction of Memory
The Turkish nation-state constructed after 1923 needed national myths.
Official histories are prepared for creating a usable past, central to the production and reproduction of hegemony. (leadership/dominance by one group over another)
Nationalist political elites use official histories to craft national memory, often appointing historians to this end.
The function of these new histories is to construct a logic of the national narrative. (Victor Roudometof)
Quest for origins: tracing the beginnings of a people as far back as possible.
Construct continuity between historical periods. → preservation of the culture, tradition, and mentality of the nation
Identify periods of glory and decline. →including moral judgements regarding the actions of other collectivities
Quest for meaning and purpose. → the identification of the nation’s destiny revealed in the progression of history
While silencing certain memories and narratives, the regime produces others.
During this process, the violent past is muted.
Bedri Günkut's Diyarbekir Tarihi exemplifies history books commissioned by the Kemalist regime.
Günkut ascribes a universal Turkishness to all regions of Diyarbekir province, harking back to the Assyrian era.
His study went to far greater lengths to identify 'Turkishness' and erase non-Turkish cultures from Diyarbekir's history.
Günkut claimed that the Turkish nation first had a civilized existence in the Diyarbekir area.
He dismissed myths of origin from non-Turkish ethnic groups, writing their names in lower case.
Günkut denied the Armenian genocide and misrepresented the Kurdish conflict.
He argued that Armenians and Kurds committed violence against Turks.
The dictatorship had hegemony over memory politics and debates about the past.
Official textbooks and city histories were silent on critical historical issues and banished ethnic minorities from history.
The narratives that locals kept in their minds diverged from those in official books.
Two separate bodies of knowledge coexisted: the libraries constructed by the regime and the oral tradition.
From the 1960s onwards, the latter came under pressure from urbanization and increasing levels of education.
Nowadays, social memory remains alive and, at times, openly clashes with political memory.
Oral History and Cultural Memory in Turkey
The Turkish state's official policy towards the Armenian genocide is characterized by misrepresentation, mystification, and manipulation.
The Armenian genocide occupies a place in the social memory of Turkish society.
Oral history interviews provide insights, even though most direct eyewitnesses have passed away.
Elderly Turks and Kurds in Eastern Turkey often hold vivid memories passed on by family members or fellow villagers.
Research results suggest a clash between Turkish political memory and Armenian cultural memory, and between Turkish political memory and Turkish/Kurdish social memory.
“…to some extent, the Turkish government is denying a genocide that its own population remembers.” (157)
Oral history is an indispensable tool for scholars interested in mass violence.
Armenian and Syriac oral history material has been studied by colleagues outside Turkey.
The existing body of oral history research within Turkey has hardly addressed the genocide.
This potential research field was politicized by successive governments and the Turkish Historical Society.
The Turkish nationalist camp fears that the local population of Anatolian towns and villages might 'confess' the truth of the genocide.
The 2006 PBS documentary The Armenian Genocide includes footage of elderly Turks speaking candidly about the genocide.
Oral history has methodological pitfalls, especially in a society where memory is overlaid with myth and ideology.
The Turkish and Kurdish populations were aware that the government was organizing the murder of the Armenians.
Much crucial information could have been salvaged had a systematic oral history project been carried out in Turkey much earlier.
A measured research project resulting in a substantial study would be a major achievement for the centenary of the genocide.
The Salience of Identity
The Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide can be interpreted through various prisms: politics, sociology, psychology, economics, gender, and mnemonics.
Politically, acknowledging the genocide would generate a net power loss.
Sociologically, denial is reinforced through peer pressure in Turkish academic culture.
Psychologically, acknowledgement would have to overcome the barrier of ordinary Turks' guilt. → “…moral restructuring so fundamental that the mind would resist it out of self-preservation.”
Economically, acknowledgement would entail restitution, reparation, and compensation.
Gender dynamics play a role, with Turkish women potentially using denial to bridge the gender gap.
“Memory is closely linked to identity as every identity requires a memory” (160).
“Memories and narratives are repositories and repertories for all forms of collective identity: family, village, region, class, nation, and so on.”
People develop social identities by participating in interactions and recognizing their membership in social groups.
The political memory instilled in official Turkish identity became relatively solid because of mass educating several generations of citizens
Transitional justice or a 'recivilizing process' never took place after the Kemalist one-party dictatorship lost power.
THEREFORE, the Armenian-Turkish conflict is very much a conflict of memory.
Armenians wish to remember a history that Turks would like to forget.
The Armenian-Turkish conflict is a clash between Armenian cultural memory and Turkish political memory.
Political memory is a core component of collective identity
A 'loss' of political memory entails a loss of collective identity.
Turks who express a sincere interest in the history of the genocide are accused of having a dubious identity. → “Asking Turks to acknowledge the genocide amounts to asking them to relinquish their Turkish identity.”(161)
A conflict between absolutely exclusive memories has become a conflict of absolutely exclusive identities.
The legacy of the Armenian genocide has played an important role over generations for the victims.
The Young Turk assault on the Armenians deepened grievances and accentuated conflicts across generations.
Ottoman Armenian communities were constructed, treated, and deported as Armenians.
The experiences of loss and exile were remembered and transmitted across time and space.
The genocide is still an identity issue.
The genocide has had a profound effect on the political elite and the general public, sensitizing Armenians to their identities
Traumatic family memories seem to persist, and many feel the need to fill in the gaps in their self-narrative.
Symbols of Silence
Two successive Turkish nationalist regimes erased the violence of the past by means of the politics of memory.
By assigning a new identity for the country, the Young Turks and Kemalists also needed to construct a new memory.
Their treatment of the past ranged from the organization of forgetting to the construction of an official narrative.
Orders were given to write new local histories, imposing silence on critical historical issues and banishing ethnic minorities from (regional) histories.
The significance of Kemalist hegemony in memory politics cannot be overestimated.
The organization of a hegemonic canon through exclusion and inclusion aimed at the formation of a closed circuit of knowledge.
This precluded the possibilities of a participatory memory or identity formation.
The regime warded off both external penetration and internal criticism of its belief system by banning and destroying texts.
'Turkishness' was measured by the level of exposure to that body of knowledge.
Much like the genocide itself, the denial of a traumatic past was part of a larger campaign to exorcise all violence from the memory of society.
The Young Turks never commemorated the tragedy of their expulsion from the Balkans but chose to move on.
Silences were imposed on society.
The most powerful symbol of the silences imposed during the Young Turk era is the strongly fortified citadel in Diyarbakır city.
The citadel is revered as one of the most important historical monuments of their nation.
The Otoman Empire and the Turkish Republic built their state apparatus in the compound to instil a sense of enduring deference.
The compound shelters the governorship, the provincial court, and the infamous Diyarbakır prison.
The latter building is considered the single most significant landmark of mass violence in Diyarbakır.
Archaeologists stumbled on large pits of human bones in January 2012.
Forensic research demonstrated that the bones were approximately a century old and likely belonged to Armenian elites murdered in 1915.
The violence is not mentioned in any way, and nothing reminds us of the victims who were killed there.
The future of the Turkish past remains silent.
→ memory is not unitary
→ how can 2 memories survive/coexist in the same society
→ Ungor argues that 2 memories exist; social (bottom-up) and political (top-down & homogenous)