18.03.2010

Collective amnesia of Turkish bourgeoisie

The spectre of Armenian genocide still haunts Turkey, reports Esen Uslu

The annual sport of the Turkish government, diplomats and media circus was played out once more earlier this month. Everybody had been waited in keen anticipation to count the votes cast at the US House Committee of Foreign Affairs in favour of the resolution calling on president Barack Obama to “characterise the systematic and deliberate annihilation of 1.5 million Armenians as genocide”.

Up to this year the adoption of such a resolution was narrowly avoided thanks to the behind-the-scenes efforts of the military-industrial complex as well as the Zionist lobby. Last year, for example, the new Obama administration agreed not to embarrass the Turkish government in exchange for efforts to resolve its frozen relations with Armenia. The outcome was the shotgun wedding known as the Zurich protocols, signed after several last-minute glitches by the respective foreign ministers in the overpowering presence of secretary of state Hillary Clinton and the representatives of EU countries. However, it was apparent to seasoned observers that neither the Turkish nor the Armenian side had any intention of implementing the protocols.

So the scene was set for this year’s face-off. The Obama administration had warned Turkey that the protocol must be ratified by the national assembly - to no avail. After some grumbling the Obama administration let it go, and it was eventually adopted by a single vote.

The Turkish government, which has grown accustomed to last-minute reprieves, had failed badly to see what was coming. It now attempted to stop the further embarrassment of a full vote in the House of Representatives. The Turkish ambassador was recalled for “consultations”, and the prime ministerial visit to the USA scheduled for later this year was put on hold. Even TUSIAD, the powerful association of Turkish businessmen, cancelled its planned tour of the US.

However, despite its bravado the Turkish government is still unsure how to proceed. Is it prepared to risk Turkey’s position as a key player in the eyes of the US with respect to the whirlwind of the Middle East? The increased importance of Turkey is considered as its most important asset and perhaps the last bargaining chip. Juicy defence procurement contracts, such as for the Joint Strike Fighter, as well as for other military hardware, are also on the table. The largest of them all is the Incirlik airbase, which is vital for US operations in the Middle East. And we should not forget the Turkish troops serving under Nato command in Afghanistan, as well those as under the UN interim force in Lebanon.

Postponing the inevitable

In reality, however, Turkey actually has very limited scope in the negotiations. Yes, it may stop purchasing hardware from the US, or postpone some of its hardware modernisation projects, but at the end of the day such measures would lead to a deterioration in relations with the US and hurt Turkey itself more in the long run. Furthermore, the Swedish parliament adopted a similar motion on Armenia a few days after the US vote, increasing the number of countries with such a position to more than 20 at the last count. Clearly the intractable policy line adopted by Turkey has reached its limits.

For many Europeans, the current political impasse is totally unnecessary. Why has Turkey tried so long to postpone the inevitable? Would it not be far better to come clean and accept its historic responsibility for the Armenian genocide that happened nearly a century ago during the upheavals of World War I? Especially now that a government with roots in political Islam, and which has waged a campaign against the tutelage of the army, high courts and top civilian bureaucracy over political life in Turkey, is in power?

These questions have also been raised by former leftists-turned-liberals, who advise the AKP (Justice and Development Party) government to abandon the traditional intransigence on the Armenian issue and adopt a new approach more in line with the government’s declared aim of ‘zero problems’ with Turkey’s neighbours.

What they fail to see is that the AKP government’s popular support is based on the sponsorship of the provincial bourgeoisie, which has reached its present level of development and influence in the last decades only. And this sector’s initial capital accumulation was derived from the expropriation of Armenian and Orthodox Christian capitalists.

Even the largest financial groups emerged through the process of Turkification of capital, which started with the Armenian genocide in 1915, and continued until early 70s with ruthless efficiency. The initial accumulation of property and riches of the Islamic Turkish capitalists of present-day Turkey was based on the expropriation of Christian minorities. This is the unpalatable truth that the Turkish bourgeoisie wishes everybody in the world would forget.

There are also quite a large number of Turks and Muslims - victims of ethnic cleansing in the former Ottoman provinces that gained their independence after World War I, who moved into the void left by the former Christian minorities in Anatolia who were either killed or forced to flee. Even their homes and smallholdings were once the property of Armenians or other Christians. Such people may not be rich, but they share the wish of the Turkish bourgeoisie that everybody in the world would just forget the past.

This collective amnesia of the Turkish bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie was strengthened by a century of nationalist and later anti-communist propaganda. The joint effect of both strands was so powerful that even the Turkish left failed to raise the issue for long periods. These comrades were so taken in by the ideas of nationalism that for them the history of the ‘Turkish’ left only began with the formation of Communist Party of Turkey (TKP) after World War I, and with the newly formed republic saved from the teeth of the imperialists and their Greek henchmen under the inspiring example of the October Revolution.

Most of the left was also happy to forget that the working class movement in Turkey started in the cities of the Aegean seaboard within Greek and Armenian communities. The Communist manifesto was translated and published in Armenian nearly half a century before it appeared in Turkish. Greek and Armenian socialists had factions within the developing national movements defending a common struggle for a single, democratic state and against partition. And despite all the atrocities the members of the TKP in the cities of the nascent republic came from all ethnic backgrounds. During the first mass arrests of communist members there were many Armenian, Jewish and Greek detainees. However, during the 30s and 40s these minorities largely disappeared from the life of the TKP because of both emigration and severe repression.

After World War II only a handful of TKP comrades were of Armenian origin, and they tended to toe the Soviet line of not making Armenian or other minority rights an issue. That situation continued even during the 60s and 70s, when a new and young revolutionary movement rapidly gained ascendancy. This movement mixed its nationalistic rhetoric with anti-imperialist phraseology. Until the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (Asala) started to engage in acts of individual terrorism in the 70s and 80s the Armenian issue tended to be ignored by the left.

By 1980 some sections of the revolutionary movement had started to arrive at a basically correct appraisal of the Armenian genocide, called for a mutually agreed population exchange between Greece and Turkey and so on. The Leninist faction of the TKP, based in London, was one of the first organisations to adopt properly thought through resolutions on these issues.

The positive results of the changed understanding led to a closer cooperation with the Armenian organisations abroad. In April 1982, for example, Ä°ÅŸçinin Sesi (Workers Voice, the paper of the TKP Leninists) reported that the Young Armenian Association in Manchester had received a delegation from the Union of Turkish Progressives in Britain, and resolved to donate one fifth of their available cash to the UTP in support of their joint struggle. In the 80s the paper carried many such reports, as well as those from Turkey indicating raised awareness on the issue.

Alas, in later years the Armenian issue disappeared from the agenda of Turkish communists once more. There were many reasons for this, but the most important of them was the increased prominence of the Kurdish question. The armed struggle raised the stakes and drew a line between internationalist and nationalist tendencies within the communist movement as well as the left as a whole. Even the internationalist tendencies were unfortunately tainted with the Soviet line, and the disintegration of the USSR had the effect of strengthening the hand of the nationalists.

Public knowledge

During recent years the easing of the censorship and disinformation campaign run by the state allowed information about the horrors of the genocides, the forced displacement and exile of Armenian, Pontic Christian, Assyrian, Chaldean, Greek and Turkish Orthodox Christian communities to become more and more available. The Asset Tax imposed on the Christian communities during World War II, under whose terms non-payment was subject to a penalty of forced labour in a concentration camp-like environment; the revoking of Turkish citizenship from members of the Greek Christian community following clashes in Cyprus in the early 60s; the pogrom of September 6-7 1955 organised by the state security apparatus - these acts of repression became public knowledge and were met with a wave of disbelief.

The massacres perpetrated against Kurds and Alevis started to be seen in a new light; the connection between the state security organisations and those engaged in actions against Christian minorities all over Turkey became more and more understood. The continuity between the Union and Progress Party of the late Ottoman period - the mastermind of the genocides and of all the anti-Christian-minority actions - and the present-day state security apparatus became more and more apparent. Even political Islam, which has itself suffered at the hands of the same organisations, started to realise that it is impossible to stand for democracy unless Armenian and other minority issues are properly addressed.

The only sections standing firmly against any accommodation with those ideas are the army top brass and bureaucracy, and the petty bourgeoisie, which is represented by both the nationalist-fascist party and the nationalist social democrat party. And the bourgeoisie proper is still unwilling to take up the challenge, since its capital was initially accumulated through the plunder and pillage of Christian minorities.

However, this whole issue poisons the atmosphere in Turkey. The courageous Armenian socialist, Hrant Dink, was gunned down in a paramilitary-style assassination in January 2007, but the prosecution and trial of the suspects is going nowhere. One of the major churches of the Assyrian community, Mor Gabriel in Midyat, near the Syrian border, is facing a local land grab, and its legal attempts to defend its ancient rights have met with obstacle after obstacle. The ban on the Greek Orthodox community opening a theological school has been in operation since the 70s. Security officials check the genitalia of the Kurdish guerrillas they kill to see if they were circumcised - otherwise they are insulted as Armenians. Material approved for the national curriculum is still full of xenophobic and nationalist phraseology, etc, etc.

The US vote is the latest attempt to prod Turkey in the direction of settling its many minority issues. But we should not forget that states rich in crude oil and gas are clustered around Turkey. Neither should we forget about Turkey’s proximity to Israel, with its substantial nuclear arsenal, and Iran, with its nuclear ambitions. Then there are the volatile post-Soviet Union states around the Black Sea and Caucasus and their numerous conflicts with Russia. However, in the long run the Turkish government’s attempt to force the square peg of nationalist phraseology into the round hole of growing international condemnation is a hopeless task.

But most important of all is the task of working class revolutionaries. We must never cease to struggle for a secular, democratic republic not prescribed by either religion or nationality. To do that we must be the staunchest defenders of minority rights and wage a determined struggle against all forms of bigotry and nationalist prejudice.