1. If I were to explain the Turkish state’s denial of the Armenian Genocide in one word, I would suggest the term continuity, both in the sense of lasting perceptions of the problem and also in the persistent makeup of the Turkish ruling elite. Since its inception, Turkey has been administered not by its elect government representatives, but by a military and civilian bureaucracy, which was not elected, but rather self-appointed. This came about because Turkey was established after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after WWI through the efforts of the armed forces and bureaucracy. Therefore, the military and the bureaucracy in Ankara consider themselves the true inheritors and owners of Turkey.
2. For reasons that I will not go into here, the founding members of the Turkish Republic, the military and civil bureaucracy, formed the country as if in opposition to the rich ethnic-cultural mosaic of Turkish society. The founders perceived the ethnic-cultural plurality of society at that time to constitute a problem for the continuity and security of the state. The founding philosophy of the state rested on the existence of a state-society axis and was based on difference and on a belief that the state needed to be protected from society. In this way founding legends were created and these legends turned into very strong taboos. Questioning these taboos was made punishable under the criminal code. There are five very important taboos, which constitute the main principles in the formation of the Turkish Republic:

   1. There are no Kurds in Turkey; those people called Kurds are actually Turks who happen to live in the mountains. In order to punish anyone who might question this taboo, articles 125 and 175 of the Turkish Criminal Code were enacted.
   2. Turks are a blended nation, and Turkish society does not contain different classes. Anyone who discusses different classes or who speaks of class warfare is a communist and should therefore be punished. Articles 141 and 142 of the Turkish Criminal Code were enacted to punish anyone guilty of this.
   3. Turkey is a secular society where Western values are supreme. Islamic values and lifestyle cannot be praised and are indefensible. Article 13 of the Turkish Criminal Code was enacted to punish anyone who disputed this.
   4. The Armenian genocide never happened. It is a complete lie. Until the year 2000 there were no specific articles in the criminal code to punish anyone questioning this because, frankly, no one ever seriously did question it.
   5. The Turkish Armed Forces constitute the guardianship of these five taboos, and no one may ever question their position and control over the regime.

   Not only did the Armed forces and Bureaucracy shape the Republic around these founding principles, but they also created a system that would not allow the elected parties even the appearance of running the country.

3. This continuity (control of the military and bureaucracy) from its establishment until today explains also the roots of the Armenian-Turkish Conflict and makes understandable why the Genocide became a taboo in Turkey. Most of the cadres who founded the Republic were members of the Union and Progress party, which was behind the 1915 genocide. After organizing several congresses in Anatolia, these cadres formed the “People’s Party” in 1923. They then announced the formation of the Republic in the same year and later, as the Republican People’s Party, (the name party used after 1935), ruled the country as a single party until 1945. The so-called multi-party regime that came into being after 1945 was like a continuation of what had prevailed before.
4. If you want to understand today’s Turkey, you have to know that the underlying problem is that there is a basic conflict in Turkey, a power struggle between the military and civil bureaucracy, on the one side, and the majority of Turkish society on the other. With the victory of the Justice and Development Party (“AKP”) in 2002, we have been seeing for the first time a crack in the control of military-civilian bureaucratic elite and the dominance of it has started to crumble. The AKP as governing party has been involved in a very powerful struggle with this elite on the founding legend of the republic and we are seeing fundamental changes. Each of the taboos has been getting lifted, one after another.
   First time in Turkish history an elected government AKP –with a strong support from the society and due to the convenient (adequate) international conditions after the collapse of SU tries to push the military and bureaucracy out of political sphere and so try to diminish their political power over the judicial-administrative system.
5. The AKP has a different position than the military and bureaucracy on the Armenian-Turkish conflict, particularly on the questions of opening the border between Turkey and Armenia, and the recognition of historic wrongdoing.” Of the many examples

   1. Mazlum-Der, The Association of Human Rights and Solidarity for Oppressed People, is an organization with very close political and personal ties to the AKP administration. Mazlum-Der has pushed for an official apology to the Armenians for what happened in 1915, as well as to Kurds for all that has occurred during the Republican era.
   2. In May of 2009, Prime Minister Erdogan broke a huge taboo when he said, “This mindset has seemingly not changed. It has been the same for many years in this country. They have chased members of different ethnicities out of this country. What have we gained? This was the result of a fascist mentality.”¹

      Potentially, the AKP is in the best position to make progress in this area. It has the potential to open the door for confronting history, if it feels that civil liberties are strengthened enough, and positive steps have been taken towards resolving the Kurdish issue.

6. The Ergenekon investigations and arrests are a major blow against those who were working towards a non-solution in Turkish-Armenian Conflict. One could say that Ergenekon was an extension of the Union and Progress Party to the present day. It represents the political mindset that made genocide possible in the past that organized the deportation of the Christians from Anatolia, a mindset that Erdogan referred to as fascist.” For this reason, it is fair to say that the judicial strikes against Ergenekon have dealt a serious blow against the political forces that would have attempted to prevent a softening of relations between Turks and Armenians.
   With the Ergenekon investigations and the steps that are being taking towards strengthening civil liberties in Turkey, the country is moving towards shaking off the guardianship and control of political life by the military and bureaucracy and moving towards normal democracy. These steps truly carry the potential for opening a door to a détente in the Turkish-Armenian relationship. The last agreement between both governments is a product of this process.

It is important to know that the political position in Turkey, which is focused on an anti-Armenian and anti-genocide recognition platform and which gained momentum after 2000 has been instigated primarily by the Ergenekon organization. Ergenekon was an organization that revolved around Turkish-Armenian tensions and hostility towards Armenians, for which the subject of the events of 1915 constituted its political core. In order to grow as a movement and gather public support, it did so by nourishing anti-Armenian sentiments. They aimed to incite the Turkish population and to mobilize it along a political line that rises out of the events of 1915.

Ergenekon was behind the Article 301 criminal prosecutions of Orhan Pamuk, Hrant Dink, myself and other intellectuals. They were the ones trying to stop the 2005 conference of historians in Istanbul, and the same ones who formed Talat Pasha Committees and organized marches in Talat Pasha’s name in Europe as well as memorials for other Unionists who had been executed for murder in 1919. In other words, Turkish-Armenian tension formed the basis for the political work of Ergenekon.

Imprisoning this group will not only eliminate serious opposition to détente with Armenians, it will probably allow détente to gather support. I argue that the obstacle to the solution of the Turkish-Armenian problem is not resistance from Turkish society.

THE MAIN QUESTION to answer though, why AKP also still continues to deny the Armenian genocide; This can only be explained by the security concept!

FACING HISTORY: DENIAL AND THE TURKISH NATIONAL SECURITY CONCEPT

In September of 2005, Turkish intellectuals who questioned the Turkish state’s denial policy on the deportation and killings of Armenians during World War I gathered for a conference in Istanbul. Outside, in the streets, demonstrators also gathered in protest against the conference. One of the placards read: “Not Genocide, but Defense of the Fatherland.” Two parallel convictions are at work here, one referring to the past, the other to the present. Both the events of 1915 and the denial policy nine decades later are framed in terms of Turkish national security and self-defense.

In 2009, in a raid against the ultra-nationalist shadowy terror organization Ergenekon, which is composed of mostly army and police officers and bureaucrats, Turkish police confiscated some documents. Among those documents was a file in which the names of five people were listed along with their photos. They were targeted for assassination. My name was among that group. Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk and the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, who as you may know was assassinated in January 2007 were two other names. The title of the document, by the way, was “Traitors to National Security” All of the people listed were known for being outspoken on the Armenian Genocide and for asking the Turkish Government to face this historic reality honestly. One can therefore draw the conclusion that to be outspoken about the Armenian Genocide is to be considered a threat, by certain groups, to Turkish national security.

One may understandably ask why? Before answering this question though I have to add that this is not just the view of the political elite or an ultra-nationalist terror organization. It also underpins legal decision making. In a judgment in 2007 against two Turkish-Armenian journalists Arat Dink, son of assassinated journalist Hrant Dink and Sarkis Seropyan, who received suspended sentences of a year imprisonment, for using the term “genocide”, the Turkish court stated that: “Talk about genocide, both in Turkey and in other countries, unfavourably affects national security and the national interest. The claim of genocide… has become part of and the means of special plans aiming to change the geographic political boundaries of Turkey… and a campaign to demolish its physical and legal structure.” The ruling stated further that the Republic of Turkey is under “a hostile diplomatic siege consisting of genocide resolutions… The acceptance of this claim may lead in future centuries to a questioning of the sovereignty rights of the Republic of Turkey over the lands on which it is claimed these events occurred.” Due to these national security concerns, the court declared that the claim of genocide in 1915 is not protected speech. To quote, “the use of these freedoms can be limited in accordance with aims such as the protection of national security, of public order, of public security.”²

The situation is not that different here in the United States:

Even though by joint declaration of Congress in September 9, 1975, April 24th was declared a “National Day of Remembrance” for the Armenian Genocide and the President of the United States is authorized and requested to issue a proclamation, since then NONE of the United States Presidents, except Reagan in 1981, has used the term Genocide. The main reason for this attitude is “national security concerns of the United States in the Middle East”.

The same argument again is used against the proposals for recognition of the Armenian Genocide on the floor of Congress, which has been brought up almost every year. Both United States presidents and opponents of the resolution for the recognition of the Armenian Genocide have very similar arguments to theTurkish Court’s decision above. Indeed it would appear that, as the Court stated, using the term genocide, “unfavourably affects national security and the national interest” of Turkey and United States.

We have two set of arguments here which are brought up in opposition to one another; “National security” versus morality or in other phraseology “realists” versus “moral fundamentalists.” The “realists” emphasize national security concerns of their country. In Turkey today, any attempt to openly discuss historic wrongs, is denounced as a covert move in a master plan to partition the country and is therefore against the “national security of Turkey”. Here in the United States, the “realists” consider the acknowledgment of the Armenian Genocide by Congress or usage of the term by the President to be “against US strategic interest”. The words you hear so often are “Turkey is a close friend of ours and we should not upset them”; OR “we should not jeopardize our strategic interests in the Middle East because of a moral issue, which occurred in the distant past”. On the other side we have “fundamentalist moralists” emphasizing the supremacy of morality against “real interests.”

The point that I want to make here is that pitting “National interest” against “morality” as mutually exclusive is just plain wrong. In fact what I really believe is that any security policy in the Middle East that excludes morality cannot ultimately be a “realistic” policy that will work and that eventually it undermines national security. Indeed, if one knows Turkey and the Middle East, one would easily recognize that history and historical injustices are not just dead issues from the past; the past IS the present in the Middle East. So therefore morality are a very real issue, and for realpolitik to be successful in the region; moral values, in this instance, the specific one of acknowledging historic wrong doings, must be integrated into a policy of national security.

There is a strong interconnection between security, democracy and facing history in the Middle East. Even a passing glance at the region makes it clear that historical injustices and the persistent denial of these injustices by one or another state or ethnic-religious group is a major stumbling block, not only for the democratization of the region, but also for the establishment of stable relations between different ethnic and religious groups. My central argument is that a failure to confront history honestly is one of the major reasons for insecurity and instability in the region.

The question that I have struggled to find the answer to is, why is the discussion of historical injustices, something that goes to the heart of human rights perceived as a threat to Turkish national security? I propose that we take the argument about “national security” of Turkey very seriously and try to examine the roots of this mentality and to show the reasons why it must be changed. The mindset that an open discussion of history engenders a security problem originates from the breakup of the Ottoman Empire into nation-states starting in the nineteenth century. From late Ottoman times to the present, there has been a continuous tension between the state’s concern for secure borders and society’s need to come to terms with abuses of human rights. In this history, security and territorial integrity of a crumbling Empire, and human right abuses, can be likened to the two faces of a coin; the two separate faces of the same coin caused the rise of two opposing historical narratives.

Until recently, the dominant narrative has been the story of the partition of the Empire among the Great Powers, which ended with the Empire’s total collapse and disintegration. If you were to review the books in Turkey which recount this narrative you would be hardpressed to find a reference to massacres and genocide during the late 19th century and early 20th century. Instead, Christian communities are painted as the seditious agents of the imperialist Great Powers, continually conspiring against the state.

The other narrative has been developed basically by those ethnic and religious minorities who were subjected to different level of human rights abuses during that period. The history of the 19th century is mostly formulated in terms of human rights and the intervention of Great Powers on behalf of the minority groups. It is plain to see the contrast in both positions. In one perspective the Great Powers are portrayed as “evil” and must be criticized for having intervened TOO MUCH. In the other perspective the Great Powers have been characterized as “positive” or “benign” and are criticized for having not intervened enough.

In this light; Turkish controversies about facing national history, in particular the Armenian Genocide, can be understood, in part, as the deployment of two, apparently contradictory, historical narratives against one another. Whenever the proponents of acknowledgment bring up a history of human-rights abuses, they are confronted with an opposing narrative, that of the decline and breakup of the Ottoman Empire and seditious agents who quickened the process.

Indeed, there have been certain moments in that history where national security and human rights became inseparably intertwined. One such moment came immediately after the First World War, between 1918 and 1923.

When the First World War ended with Ottoman defeat, working out the terms of a peace settlement, the political decision makers of the time grappled with two distinct, yet related issues, the answers to which determined their various relationships and alliances. The first was the territorial integrity of the Ottoman state. The second was the wartime atrocities committed by the ruling Union and Progress party against Ottoman Armenian citizens.

The questions about the first issue were: Should the Ottoman state retain its independence? Should new states be permitted to arise on the territory of the Ottoman state? If so, how should the borders of these new states be defined? The questions regarding the second issue were: What can be done about the wartime crimes against the Armenians and the perpetrators of these atrocities? How should the perpetrators be punished? These questions related two different set of issues which hadn’t been tackled separately and were rather intertwined with each other.

The questions, related to the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire led to the formation of two different viewpoints. The Turkish nationalist movement, under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal favored continued sovereignty within reduced borders as defined by the 1918 Moudros Ceasefire Treaty. The Allied Powers and ethnic-religious groups such as Greeks, Armenians and, to a lesser degree the Kurds, on the other hand argued for the establishment of new states on both occupied and unoccupied territory of the Ottoman Empire. The successive treaties of Sèvres 1920 and Lausanne 1923 reflected these divergent points of view.

As a result of this fight over territory in the early period of the Republic a general understanding of history in modern Turkey emerged, which can be formulated in the following way: We, the Turks, who see ourselves as the legitimate successors of the Ottoman Empire defended our sole remaining territory against the Armenians, Greeks, and to a lesser extent the Kurds, who were trying to carve up Anatolia into nation-states, with the support of the British, French, and Italians. The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres resolved the question of territory in favor of the non-Turkish nationalities. For the Turks, therefore, Sèvres remains a black mark in history. For the other ethnic-religious groups, however, the significance of Sèvres is quite different. Although it did not fully reflect their demands for territory, the treaty represented an unprecedented historical opportunity to resolve the territorial issue in their favor. Conversely, the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which guaranteed Turkish dominance in Anatolia for the Turks, stands as a milestone and validation of their continued national existence. Meanwhile, the other nationalities regard it as a great historical injustice.

Nevertheless both the Sevres and Lausanne treaties were not merely symbols of territorial conflict. These two treaties would symbolize how the injustices committed against Armenians and other Christians during the war, would be addressed. The central question was how would those perpetrators of human rights abuses during the war be punished? Although everyone, including the Turkish nationalists agreed that these crimes should not be left unpunished; there was uncertainty about the scope of the penalty. One group advocated for the trial and punishment of only some first-hand criminals as well as some of the top Union and Progress leaders. Another group advocated for the trials of individual suspects, casting the net as wide as possible, and for the punitive dismemberment of the Ottoman state into new states created on its territory.

The position of the Entente powers was that “the Turks.”³

, so to speak, organized the massacres of other peoples, in particular the Armenians, during the First World War. It was therefore necessary to punish “the Turks” collectively in order to rescue the subject peoples (Arabs as well as Greeks, Armenians, etc.) from Turkish domination. Punishing “the Turks” was to be accomplished in two phases. First, the members of the Ottoman government and other officials were to be tried for the crimes against the religious and ethnic communities. Second, “the Turks” would henceforth inhabit a state that would be rendered as small and as weak as possible. A telegram sent to the Paris Peace Conference on April 3, 1919 by the Assistant High Commissioner of Istanbul, Webb, clearly illustrates this policy:

In order to punish all of those persons who are guilty of the Armenian horrors, it is necessary to punish the Turks as a group. Therefore, I propose that the punishment be given on a national level through the partitioning up of the last Turkish Empire, and on a personal level by trying those high officials who are on the list in my possession, and in a manner that would serve as an example for their successors.⁴

In short, casting the net as widely as possible, the Allied powers advocated for the trials of individual suspects, and for the punitive dismemberment of the Ottoman state into new states created on its territory. So, the main ostensible reason for partitioning Anatolia among various national groups was motivated by the Great Powers’desire to punish “the Turks” for the barbarous acts they had committed.

What was the attitude of the “Turkish” position relative to the punishments of the criminals? Recall that postwar Turkey was governed from two political centers: Istanbul, the seat of the Ottoman Government, and Ankara, the headquarters of the Turkish Nationalist movement led by Mustafa Kemal. Both, the Istanbul and Ankara governments acknowledged the massacres of Armenians and agreed with the Allies that the perpetrators should be tried and the trials were considered “just and necessary.” However, Ankara and Istanbul vehemently opposed the punitive partition of Anatolia.

This question was one of the central issues when both governments met in October 1919 to call an election of an Ottoman Parliament in accordance with the constitution. They signed five protocols to regulate the process of upcoming elections. The first and third protocols were directly related to the topic at hand. The first protocol declared: “1. Ittihadism – (Party of Union and Progress) [which organized the genocide against the Armenians] or any hint of its reawakening is politically very damaging… 4. It is judicially and politically necessary to punish those who committed crimes in connection with the deportation.” In the third Protocol both parties agreed that the fugitive members of “Ittihat,” who were wanted in connection with wartime atrocities, were not to participate in the elections. The protocol described the atrocities as “the evil deeds” of the Union and Progress Party. The perpetrators were defined as persons “who have been sullied by the nefarious acts of the deportation and massacre”. And so their participation in the election was qualified as “contrary to the true interests of the nation.”

The founder of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal, addressing the Parliament on April 24, 1920, called the atrocities a “shameful act.” Now keep in mind, Mustafa Kemal was not a human rights activist or an altruist but a politician. The underlying reason in supporting the punishment of perpetrators of wartime crimes was their expectations from the ongoing Paris Peace conference. The commanders of the British and French occupying forces in Istanbul grabbed every opportunity to remind the “Turks” that if they expected a positive outcome from the Paris Peace talks, action absolutely had to be taken against the perpetrators of the war crimes. So, the Mustafa Kemal led government in Ankara and the administration in Istanbul believed that the war crime trials were the price for obtaining national sovereignty. In a memo written by Mustafa Kemal, in September 1919 to the Istanbul government, this point was underlined in a very clear way; “The punishment of perpetrators, he wrote, “should not stay only on paper. . . but should be carried out, since this would successfully impress the foreign elements.” In exchange for this concession the Turkish leadership expected a more favorable peace settlement without loss of territory.

This strategy failed. In April1920, the provisions of Sèvres became known, according to which it was proposed to punish “the Turks” for the war-crimes by partitioning the Ottoman territory. In the same month, the Istanbul Court Martial, which had been established in November 1918 and which was in the process of trying the perpetrators of the Armenian atrocities, now under pressure from Allied powers, began trying almost the entire Turkish national leadership, Mustafa Kemal foremost among them, who were opposed to the partitioning of Anatolia. Mustafa Kemal and around one hundred nationalists were sentenced to death in absentia.

When the Turkish nationalists realized that their support for the punishment of war criminals was not going to prevent the partitioning of Anatolia; and was in fact going to lead to their own prosecution and punishment, their attitude changed.

As Mustafa Kemal wrote to Istanbul on August 20, 1920, “[t]he Ottoman Government…continues to hang the children of the homeland on accusations of [having perpetrated] deportation and massacres, which now became totally senseless.”⁵ What Kemal meant was that the policy whereby the Ottoman government punished Turks for what they had done to the Christian minorities would make sense only if Turkey received some positive results in terms of a better treaty to secure the Ottoman territories. However, Sèvres had been signed, Ottoman sovereignty was not acknowledged, and Ottoman territories were distributed among different nations. Therefore, Kemal concluded these “senseless” death sentences should be halted.

We can conclude that had the Western forces agreed to territorial integrity in exchange for trials on cases of “crimes against humanity”, we might be talking about a very different history today.

Today, we can say that the Court Martial in Istanbul is a symbol of these two interwoven but distinct strands of Turkish history, “territory and borders” or expressed another way “national security” on the one side, and “human rights,” or “facing history and addressing historic wrong doings” on the other. The fact is that the attempt at dismemberment and partition of a state as a form of a punishment for the atrocities committed during the war years and proposed punishment of its nationalist leaders for seeking the territorial integrity of their state, created the mindset in Turkey today that views any reference to the historic wrongdoings in the past as an issue of national security.

A product of this mindset is therefore a belief that democratization, freedom of thought and speech, open and frank debate about history, acknowledgment of one’s past historical misdeeds, is a threat to national security. Those who invite society to engage in an open examination of the past are therefore labeled “traitors” and made targets of smear campaigns, are dragged into courts and prosecuted under Turkish Criminal Code Article 301 for “insulting Turkishness”. It is this kind of mindset that was behind the murder of Hrant Dink.

¹ http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/gundem/11714165.asp This statement of Erdoğan caused a lot of debate in the Turkish press, for an example see: http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/columnists-176593-understanding-erdogans-self-criticism.htm

²Court Decree, 2nd Penal Court of First Instance for The District Of Şişli, File Number: 2006/1208, Decree Number: 2007/1106, Prosecution No.: 2006/8617

³I place the term “Turks” within quotation marks. Although the term was used in the discussions of the time, it is clear that in explaining historical events general terms such as this are not only wrong to use, but also incorrect from the standpoint of attempting to write a history.

⁴FO 371/4173/53351, folios 192-3

⁵Bilal Şimşir, Malta Sürgünleri (Ankara, 1985), p. 334. The letter was written to the first Grand Vizier of the Armistice period, Ahmet İzzet Paşa, with the aim of its contents being communicated to the British High Commission.