Facing History: Denial And The Turkish National Security Concept

Sociologist and historian Taner Akçam was born in the province of Ardahan, Turkey. As the editor-in-chief of a student political journal, he was arrested in 1976 and sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment. Amnesty International adopted him as a prisoner of conscience. A year later, he escaped to Germany. Between 2000 and 2002, Taner Akçam was Visiting Professor of History at University of Michigan. He worked also as Visiting Associate Professor at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at University of Minnesota. Among Taner Ackam’s many published works is The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (2012). On a visit to Australia, Taner Ackam addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 31 October 2012 

FACING HISTORY: DENIAL AND THE TURKISH NATIONAL SECURITY CONCEPT 

TANER AKCAM

 In 2009, in a raid against the ultra-nationalist shadowy terror organization Ergenekon, which is composed of mostly army and police officers and bureaucrats, Turkish police confiscated some documents. Among those documents was a file in which the names of five people were listed along with their photos. They were targeted for assassination. My name was among that group. Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk and the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, who as you may know was assassinated in January 2007 were two other names.

The title of the document, by the way, was “Traitors to National Security”. All of the people listed were known for being outspoken on the Armenian Genocide and for asking the Turkish Government to face this historic reality honestly. The shadowy terror organization Ergenekon was not alone in considering to be outspoken on Armenian genocide as a threat to national security. As you may well know, over the last decades in Turkey, the government along with media didn’t hesitate to label anyone who has dared bring up the topic Armenian Genocide as a traitor to the nation, to drag from courtroom to courtroom for prosecution, not to mention, even to assassinate.

One can therefore draw the conclusion that to be outspoken about the Armenian Genocide is to be considered a threat to Turkish national security.

One may understandably ask why? Before answering this question though I have to add that this is not just the view of the political elite or an ultra-nationalist terror organisation. It also underpins legal decision-making. In a judgment in 2007 against two Turkish-Armenian journalists Arat Dink, son of assassinated journalist Hrant Dink and Sarkis Seropyan, who received suspended sentences of a year imprisonment, for using the term “genocide”, the Turkish court stated that:

Talk about genocide, both in Turkey and in other countries, unfavorably affects national security and the national interest. The claim of genocide… has become part of and the means of special plans aiming to change the geographic political boundaries of Turkey… and a campaign to demolish its physical and legal structure.

The ruling stated further that the Republic of Turkey is under “a hostile diplomatic siege consisting of genocide resolutions… The acceptance of this claim may lead in future centuries to a questioning of the sovereignty rights of the Republic of Turkey over the lands on which it is claimed these events occurred.” Due to these national security concerns, the court declared that the claim of genocide in 1915 is not protected speech. To quote, “the use of these freedoms can be limited in accordance with aims such as the protection of national security, of public order, of public security”.[1]

The situation is not that different in the United States. Even though by joint declaration of Congress in September 9, 1975, April 24th was declared a “National Day of Remembrance” for the Armenian Genocide and the President of the United States is authorised and requested to issue a proclamation, since then NONE of the United States Presidents, except Reagan in 1981, has used the term Genocide. The main reason for this attitude is “national security concerns of the United States in the Middle East”.

The same argument again is used against the proposals for recognition of the Armenian Genocide on the floor of Congress, which has been brought up almost every year. Both United States presidents and opponents of the resolution for the recognition of the Armenian Genocide have very similar arguments to the Turkish Court’s decision above. Indeed it would appear that, as the Court stated, using the term genocide, “unfavorably affects national security and the national interest” of Turkey and United States. And I am sure, you will hear the same arguments here in Australia soon…

We have two set of arguments here which are brought up in opposition to one another; “National security” versus morality or in other phraseology “realists” versus “moral fundamentalists.” The “realists” emphasise national security concerns of their country. On the other side we have “fundamentalist moralists” emphasising the supremacy of morality against “real interests”.

The point that I want to make here is that pitting “national interest” against “morality” as mutually exclusive is just plain wrong. In fact what I really believe is that as the recent developments in the Middle East clearly teaches us any security policy in the region that excludes morality cannot be a “realistic” policy and even undermines national security. Indeed, if one knows Turkey and the Middle East, one would easily recognise that history and historical injustices are not just dead issues from the past; the past IS the present in the Middle East. So therefore morality is a very real issue, and for realpolitik to be successful in the region; moral values, in this instance, the specific one of acknowledging historic wrong doings, must be integrated into a policy of national security.

There is a strong interconnection between security, democracy and facing history in the Middle East. Even a passing glance at the recent developments at the region makes it clear that historical injustices and the persistent denial of these injustices by one or another state or ethnic-religious group is a major stumbling block, not only for the democratisation of the region, but also for the establishment of stable relations between different ethnic and religious groups. My central argument is that a failure to confront history honestly is one of the major reasons for insecurity and instability in the region.

The question that I have struggled to find the answer to is, why is the discussion of historical injustices, something that goes to the heart of human rights perceived as a threat to Turkish national security? I propose that we take the argument about “national security” of Turkey very seriously and try to examine the roots of this mentality and to show the reasons why it must be changed. The mindset that an open discussion of history engenders a security problem originates from the breakup of the Ottoman Empire into nation-states starting in the nineteenth century. From late Ottoman times to the present, there has been a continuous tension between the state’s concern for secure borders and society’s need to come to terms with abuses of human rights. In this history, security and territorial integrity of a crumbling Empire, and human right abuses, can be likened to the two faces of a coin.

Indeed, there have been certain moments in that history where national security and human rights became inseparably intertwined. One such moment came immediately after the First World War, between 1918 and 1923.

When the First World War ended with Ottoman defeat, working out the terms of a peace settlement, the political decision makers of the time grappled with two distinct, yet related issues. The first was the territorial integrity of the Ottoman state. The second was the wartime atrocities committed by the ruling Union and Progress party against Ottoman Armenian citizens.

The questions about the first issue were as follows. Should the Ottoman state retain its independence? Should new states be permitted to arise on the territory of the Ottoman state? If so, how should the borders of these new states be defined? The questions regarding the second issue were: What can be done about the wartime crimes against the Armenians and the perpetrators of these atrocities? How should the perpetrators be punished? These questions related two different set of issues which hadn’t been tackled separately and were rather intertwined with each other.

The questions, related to the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire led to the formation of two different viewpoints. The Turkish nationalist movement, under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal favored continued sovereignty within reduced borders as defined by the 1918 Moudros Ceasefire Treaty. The Allied Powers and ethnic-religious groups such as Greeks, Armenians and, to a lesser degree the Kurds, on the other hand argued for the establishment of new states on both occupied and unoccupied territory of the Ottoman Empire. The successive treaties of Sèvres 1920 and Lausanne 1923 reflected these divergent points of view.

As a result of this fight over territory, in the early period of the Republic a general understanding of history in modern Turkey emerged, which can be formulated in the following way. We, the Turks, who see ourselves as the legitimate successors of the Ottoman Empire defended our sole remaining territory against the Armenians, Greeks, and to a lesser extent the Kurds, who were trying to carve up Anatolia into nation-states, with the support of the British, French, and Italians. The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres resolved the question of territory in favor of the non-Turkish nationalities. For the Turks, therefore, Sèvres remains a black mark in history. For the other ethnic-religious groups, however, the significance of Sèvres is quite different. Although it did not fully reflect their demands for territory, the treaty represented an unprecedented historical opportunity to resolve the territorial issue in their favor. Conversely, the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which guaranteed Turkish dominance in Anatolia for the Turks, stands as a milestone and validation of their continued national existence. Meanwhile, the other nationalities regard it as a great historical injustice.

Nevertheless both the Sevres and Lausanne treaties were not merely symbols of territorial conflict. These two treaties would symbolise how the injustices committed against Armenians and other Christians during the war, would be addressed. The central question was how would those perpetrators of human rights abuses during the war be punished? Although everyone, including the Turkish nationalists agreed that these crimes should not be left unpunished; there was uncertainty about the scope of the penalty. One group advocated for the trial and punishment of only some first-hand criminals as well as some of the top Union and Progress leaders. Another group advocated for the trials of individual suspects, casting the net as wide as possible, and for the punitive dismemberment of the Ottoman state into new states created on its territory.

The position of the Entente powers was that “the Turks”, so to speak, organised the massacres of other peoples, in particular the Armenians, during the First World War. It was therefore necessary to punish “the Turks” collectively in order to rescue the subject peoples (Arabs as well as Greeks, Armenians, etc.) from Turkish domination. Punishing “the Turks” was to be accomplished in two phases. First, the members of the Ottoman government and other officials were to be tried for the crimes against the religious and ethnic communities. Second, “the Turks” would henceforth inhabit a state that would be rendered as small and as weak as possible. A telegram sent to the Paris Peace Conference on April 3, 1919 by the Assistant High Commissioner of Istanbul, Webb, clearly illustrates this policy:

In order to punish all of those persons who are guilty of the Armenian horrors, it is necessary to punish the Turks as a group. Therefore, I propose that the punishment be given on a national level through the partitioning up of the last Turkish Empire, and on a personal level by trying those high officials who are on the list in my possession, and in a manner that would serve as an example for their successors.

In short, casting the net as widely as possible, the Allied powers advocated for the trials of individual suspects, and for the punitive dismemberment of the Ottoman state into new states created on its territory. So, the main ostensible reason for partitioning Anatolia among various national groups was motivated by the Great Powers’ desire to punish “the Turks” for the barbarous acts they had committed.

What was the attitude of the “Turkish” position relative to the punishments of the criminals? Recall that postwar Turkey was governed from two political centers: Istanbul, the seat of the Ottoman Government, and Ankara, the headquarters of the Turkish Nationalist movement led by Mustafa Kemal. Both, the Istanbul and Ankara governments acknowledged the massacres of Armenians and agreed with the Allies that the perpetrators should be tried. However, Ankara and Istanbul vehemently opposed the punitive partition of Anatolia.

This question was one of the central issues when both governments met in October 1919 to call an election of an Ottoman Parliament in accordance with the constitution. They signed five protocols to regulate the process of upcoming elections. The first and third protocols were directly related to the topic at hand. The first protocol declared: “1. Ittihadism – (Party of Union and Progress) [which organised the genocide against the Armenians] or any hint of its reawakening is politically very damaging… 4. It is judicially and politically necessary to punish those who committed crimes in connection with the deportation.” In the third Protocol described the atrocities as “the evil deeds” of the Union and Progress Party. The perpetrators were defined as persons “who have been sullied by the nefarious acts of the deportation and massacre”.

The founder of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal, addressing the parliament on 24 April 1920, called the atrocities a “shameful act”. Now keep in mind, Mustafa Kemal was not a human rights activist or an altruist but a nationalist and a politician. The underlying reason in supporting the punishment of perpetrators of wartime crimes was their expectations from the ongoing Paris Peace conference. The Allied Powers grabbed every opportunity to remind the “Turks” that if they expected a positive outcome from the Paris Peace talks, action absolutely had to be taken against the perpetrators of the war crimes. So, the Mustafa Kemal led government in Ankara and the administration in Istanbul believed that the war crime trials were the price for obtaining national sovereignty. In a memo written by Mustafa Kemal, in September 1919 to the Istanbul government, this point was underlined in a very clear way; “The punishment of perpetrators,” he wrote, “should not stay only on paper… but should be carried out, since this would successfully impress the foreign elements.” In exchange for this concession the Turkish leadership expected a more favorable peace settlement without loss of territory.

This strategy failed. In April 1920, the provisions of Sèvres became known, according to which it was proposed to punish “the Turks” for the war crimes by partitioning the Ottoman territory. In the same month, the Istanbul Court Martial, which had been established in November 1918 and which was in the process of trying the perpetrators of the Armenian atrocities, now under pressure from Allied powers, began trying almost the entire Turkish national leadership, Mustafa Kemal foremost among them, who were opposed to the partitioning of Anatolia. Mustafa Kemal and around one hundred nationalists were sentenced to death in absentia.

When the Turkish nationalists realised that their support for the punishment of war criminals was not going to prevent the partitioning of Anatolia; and was in fact going to lead to their own prosecution and punishment, their attitude changed.

As Mustafa Kemal wrote to Istanbul on August 20, 1920, “[t]he Ottoman government…continues to hang the children of the homeland on accusations of [having perpetrated] deportation and massacres, which now became totally senseless.” What Kemal meant was that the policy whereby the Ottoman government punished Turks for what they had done to the Christian minorities would make sense only if Turkey received some positive results in terms of a better treaty to secure the Ottoman territories. However, Sèvres had been signed, Ottoman sovereignty was not acknowledged, and Ottoman territories were distributed among different nations. Therefore, Kemal concluded these “senseless” death sentences should be halted.

We can conclude that had the Western forces agreed to territorial integrity in exchange for trials on cases of “crimes against humanity”, we might be talking about a very different history today.

Today, we can say that the court martial in Istanbul is a symbol of these two interwoven but distinct strands of Turkish history, “territory and borders” or expressed another way “national security” on the one side, and “human rights” or “facing history and addressing historic wrong doings” on the other. The fact is that the attempt at dismemberment and partition of a state as a form of a punishment for the atrocities committed during the war years and proposed punishment of its nationalist leaders for seeking the territorial integrity of their state, created the mindset in Turkey today that views any reference to the historic wrongdoings in the past as an issue of national security.

A product of this mindset is therefore a belief that democratisation, freedom of thought and speech, open and frank debate about history, acknowledgment of one’s past historical misdeeds, is a threat to national security. Those who invite society to engage in an open examination of the past are therefore labeled “traitors” and made targets of smear campaigns, are dragged into courts and prosecuted under Turkish Criminal Code Article 301 for “insulting Turkishness”. It is this kind of mindset that was behind the murder of Hrant Dink.

Reviewing Turkish History from this perspective reveals three important new perspectives. First, Mustafa Kemal’s condemnation of the Armenian massacres is diametrically opposed to the current official Turkish policy of denial. Kemal’s position, which is not sufficient for today, however could be a positive starting point for a resolution. To become a truly democratic member of the society of nations, Turkey must confront this “dark chapter” of its history, this “shameful act”, as its founding father called the Armenian genocide.

Secondly, until now, the Turkish-Armenian problem has been perceived within the old paradigm which produced these conflicts, namely, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the clash of different ethnic or national groups over lands and boundaries. We have to change this understanding. What we need is a new paradigm and we need to rethink the Armenian-Turkish conflict. We have to reposition the Armenian-Turkish conflict within the new paradigm of transitional justice, that is, as a part of the democratisation effort within existing nation-states. The conflict should not be regarded as a territorial dispute, but rather as a human rights issue and as a problem of historic injustices that must be rectified in order to establish a just and democratic society.

Thirdly, the concept of Turkish national security must be revised and changed. The main flaw of this concept is its perception that the promotion of basic democratic rights such as equality under the law, social reform and freedom of speech are a threat to national security. In the past, the emergence of the so called “Armenian question” was the result of Armenian demands for equality and social reform, which arguably would have led to a better Ottoman society. Their demands and the Armenians themselves were considered a security threat which led to them being targeted for massacres and deportations. Today the demand for an honest account of history is being handled in the same way: as a security problem.

The irony is that criminalising historical inquiries for national security reasons is not only a huge obstacle on the path to democracy, but also is counterproductive and leads directly to real security problems for the country. This “self-fulfilling prophecy” can be shown not only in the Armenian genocide of the past but in the Kurdish problem today. Just as the Armenians and their social and political demands for a more just society were considered a threat in the past, a democratic future for Kurds today is also considered a threat to security. So, instead of solving Kurdish problems by seeking solutions that would lead to a more democratic society, the old, and useless, security concept has been resurrected and has declared that Kurdish demands are essentially a security problem for the nation.

As long as Turkey continues to regard moral principles (one of which is facing historic injustice with honesty) and national security as two opposing poles that are mutually exclusive, and refuses to come to terms with the past for national security reasons – indeed, as long as Turkey’s national security is defined in opposition to an honest historical reckoning – further problems will be created.

There is a regional aspect of the problem also: A non-democratic, authoritarian Turkey creates more of a security problem than it solves when it makes the consistent denial of historical injustices an integral part of its security policy. It is exactly this attitude that delays not only democratization in the region, it also destabilises relationships in the volatile Middle East. You cannot solve any problem in the Middle East today without addressing historic wrong doings because history is not something in the past; past is the present in the Middle East.

You need to understand that one of the main problems in the region is the insecurity felt by different groups towards each other as a result of events that have occurred in history. When you make the persistent denial of these pain-filled acts a part of your security policy this brings with it insecurity towards the other. This is what we call the security dilemma: What one does to enhance one’s own security causes a reaction that, in the end, can make one even less secure.

For this reason, any security concept, any policies of real-politik in and for the region that ignores morality and forgets the addressing of historic wrong doings is doomed to fail in the end.

So, instead of helping those who deny past injustices, and make this denying a part of their security concept our policy should integrate an honest confrontation with history into a policy of national interest in the Middle East. I believe that we will enter a new era where morality and real-politik will not be considered mutually exclusive; morality is a indispensible part of real-politik.