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

by Meline Toumani

  Halaçoğlu went on, obsessed with the idea that everyone had gotten along. “They always wondered how it could have happened that two peoples living in the same place could become enemies. They talked about how they never wanted to leave this place.…”

  One of the most beloved Armenian folk songs mourns the Armenians’ dispersion from the Kilikia region in painful detail. As Halaçoğlu kept going with his spiel, I remembered the first time I heard “Kilikia.” One of my favorite uncles (by marriage), whose Kilikia-born mother had survived the genocide and settled in Lebanon, sang the song from the end of the table after a family dinner. “I’ve seen the plains of Syria, the peaks and cedars of Lebanon. I’ve seen prosperous Italy, Venice and its gondolas,” went one verse. “But none of them are as beautiful as my Kilikia.” The song ends with the hope that if nothing else, they will return to Kilikia to be buried.

  “Did anyone in your family suffer from the massacres?” I asked Halaçoğlu.

  “Of course, very many. I have a very large family. But people wanted to forget about these things. They didn’t want to repeat it, repeat it, and repeat it and make the children remember these things all the time. They wanted to forget.”

  It occurred to me only much later that Halaçoğlu never asked me if anyone in my family had suffered.

  I changed the subject, asking him if he knew Hrant Dink.

  “Of course I did.” He paused for a moment. “I mean, we weren’t really close friends.”

  At this, Ertan, who had been so poised as to seem like a statue, stumbled for the first time. He coughed and rephrased Halaçoğlu’s answer four different ways before moving on.

  “I was very upset when I learned that he was killed,” said Halaçoğlu. “Because maybe he was the only person who could be an intermediary to the Armenian diaspora.”

  He and Hrant had agreed that Turks and Armenians should not have bad feelings toward each other, he said. A lengthy explanation followed, in which he was intent on demonstrating the precise intersection of Hrant’s point of view and his own, hinging on an argument that any bad feelings between Christians and Muslims were created by “imperialists and missionaries in Ottoman times, who tried to make the two groups into enemies.” He told me that he had proof of these intentions in the form of secret reports—three thousand documents that he himself purchased from Russia, for five hundred dollars—“because Russia needed that kind of money at the time.”

  “What did you think about the expression that people chanted at Hrant’s funeral: ‘We are all Armenian’?” I asked.

  “We do not accept in any way such a massacre against Hrant.”

  “But what did you think about that slogan?”

  Halaçoğlu avoided my question and said that radicalization was the result of a constant, one-sided emphasis on a past that was tragic for everyone.

  “But could you bring yourself to say this statement in solidarity? ‘We are all Armenian.’ You personally?”

  “We were never brought up in our childhood as anyone’s enemies. This revived only in the last few years.”

  “I’m asking about the ‘We are all Armenian’ statement. Could you say that yourself?”

  “I don’t feel the need to say something like that. If I needed to say it, I would, but I don’t feel the need.”

  When I didn’t respond, he continued.

  “There’s no barrier. I mean, I could also say it. So in the end you’re Armenian, and I am a Turk, but we are both human beings.”

  “But it’s not that simple,” I said. “If it were, I wouldn’t be here.” And yet, I knew even as I uttered these words, that my own insistence that we were all human beings was precisely what had brought me here. Before coming to Turkey, I did not understand that even this, the most innocuous-seeming idea ever to emerge from the mind of man, could be used to promote intolerance. If we were all human beings, Halaçoğlu argued, why should he make any special fuss about someone’s Armenian identity?

  “I’d like to ask you about something else,” I said. At Hrant’s funeral, participants had held small, wooden pickets topped with circular posters bearing a life-size photograph of Hrant’s face. In coverage of the funeral march, it was repeatedly claimed that one hundred thousand people had marched together. But Halaçoğlu had come forth with a statement that was all over the Turkish papers: he said that the number was inflated, because all those images of Hrant’s head had doubled the headcount.

  “If your goal is to make people feel more comfortable together, why would you say such a thing at a time like that? I’m speaking from the heart now,” I said. “It seemed like a really insensitive comment.”

  Ertan asked me to repeat this, slowly.

  I rephrased. “If we want to find a way to connect to each other as human beings, and if so many people were moved by that horrible tragedy, as an Armenian I felt that was an insensitive thing to say.”

  Ertan looked puzzled. “Insensitive?”

  Something about this word was resisting translation. Was it confusion about the difference between physical and emotional sensation? Or was the notion simply too absurd to repeat? A young journalist, a woman, naturally, using the only power women were expected to employ—the power of the pout, let’s call it—telling a sham historian that he had hurt her feelings?

  After watching us try to rework my comment a few times, Halaçoğlu leaned forward and held up both hands. “Tamam, anladım.” Okay, I got it.

  Now he claimed that journalists had distorted what he said. This would have been easier to believe if not for the fact that Halaçoğlu had a habit of issuing new press releases whenever prior statements were poorly received. He was like a Magic 8 Ball—if you don’t like the result you get, just shake it and try out a different one.

  “This is what I actually said. I said that the group that was chanting, ‘We are all Armenian, we are all Hrant’ did not do anything like this in any other funeral ceremony.”

  “But was this like any other tragedy?”

  “I mean in any other funeral where someone was killed in a similar way.”

  “Nobody was killed in a similar way,” I said. My voice was now agitated for the first time. Neither Ertan nor I could quite keep our cool when the subject of Hrant’s murder came up. But my statement wasn’t strictly true: many journalists in Turkey had been murdered in similar ways, murdered for their ideas. In the early 1990s, in particular, reporting that could be viewed as pro-Kurdish was tantamount to suicide. Arrests and torture were common, and during that decade several journalists were killed in connection with their work. Fortunately, the pattern had not been repeated in recent years, until Hrant’s assassination. But Halaçoğlu apparently saw no threads connecting the murders of journalists, state censorship, and his own bottomless oeuvre.

  “What I want to say is that if they had said, in the funerals of these other people, ‘We are all Turks,’ there wouldn’t have been a radicalization in Turkey. We could have prevented this.”

  “But people already have to say that they’re Turks, every day in school,” I said, referring to the pledge that schoolchildren chanted in unison. “How can you compare those other deaths to the death of a Turkish-Armenian journalist who was killed because he was Armenian, given the position of Armenians in this country?”

  “No, look. I do not accept the idea that Hrant was killed because he was Armenian.”

  Huh?

  “Because his being killed is not good for Turks at all.”

  Right.

  “Who can want there to be more reaction against the Armenians in Turkey? Who would want this? Would you or would I? No!”

  No.

  “So this is being propagated. This is being forced.” He referred back to the intervention of “imperialists” in the Ottoman era. “And today in our own time, another state is doing the same thing.”

  The United States? The EU? Israel perhaps? The paranoia about foreign intervention in Turkey’s affairs had a legitimate history, but it had swelled to enc
ompass every single problem the country faced, matters great and small, including some that had nothing to do with politics. Zoology, for example. In 2005 the Ministry of Environment and Forestry renamed three indigenous animals, releasing a statement saying that the old names “were given by foreigners with designs on the country’s unity.” The name of a red fox known as “Vulpes Vulpes Kurdistanica” was shortened to “Vulpes Vulpes.” A species of wild sheep called “Ovis Armeniana” was changed to “Ovis Orientalis Anatolicus,” and a type of deer known as “Capreolus Capreolus Armenus” became “Capreolus Cuprelus Capreolus.” The statement went on: “Unfortunately, foreign scientists, who for many years researched Turkey’s flora and fauna, named plant and animal species that they had never come across before with a prejudiced mind-set.… This ill intent is so obvious that even species that are endemic to our country were given names that are against our unitary structure,” it concluded.

  “What do you think about Article 301?” I asked. This was the amendment to the penal code that made “insulting Turkishness” a crime with a ten-year prison sentence. Judging from the many trials under way in Turkish courts, the law’s main function seemed to be to punish the use of the word genocide. There were cases against those who had spoken the word or implied it, then cases against the lawyers who defended them, and, in turn, cases against journalists who wrote too freely about these cases.

  “I am in favor of freedom of expression, but with the requirement that you are not harassing others.”

  “It’s difficult to agree on what it means to harass others,” I said.

  “Well, would it be correct if I insulted you and harassed you because you are Armenian?”

  I shrugged.

  “It wasn’t your choice to be born as an Armenian.”

  He paused, waiting for me to react.

  “The same way I was born as a Turk,” he added.

  Finally I gathered my wits—only to say something that sounded insane. “I absolutely believe that by law you should be allowed to say whatever you want about me or about Armenians.”

  He was surprised by this, and scrunched his face in exaggerated disappointment. “But it is not nice to insult, to harass,” he said, taking a fatherly, instructive tone. “Would it be correct to say Armenians are low human beings?”

  “It would be unfortunate if you said that, but it should not be illegal.”

  “I think insulting someone’s identity should be illegal,” he said. “Because one does not choose which nation to belong to.”

  It struck me as sad that the best argument he could make as to why he should not insult my identity was because I did not have a choice about it.

  He went on. “There can be bad Turks, bad Armenians, but we should not harass or insult Armenianness or Turkishness.”

  “So should insulting Armenianness also be a crime?”

  “It should be a crime.”

  “How about insulting Kurdishness?”

  “Any nation.” Then he added—as though he was afraid that I was not getting his point—“Nobody should be harassed because he is black.”

  In the United States, of course, we were more or less free to insult blacks if we chose to. The cornerstone of our democracy, the First Amendment, invited us to insult one another openly and hideously so long as the insult was not accompanied by calls to violent action. To that end, we had Ku Klux Klan marches ambling down Main Street in American towns even after the gains of the civil rights movement. The American Civil Liberties Union had defended their right to do so. An open society calls on individuals and groups to win influence through reason and example, not solely by prohibition. By contrast, in Turkey, the prohibition on insulting Turkishness had been forged into a weapon used in court against Hrant Dink, and the lawsuits and the lynch-mob atmosphere they created led straight to his murder, ennobling a seventeen-year-old from Trabzon with a network of powerful figures behind him to take on the role of assassin. And now, with all of that in mind, I found myself sitting on a sofa at the Turkish Historical Society, face-to-face with Yusuf Halaçoğlu, touting the virtues of hate speech.

  But still he was not satisfied that he’d made himself understood.

  “How correct, how right would it be if I told you that according to my investigations, I decided that the Armenians are a low-profile people?” he asked.

  I said nothing.

  “I do not agree that the Armenians, Greeks, or Jews should be in the status of minorities. Because if you give them minority status, they will be second-class people. Armenians were born here in Turkey just as I was. So just like me, they should benefit from everything that Turkey has, as they wish. They can say, ‘We are all Armenians,’ but they are my fellow citizens.”

  “That’s beautiful,” I said. The words came out of me as if from a robot programmed to generate polite remarks on cue. If I hadn’t heard my own voice saying this on tape, later on, I would have denied that I ever could have been so mawkishly insincere. I had lost control of the interview altogether, and it was the hint I saw behind Ertan’s eyes that told me it was time to cut my losses and go. He looked embarrassed for me.

  As we stood to leave, I asked Halaçoğlu if he expected to continue in his job at the Historical Society for a long time.

  “No,” he said firmly. He was tired. “I don’t want to be involved with politics anymore.”

  Then Halaçoğlu told me he wanted to explain just one more thing.

  What followed was less an explanation than a parting souvenir. It was a set of documents that, he believed, would help me understand his views. He shoved a few papers into a clear plastic sleeve, four streaky photocopies of archival documents that were to settle once and for all the debate over what happened to the Armenians at the end of the Ottoman Empire.

  What were the documents? A couple of letters from diplomats and a page of a population record. It was as if a historian were merely a cook with a knack for improvising, making some kind of soup with whatever happened to be in the cupboard.

  Later, when I recalled the interview, my memories were nearly empty of visual detail, as if I had frozen my senses in order to endure the meeting’s peculiar dishonesty—my own as well as his. But one image remained clear in my mind: the sight of Halaçoğlu’s unsteady, aging hand trying to maneuver the edges of those photocopied sheets into the soft, transparent cover. He appeared somehow vulnerable—human, finally—as he wrestled with this small secretarial project.

  That glimpse of vulnerability reflected my larger confusion about the meeting: all his obfuscations and rationalizations—his own and, by extension, those of Turks in general—seemed on the one hand the very definition of insecurity, of a brittle identity unable to risk questioning the story it clung to. Yet at the same time, he held to his rationalizations with such tenacity that it was he who had control, while I floundered. Thinking back to my conversation with Müge about whether Halaçoğlu would want to talk to somebody like me, I realized that in a match like this, I was bound to be the loser. Certainty is always more powerful than doubt. I had known that once, as a child.

  A year later, Halaçoğlu would resign from his post and win a seat in the Turkish Parliament under the MHP—an ultranationalist party—representing the large, industrial province of Kayseri.

  * * *

  AFTER LEAVING HALAÇOĞLU’S office, I went alone to the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, which was situated on a hill overlooking the old district of Ankara. What a deep history this region had. The museum was set in the restored structures of a fifteenth-century marketplace and inn, and wandering through its archways and stony nooks, you could learn about the world’s oldest civilizations: from the Paleolithic era on to the Hittites, the Lydians, and the Phrygians, they were all there. The museum also covered more recent civilizations: Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Seljuk. Here and there one might marvel over the involvements of the Medes, the Scythians, the Egyptians, and Persians in Anatolian history. A few years earlier, the European Museum Forum had recognized thi
s as the European Museum of the Year.

  I spent several minutes reading a timeline that summarized the shifts and jolts of three thousand years: it began in 1200 BC, describing the aftermath of the Aegean migrations, the vanquishing of Lydia in 546 BC, and so on, as kingdoms displaced one another and morphed and split. There was the divide of the Roman Empire into East and West and the rise of Byzantium, bringing us to the year 330. Then the timeline skipped to 1071, the Malazgirt Battle, which opened the doors of Anatolia to Seljuk Turks. The Seljuks’ activities got several entries, leading up to 1453, when Constantinople became the capital of the Ottoman Empire. The next few centuries went by without remark, until 1923, when Atatürk declared the new Turkish republic.

  In other words, the hundreds of years that comprised the height of Armenian civilization in Anatolia—the rise and fall of several Armenian dynasties and kingdoms—were left out of the timeline altogether.

  I walked through every exhibit in the building, studying captions and wondering if I just hadn’t found the right room yet. Peering through the glass at ancient statues and gold earrings, a familiar, self-questioning voice crept into my mind: was it possible that in fact the Armenians were so minor and irrelevant that it was actually reasonable to ignore them in this museum?

  I looked around for an information desk or a guide, but the only employee I could find was a young man who seemed barely out of his teens, standing behind the counter at the museum’s souvenir shop. Fingering through some postcards and key chains, I tried to sound nonchalant. “Excuse me, I was just curious. Is there anything in this museum about the Armenian people?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, smiling back shyly.