There Was and There Was Not: A Journey through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond

by Meline Toumani

  These foiled attempts by serious historians to work with Halaçoğlu were important because Prime Minister Erdoğan had recently taken to calling for a joint historical commission to analyze the events of 1915. It was a trick play, implying that the events had not yet been adequately studied: nobody who understood the territory could take such a call seriously. But because Erdoğan kept repeating the idea to foreign reporters and in diplomatic meetings, he had the rhetorical upper hand, making it seem as though Turkish scholars were eager to cooperate if only the other side would step up to the plate.

  Sporting metaphors were irresistible: Müge had told me of yet another failed project that she referred to as a “boxing match of documents.” Under the auspices of a group called the Vienna Armenian-Turkish Platform, Halaçoğlu had offered to bring to the table one hundred documents that proved the genocide had never happened. And two scholars from Armenia’s National Academy of Sciences would chip in one hundred documents that proved it had. A group of scholars of various ethnicities were to adjudicate the battle. Papers came and went; at some point the document cap was raised to 133. Eventually, the Armenian participants pulled out. “I don’t know why they even tried,” said Müge. “I would never go into such a thing. That’s not how scholarship works.”

  In fact serious scholarly cooperation was well under way, but Halaçoğlu was not part of it. And despite Erdoğan’s calls for more research, his own administration initially shut down the first attempted conference in Turkey that sought to discuss the 1915 massacres outside the official framework. That groundbreaking event was eventually held at Istanbul’s Bilgi University in September 2005, but only after participants passed through a crowd of nationalist protesters hurling eggs and tomatoes, and after the minister of justice Cemil Çiçek accused the conference organizers (a group of progressive historians and sociologists, all Turkish) of “stabbing the nation in the back.”

  In the United States, meanwhile, Müge and two of her colleagues—Ronald Grigor Suny and Gerard Libaridian, both ethnically Armenian—had convened the WATS group, whose conferences and online discussion boards were equal parts rigorous academic exchange and group therapy for Armenian and Turkish scholars.

  As for scholars of the subject who were neither Armenian nor Turkish, they were few and far between—and almost all those in this category had, at least, an Armenian or Turkish spouse. The two most prominent American supporters of the Turkish position, Heath Lowry and the late Stanford Shaw, were both married to Turkish women (whether those marriages were the result of their work or its inspiration is a study for a journalist more intrepid than I).

  The relevant point is that the political drama surrounding scholarship on 1915 meant that hardly anybody without a personal stake in the matter had the energy to get involved. A shocking proportion of Ottomanists and scholars of World War I stayed out of the debate entirely, glossing over the subject on the last page of a chapter or in a disclaimer-style footnote after a suspiciously vague passage. If the book is five hundred pages long, look for a paragraph about the massacres of Armenians—they may be generalized as “the empire’s Christian subjects”—around page 498.

  This reluctance to enter the fray was somewhat understandable if you considered what happened to the late American historian Donald Quataert. A respected scholar based at Binghamton University, Quataert specialized in the social, economic, and labor history of the Ottoman era. He was on the board of the Institute for Turkish Studies, a research center on the Georgetown campus. In 2006, after a long career that carefully side-stepped the Armenian question, Quataert made a bold move: he wrote in a book review that more Ottoman scholars needed to take the risk of studying the Armenian genocide. He noted that although he considered the term a distraction, he did believe the events fulfilled the definition. And it turned out that even this passing comment tucked into an article was a bridge too far.

  Quataert’s review was met with a stern warning from Turkey’s ambassador to the United States, Nabi Sensoy. According to Quataert, the ambassador told him that his comments had angered Turkish leaders and they had threatened to revoke the Georgetown institute’s funding—three million dollars from the Turkish government, which at the time constituted the institute’s entire budget.

  Quataert resigned from the board of the ITS and was followed by a few colleagues. The president of the institute, David Cuthell, referred to the Armenian issue as the “third rail.”

  Meanwhile, Western scholars who supported the Turkish thesis, such as Lowry and Shaw, had faced a threat far worse: assassination attempts by Armenian terrorists against them and their families.

  In this politicized, even dangerous academic climate that scared off all but the most hardy, the influence of a government-appointed historian like Halaçoğlu—a defender of the faith whose resources and energy seemed inexhaustible—could not be simply dismissed.

  Passing through the lobby of the Historical Society, which occupied a large, modernist building, Ertan and I stopped to take in a relief of Atatürk’s face on the wall, accompanied by an homage. Translating it for me as a receptionist watched us, Ertan forced a straight face and a businesslike tone: “Dear Eternal Atatürk, the things that you expect from the Historical Society, we and those who come after us will follow your wishes always.”

  Moments later, I shook Yusuf Halaçoğlu’s hand with as much willful positive feeling as I had ever mustered. He looked about my father’s age, with a sharp, triangular chin shooting up to high, wide Mongolian cheekbones. His hair was opaque and smooth, shaped like a helmet. He had a permanent squint in his eyes that reminded me uncannily of George W. Bush. He appeared delighted to see me.

  Halaçoğlu showed us to one of the six leather couches in his office. He did not speak any English, so I signaled to Ertan that I was ready to begin. I had prepared my introductory comments at some length, but before I could say a word, Halaçoğlu began to orate, and Ertan had no choice but to go along: “When the subject is Turkish and Armenian relations,” Halaçoğlu said, “the issues go back to history.”

  I interrupted. “Before we start, I want to let you know a bit about myself, and the reason I’m here.” I told him that I was an Armenian from the diaspora. I was doing research in Turkey about the “difficult issues” in our “shared past” and the way that those issues played out in the present. “I know that it’s not easy for Armenians and Turks to speak to each other naturally about this subject, but I really hope that we can have an open and comfortable conversation.”

  “Just a minute,” he said, holding up his palm in front of him. “For me it’s not hard at all. I have many Armenian friends. It’s not necessary that we do not have a comfortable relationship because of an event in 1915. After all, we’re living today.”

  I had Turkish friends, too, I told him brightly. I added that I was having a lovely time in Turkey. “So that’s all good. But I’m talking about how Turks and Armenians feel about one another in general.”

  “Now of course, because of the recent events, from 1915 on, there are people who say that there was a genocide, and those who come out against that,” Halaçoğlu said. “And because of all these rumors, our Armenian youth—I mean young Turks with Armenian origins—feel a trauma. There’s a similar trauma in the Turkish young people. That’s why I think that at this point it is necessary to bring together young people with Turkish origins and young people with Armenian origins.”

  I, too, believed that we needed to bring young Turks and Armenians together, I told him. I was surprised to find common ground so quickly. I asked if the point would be for the youth to talk about their stereotypes of one another, or perhaps to exchange stories about their families’ experiences.

  “No,” he said. “It would be something like a summer camp; a chance for them to meet each other, but also a chance to educate them about certain issues. To counteract the effects of negative ideas that come from the outside to the minds of these young people.”

  “Like what, for example?” />
  “When you bring people together and they face traumas simultaneously, then it’s easier for them to see things.”

  “What things?”

  “So if you were a person always saying that, for example, ‘This many Armenians were killed there at this moment’—and if I was a person saying, ‘That many Turks were killed at that moment,’ then from our debates, at the very least we would relieve some tension. But it’s not only that. There are many positive things to talk about, like what good neighbors they were to each other.” He meant Armenians and Muslims in the Ottoman Empire. “How many nice things happened between them. It’s not only bad things that happened in 1914, 1915, and 1918.”

  I had been determined not to talk about history with Halaçoğlu, but as our conversation progressed, he tried to squeeze in a historical red herring at every turn. I began to see how truly confusing it would be to talk to him without a total grasp of both the history and the historiography of the Armenian issue, to understand the myriad ways that the events of the late Ottoman era could be used to serve different agendas.

  Simplistic tropes such as the great, unsung harmony between Christians and Muslims, as Halaçoğlu liked to think of it, were obvious enough. Another transparent tactic was to imply that everyone had suffered equally. More complex and insidious were his frequent allusions to evidence and records. The government orders for the deportation and extermination of Armenians were known to have followed two tracks: the Interior Ministry issued official, written instructions to deport the Armenians of a given province, citing such reasons as protecting them from unrest; at the same time, unofficial commands—sometimes written but often only verbal—were delivered through party secretaries and other trusted messengers, indicating that the goal of the deportation was extermination, to be effected by a brutal Special Organization that operated outside normal channels and drew on refugees and convicts to carry out the massacres. The dual-track orders continued to serve their obfuscating purpose decades later, inviting misinterpretation by researchers. Even population records, which could seem to a casual observer like a relatively neutral form of documentation, were rife with controversy because it was in the interest of the Ottoman authorities to manipulate the numbers in order to control minority representation in local or national councils. Demographic records from the Armenian Patriarchate—which had its own interests—regularly clashed with official numbers. Population counts were of particular importance, of course, when historians looked back to assess the scale of massacre.

  For years, Turkey’s official position on the events of 1915 had created for Armenians an imperative to prove—resulting in a single-minded, juridical drive to show that there was a genocide. Consequently, the dominant scholarly energy on both sides had gone to answering the question of whether, instead of why or how. Even less subtlety trickled down to the level of popular conversation. There was or there was not—this was the realm of faith and fantasy, of childlike thinking. As if one morning, for no reason whatsoever, a big bad man in a palace woke up and ordered that all the Armenians be shot dead. Or as if one morning, the terrible Armenian traitors began fighting for the enemy and the poor Turks had no choice but to send them away.

  One reason why the WATS group represented such a sea change in critical analysis of the genocide was because it openly acknowledged the politicized landscape but attempted to move beyond it—to move away from whether, toward a more complex understanding. The group proceeded from a basic view that Armenian civilization in Anatolia as it had existed for hundreds of years had been, in effect, annihilated in the World War I era, but that many aspects of that annihilation called for further study. How far in advance had the Ottoman authorities considered such radical measures? Were earlier pogroms against Armenians, in the 1890s and 1909, isolated events, or were they part of a long-term radicalization of the government’s approach to national security leading to 1915? Events unfolded differently in different regions, with some local commanders following orders while others refused to obey: what did local variations reveal about the larger picture? To what extent was violence from Armenian nationalist committees perceived as a real threat or used as a pretext? How did wartime pressures and the intervention of European countries influence Turkey’s decisions? Was there a meaningful difference between actions that resulted in genocide and actions planned with that explicit goal? The questions were as rich as they were problematic.

  The goal of WATS was not to embrace some kind of bottomless relativism in which all interpretations were equally valid, nor to parse out some sort of compromise. The purpose was to develop a mature reckoning that could hold multiple, tense factors side by side in one analysis: to acknowledge that Armenians could have been actors in their own fate while also being, unequivocally, victims of genocide. That Turks could have been absolutely besieged by the demise of their once-massive empire, and indeed suffering the hardships of World War I, but that their leaders could have nonetheless made ruthless calculations that later could be called genocide.

  It was easy to see why Turkey would benefit from a more nuanced understanding of the genocide, but perhaps less obvious what the Armenians stood to gain from complicating their own story. One of the Armenian founders of WATS, Ronald Suny, explained succinctly: if we don’t ask questions about why and how the genocide happened, we are left with the explanation that most Armenians have settled on—that “Turks are just the sort of people who do these things.” In other words, racism.

  I had become something of a WATS groupie. But as the saying went, “The more you know, the more you know how much there is to know.” I knew this much: talking to Halaçoğlu, I would not have the mental stamina to go point-for-point on history with somebody whose entire career was devoted to sowing confusion. Instead, I spent much of our interview trying to reorient the conversation.

  “Why did you decide to become a historian?” I asked.

  “Oh!” he exclaimed. “In fact, I was drawn to two professions—one was agriculture, the other was history. I chose the second one. I was thinking it would be nice to know about the past.” He leaned back and spoke with a fond, nostalgic tone.

  “And when did you first learn about the Armenian issue? Did you hear about it when you were a child?”

  “No, not when I was a child. When I was a docent at the university in 1985.” That would have been right at the end of the ASALA era; his mention of a specific year seemed deliberate.

  “But when you were a child, did your family tell you any stories about Armenians? Did the word ‘Armenian’ mean anything to you?”

  Halaçoğlu seemed to like this question. “I was born in the region with the old name of Kilikia, in the town of Sis”—modern-day Kozan—“a place where many Armenians used to live. And well, there were—unfortunately this is a fact—there were two ovens there.” He referred to fırın, the deep, barrel-like kilns that were used to bake bread, which was tossed against the hot stone walls. “And they said that in those ovens Armenians had burned the Muslims. Those two ovens were still there.”

  I nodded. This may have been true. That was terrible. I was intent on showing empathy for such a possibility.

  “And, well, my grandfather was born a very long time ago, in 1876, so he knew all the events. But you know, he never spoke about the Armenians in a negative manner. He only spoke negatively about the Armenian rebel gangs. As a child, I never heard the word genocide; that is, I didn’t hear it from either side. I was never brought up as anyone’s enemy.”

  Of course, the term genocide hardly existed in common parlance when Halaçoğlu was a child. He was born in 1949. The term was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer whose life’s work was to devise a way for the world to punish the perpetrators of race murder. Lemkin’s campaign resulted in the United Nations’ passage, in 1948, of a treaty to define such an atrocity. Titled the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” it said that a group had suffered genocide if, because of its nationality
, ethnicity, race, or religion, its members had faced any of the following: killing, serious bodily or mental harm, conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction in whole or in part, the imposing of measures intended to prevent births within the group, and the forcible transfer of children to another group. Lemkin cited the massacres of Armenians as an example in creating his definition, but Armenians themselves did not start campaigning for use of the term until decades later.

  “Were there still Armenians living in Sis when you were a child?” I knew the answer to my question already; I was simply trying to make a point: where do you think they went?

  “No. But sometimes those who had emigrated from Sis to Lebanon and Aleppo would visit. And because they spoke in Turkish we used to stroll around with them and talk.”

  “What kinds of things would you talk about?”

  “Oh, they used to speak about their old houses where they had lived, and how they used to live together with the Turks and had such good neighborly relations.”

  Those who had emigrated. They used to tell about their old houses. He made the visits sound like casual sightseeing excursions. In fact, most of the Armenian deportees had been forced to leave their homes and assets, sometimes significant holdings. Many survivors who wound up in nearby Aleppo tried for decades to return and file claims to get their property back, almost entirely without success.

  The other subtext to Halaçoğlu’s anecdotes was: Many Armenians survived. So why would you call it a genocide? Indeed, Armenians from areas close to the Syrian border, like Sis, were disproportionately more likely to have survived the expulsions. Whereas deportees from Eastern Anatolian cities had a survival rate of only about 20 percent, deportees from provinces farther west, including Kilikia, had the comparatively better fate of only walking for weeks to disease-ridden refugee camps in the Syrian desert.