Adrian Hamilton: Turkish government breaches wall of denial about the past

PanARMENIAN.Net - With all that was going on in Europe at the time, the Dersim massacre of the Tunceli Alevi in eastern Turkey between 1937 and 1938 aroused little attention. But it was a fearful crime nonetheless. A total of 13,806 people, many of them civilians, were killed, according to documents released last week by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. As many as 22,000 were deported from the area, according to the musicologist Hasan Saltuk, who has a book on the subject coming out in May. In style, in brutality and in intent, it was reminiscent of the much bigger killings of the Armenians at the end of the First World War, Adrian Hamilton says in the article titled “Breaking with the past is key to Turkey’s future” published by The Independent.

“It's hard to overestimate the significance of the decision to release these documents and for the Prime Minister to publicly "apologize" for the action. Ever since their defeat in the First World War and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Turks have been living under the narrative created by President Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the "father" of the nation – that of a modern westernized secular state which had rejected its past, abandoned its Muslim status and had reformed itself into a centralized nation. Even today it is a crime, punishable by imprisonment, to speak ill of him,” he says.

“By directly implicating Ataturk himself in this affair, however, the government is also breaching a whole wall of secrecy and denial about the past. With the Dersim documents out in the open, do we now move to open admission of state responsibility for the Armenian Genocide? Does Ankara accept what it has done to the Kurds within its territories? With the centenary of the Armenian massacres due in 2015, the opportunity for a grand gesture of responsibility is clearly there. It's what traditionalists fear, concerned that, in raking up the past, the government will now release the forces of fragmentation of the state, and liberals dearly wish for, eager to see the country face up to its past. Even those who distrust Erdogan's religious aspirations nevertheless welcome the moves to dismantle the judicial-military network which has dominated the country since the last war,” the author says.

“One of the truly great figures of the 20th century, Ataturk managed to get a country in the ruins of a once-powerful past to come to terms with its defeat and face the future. No other imperial power managed that feat. One asks whether the U.S. now or Britain can do it as effectively. But it was at a cost to tolerance, to the minorities and to freedom. Nearly a century later, we are in a very different world in which a resurgent Turkey is laying claim to a regional influence and an example of moderate political Islamism which it has not seen since the Ottoman days. For the outside world, it is its foreign policy that fascinates, its break with the U.S. and its support of the overthrow of the regimes of Libya and Syria. But it is the story of change within the country which is just as fascinating and uncertain. Nowhere does history matter as much as in the Middle East. In confronting its past Turkey is now preparing itself for a different future,” he concludes.