Emrah Göker writes "

ON TURKS, ARMENIANS, AND IMPOSSIBLE ENCOUNTERS

Emrah Göker[1]

"There is no right life in falsehood."

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia[2]

I am looking at my screen in a sad, though not perplexed, mood today. Allah knows, I want to get furious, but find myself unable to. I also feel embarrassed for not being shocked; the thought of getting used to all this right-wing nationalist bullshit is disturbing and embarrassing. One of the most adamant Turkish racist electronic venues diffusing hatred in English, Turkish Forum, invites me, along with many other citizens of Turkey currently residing in the US, to protest Armenian-American lobbies in front of the White House. I am told that the "enemy" wants to have the 1915 Genocide recognized, force Turkey pay $20 billion in reparations, have both countries open their borders, and claim a huge chunk of Turkish territory. Curiously, Armenians (I am warned) also want to steal the province of Trabzon. It is the only province mentioned in the text, where, recently, four left-wing prison activists were almost lynched by a 2000-strong, incurably masculine, deliriously nationalist crowd, who were led to believe that these pamphleteers were about to burn the Turkish flag.[3] This propaganda war of denial and falsification (shamelessly borrowing the US imperialist slogan, "United We Stand") is also advertising a hit list of "Turkish turncoats", some of them my dear friends and excellent scholars, who are accused to ignore Armenian atrocities against Turks and for being "bought" by Armenians. The language being used is homologous to the Aryan Power rhetoric about "self-hating Whites"; or the Zionist one about "self-hating Jews". It is strange that the nationalists are selling their version of McCarthyism in the US, at a time the neo-cons are busy brewing their own brand in the universities. Now, there was an English proxy of that Turkish proverb. Ah, of course. Birds of a feather, flock together.

In my sadness, I think about encounters and interventions. Where, and what can I say? It is almost impossible to avoid being interpellated as a "Turk" by Armenians, in its ethnicized sense. On the other hand, the State of Turkey is not content with a singly constitutional notion of citizenship and also interpellates me in a similarly ethnicized way. Republican history teaches us that this stately calling is loaded with nationalist ideology, exclusionist ethnic pride, and oftentimes, outward racism toward non-Turks. Perhaps unlike occupying the position of Hay for most Armenians, occupying that of Türk for critics like me is problematic. But, one always has to speak the truth to the powers that be, that's what I have learned from the late Edward Said.

Recently, reasonable dialogue amongst various Turkish groups about what has come to be termed the "Armenian Question" has become mostly impossible. With some important exceptions, nationalist hysteria is rampant. There is today an urgent need to de-ethnicize the terms of any present and future dialogue within the Turkish side, and between Turks and Armenians, since, I believe, nationalist and diplomatic rivalries are kept alive by both sides. Armenians are no less immune than Turks to nationalist biases and hysteria. Recognizing this, I argue, is the first step towards the de-ethnicization of the terms of the debate, towards accounting for the debate's history of ethnicization, and towards building a common moral ground. So, what is there to be said?

Remembering and Forgiving

I wish to talk about two things: Remembering and forgiving. I will try to expand on two general arguments: (1) Overcoming denial and forgetfulness (inside the Turkish side) and engaging in forgiveness (inside the Armenian side) are both impossibilities, two destinations which perhaps can never be arrived at; but for the very reason that they are impossible, we cannot ignore their challenge, we have to confront these impossibilities and move towards their overcoming. (2) The confrontation with one impossibility cannot proceed without being linked to the confrontation with the other: insightful remembrance fails without the gift of forgiveness, and forgiveness would be meaningless without the practice of remembering that which needs to be forgiven.

Politics of remembrance

First, I want to talk about remembering. Inspired by Walter Benjamin, I suggest that the impossibility of overcoming the state's denial of capital crimes not only against Armenians but also against Kurds (especially during the 1984-1999 civil war, whose memory is fresh) and Turks (especially around the time of the 1980 military coup) should be confronted, within Turkey, by an ethics and politics of "insightful remembrance".

With this concept, Benjamin proposes a rebuttal of "uncritical monumental history", which is an official form of history-writing that produces solid, fetishized, petrified masses of history, histories of dead monuments, devoid of the voices of their subjects, especially of their victims. This form of history-writing undermines subjective constructions of memory or suppresses such remembrances through violent practices. Against this, Benjamin posits insightful remembrance, an ethical and thus political form of remembering the past by recognizing the historical causes of the destruction and distortion of memory and by using this retrospective opening to resist the present.

I believe that such a politics of remembrance is an indispensable element of any progressive movement for social justice inside the Republic of Turkey. Three moments of this politics can be defined: First, the moment of recognition that our past and present are in constellation - questions of the past continue to haunt Turkish citizens' grappling with national and religious identity, social justice and democracy. The second moment of insightful remembrance attempts to liberate those oppressed episodes of history and to place them in contact with similar episodes in the present that embody potential resistance. In the third moment, the victims of history and of history-writing are remembered, with the purpose of putting an end to the continuum of violence inflicted upon them by the victors.

Today's "denial industry" backed by many groups inside and outside the state of my country is an integral part of the official "uncritical monumental history". This propaganda war, above all else, serves to misrecognize the foundations of the Republic. As almost every entity in the form of the nation-state today, Turkey was also founded upon violence. As every ruling elite of every nation-state did, a mythology of creation was invented to rewrite the history of the violent elimination and suppression of Kurds, Armenians, Greeks and Arabs.

Here's the impossibility related to confronting this absence of reflexive memory about who we are and what we have done: Today, the likeliest candidate for the initiation of a progressive politics for remembrance, reconciliation and democracy within Turkey is the Left. But at this stage, the Left in Turkey holds negligible grassroots support. In the 2004 municipal elections, more than 80% of the electorate voted for conservative and nationalist right-wing parties, and the right-centrist Justice and Development Party (JDP) consolidated its hold on power. Under the JDP, a somewhat cautious alliance between the conservative Anatolian bourgeoisie and the secular, more powerful Istanbul bourgeoisie has so far guaranteed the socialization of the heavy costs of recovery from the 1999-2001 crisis; neoliberal policies continued at the expense of the working people. EU integration reforms appear promising, but racist, reactionary forces continue resisting them, which puts grassroots pressure on the JDP cabinet. No substantial steps have so far been taken toward forcing the national police organization to be more publicly accountable, or toward prosecuting endless (past and present) civil rights violations in the country's Kurdish provinces. The conservative government, backed by a pro-EU capitalist coalition, opted for an untroubled, top-down transition to post-civil war democratic consolidation, with as little social movement opposition as possible. Meanwhile, proto-fascist, miniscule at the moment, mobilizations against the Left, against Kurdish and other minority groups, in defense of "national integrity", are encouraged by the state's nationalist inclinations toward containing Turkish democratization.

The responsibility of remembering the violent past and acting on the injustices of the present is waiting to be shouldered. There seems to be a widespread conviction in Turkey that "yesterday is yesterday", "what is done is done", accompanied by an anxiety that digging through controversial issues related to the Armenians, the Kurds, or the Army is unpatriotic, is divisive.

On the contrary, radical realization of constitutional citizenship in Turkey should be the ultimate "patriotic" goal as long as we have to work through the fierce antagonism between capitalism and democracy within the nation-state form. Through confronting with who we are and how we came to be who we are, by making peace with the victims of our history (and we are also among those victims), through this can we hope to flourish as free human beings.

However, this also has to be said: A politics of remembrance in Turkey, appealing to the citizens of the country, cannot afford to isolate a 90-year old question and only focus on its politicization in the domestic scene. The wounds of the Kurdish conflict and of the 1980 military coup are still bleeding, and the collective memory of these two traumatic episodes are still repressed. A progressive politics for social justice has to tackle with forgetfulness in a holistic manner. Oftentimes, I think, Armenians outside Turkey fail to appreciate the complexities of the domestic aspects of the politics of remembrance.

Politics of forgiveness

Now, in parallel to tackling the problem of overcoming denial within Turkey, I want to raise a number of questions about this other impossibility, the gift of forgiveness from Armenians to the citizens of Turkey. Although it might sound awkward and out-of-place to talk about forgiveness when the descendants of the perpetrators are still largely denying the crimes, not to mention the fact that ethnic prejudices against Armenians are unfortunately still in circulation, I hope my points will be clear.

Basically, I have two of them: (1) Justice will not be done through pressing for what excuse for international law exists is upheld in recognition of the genocide, it won't be done when the state of Turkey is defeated. It will not be any more OK to grant forgiveness after humiliation. (2) There is no homogeneous identity of "Armenian" (inside Armenia or within the diaspora) authorized to grant forgiveness, so overcoming this impossibility would also facilitate the flourishing of different ways of "being Armenian", ways which go beyond an identity overdetermined by victimhood.

Let me expand on these points a bit.

The late French philosopher Jacques Derrida reminds us the religious roots of forgiveness, as an appeal to the "universal urgency of memory", a "necessity to turn to the past and take this act of memory/repentance beyond juridical instance".[4] I want to underline the importance of this aspect of being "beyond juridical instance". While the legal category of "crime against humanity" is certainly within the horizon of the politics of forgiveness, forgiveness cannot be reduced to a "pardoning" negotiated between two nation-states.

One difficulty we are facing here is the following: What happens to forgiveness when dialogue is replaced by institutional mediation? Wouldn't justice and forgiveness be tainted by the introduction of a third-party (especially an imperialist one like the US army-state)? Isn't forgiveness something more than the judicial logic of amnesty?

(At this point, of course, I am assuming that there are Armenians and Turks out there who are genuinely interested in reconciliation. It is otherwise a fact that some Armenians are only interested in winning a court victory and seeking revenge through forcing the state of Turkey into a corner. Likewise there are many Turks who see things with the eyes of the state and vow to fight the diplomatic battle by any means necessary, and thus they feel threatened by any perceived attack on "sovereignty". Chauvinism and hysteria feed upon one another on each of the two sides and pointless polemic rather than dialogue is dominant. But we know that. "The point is to change it".)

Derrida argues that the only thing to forgive is the unforgivable, which signifies another impossibility to be confronted about forgiveness. In the context of today's Turkish-Armenian relations, we have a situation where the crimes are removed at least two generations from their perpetrators and victims. The crimes in question do indeed appear unforgivable; if the perpetrators could be prosecuted today, any Turkish court would have punished them as severely as the law permits. So paradoxically, there is something to forgive: the unforgivable. Still, the question remains: Who will forgive whom and what exactly will be forgiven after 90 years? How can the effects of the atrocities upon dispersed Armenian communities in past decades be accounted for?

Honestly, I am not interested at all in the legal dimension of these difficulties, for the reasons I have already stated: Once official entities represented in the judicial process dominate the reconciliation process, friendship, democracy and justice will be kicked out of the back door.

One way, though not an entirely safe and smooth way, out of these difficulties is to try to link the domestic struggle against denial in Turkey with the Armenian-Turkish process of understanding and forgiveness, but pushing for this linking through extra-state actors, preferably through social movement organizations. And preferably again, institutionalized mediators, especially nation-states with their own bloody histories of colonialism and imperialism, should be left out of the picture.[5]

As for my second point, I suggest that confronting the impossibility of forgiveness, as long as, of course, it is accompanied by a genuine Turkish commitment to insightful remembrance, may present Armenians a way out of the closures of nationalism. This is another difficulty to deal with. While a lot of citizens of Armenia may want a democratic transformation of their country and friendly relations with its Azeri and Turkish neighbors, there are those who are very reactionary. While some Armenians in the diaspora are sympathetic to dialogue, there are others who would support the US crimes against humanity in Iraq or Israeli crimes against humanity in Palestine as long as this serves the interests of their legal battles against Turkey.

Ultimately, of course, this is a political question remaining to be resolved among conflicting Armenian groups everywhere.

Back in 1991, during the fall of the Soviet regime, Armenian historian Gerard Libaridian made the following observation in his book Armenia at the Crossroads: "The Genocide, its exploitation, and its denial by Turkey have paralyzed the collective psyche of the Armenian people. A nation of victims - at first of the violence, and subsequently of its denial - is incapable of sustaining a rational discourse. A nation cannot imagine the future if the only thing it can imagine the future bringing is further victimization. The denial of the future justifies the denial of the present and mandates an obsessive treatment of an overburdened past."[6] More recently, in The Challenge of Statehood, Libaridian criticized the reduction of Armenian history to pre- and post-genocide. He is not of course arguing for accepting the Turkish "denial industry", however, he is complaining about the fetishization of the past so that no rational dialogue becomes possible in the present: "Making Genocide recognition the basis of all politics has led to an obsessive pattern of behavior. This behavior pattern has disabled the Armenian psyche and mind and, even worse, has made them hostage to the stimuli of others. Once more Armenian minds and thoughts have become hostage to Turkish policy, this time of denial, and to the vagaries of international recognition. Armenians are engaged in a protracted battle, the key to which is held by the 'enemy'."[7]

Dialogue?

Assuming that there is a genuine political will, on the part of both Turks and Armenians, to sustain and expand dialogue, I have a few final words on this thing called dialogue.

Dialogue is not urging each other to be blind to our mutual differences. We constantly ask the questions "who am I?" and "who are you?" as we converse, and our senses of justice, democracy and of identity are negotiated through our interaction. Yes, dialogue is understanding, but as the great hermeneutician Hans-Georg Gadamer quickly reminds us, it is Andersverstehen, understanding-differently. Without the placing of oneself before the open "court" of dialogue and mutual questioning, without the experience of the decentering of selfhood (including national selfhood), without changing and being changed, without suspending and transforming and negotiating our prejudices, we won't be "conversing", we will be crossing swords, which is always the easiest thing to do in contentious politics.

Dialogue is not about "winning an argument". This, I believe, was first reminded by Aristotle in his Rhetorics, who wanted to distinguish the art of contradiction from the art of discourse, praising the latter. In dialogue, he argued, we are after phronesis, that is, practical wisdom, which is sought through both sides' love of the good and of friendship and through mutual understanding.

Some commentators in my country have suggested the following: "The Armenian Question should be left to the historians". They seem to be assured that the victor of the "battle of historians" will have the final word on the conflict, ethically and politically. This is exactly what we should not do, we should not leave the crucial issues at the mercy of academics - if we want to have a dialogue, through the past, about the present, using a language as de-ethnicized as possible, we have to confront impossibilities: Hier ist die Rose, hier tanze!

Notes

[1] Emrah Göker is a graduate student at Columbia University. Parts of this text, here modified and updated, were presented at the May 2004 panel, "Reconciliation through Democracy: Continued Challenges for Armenia and Turkey", at New York's Fordham University. A Turkish version is forthcoming in the May 2005 issue of the socialist monthly Birikim.

[2] The 1974 English translation (Verso Books) of the book by E. F. N. Jephcott is inaccurate here: "A wrong life cannot be lived rightly." Adorno originally writes: "Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen."

[3] Here is the English coverage of the attack by the popular-nationalist daily Hürriyet: "Anger Has Spilled into the Streets", 4/7/2005.

[4] Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (Thinking in Action) (New York, 2001).

[5] These issues are thoroughly investigated in Taner Akçam's Dialogue Across an International Divide: Essays Towards a Turkish-Armenian Dialogue (Zoryan Institute, 2001).

[6] Armenia at the Crossroads: Democracy and Nationhood in the Post-Soviet Era (Watertown, 1991), p.2.

[7] The Challenge of Statehood: Armenian Political Thinking Since Independence (Watertown, 1999), p. 312.
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