The Armenians in Modern Turkey

Post-Genocide Society, Politics and History

Talin Suciyan

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781784531713
• eBook ISBN: 9780857729729
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

After the Armenian genocide of 1915, in which over a million Armenians died, thousands of Armenian-Turks lived and worked in the Turkish state alongside those who had persecuted their communities. Living under heavy censorship, and in an atmosphere of official denial that the deaths were a genocide, how did Turkish Armenians record their own history? Here, Talin Suciyan explores the life experienced by Turkey's Armenian communities as Turkey's great modernisation project of the 20th century gathered pace.Suciyan achieves this through analysis of remarkable new primary
material: Turkish state archives, minutes of the Armenian National Assembly, a kaleidoscopic series of personal diaries, memoirs and oral histories, various Armenian periodicals such as newspapers, yearbooks and magazines, as well as statutes and laws which led to the continuing persecution of Armenians. The first history of its kind, The Armenians in Modern Turkey is a fresh contribution to the history of modern Turkey and the Armenian experience there

CHAPTER 1

SOCIAL CONDITIONS OF ARMENIANS REMAINING IN ISTANBUL AND IN THE PROVINCES

Historical Background

Within the ongoing debate around the ruptures and continuities from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey, new historical material has become available thanks to recent research on the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. I begin this chapter with an overview of the historical background – the set of conditions, structures and practices – which I consider to be decisive in the period. For instance, the confiscation of property and law-making mechanisms during the final period of the Ottoman Empire and the mechanisms legitimising post-genocide processes reveal a most important area of study, namely the economic order of the post-1923 period.¹ The more we find out about the structures and practices of the transition period form the flourishing literature, the better we are able to understand the nature of the continuities and ruptures.

Published in the mid-1980s, Erik Jan Zürcher's book, Turkey: A Modern History, started to reveal such lines of continuity. The biographical survey at the end of his book is an especially fruitful starting point in tracking the careers of some of the prominent figures throughout the last decades of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century.² Taner Akçam too argues that the roots of Turkey's current problems can be found in its Ottoman heritage.³ However, my aim here is, rather than to go into the details of this discussion, to draw attention to one aspect emphasised by Akçam, namely, ‘[the] “[c]ontinuity of mentality” which survived the empire-to-republic transition, and which fundamentally explains the behavioural worlds of both ruler and ruled in the Turkish Republic’.⁴

The policies concerning the eastern provinces and secondary literature on institutional and structural continuities from the nineteenth century onwards must be interpreted in conjunction, not only because the series of policies continued well into the post-1923 period, but also because the main group that I deal with, Armenians, constituted the local population of the region. The question of continuity must thus be pursued in secondary literature in the context of centre–periphery relations.

The eastern provinces did not constitute a popular topic within centre–periphery relations until recently. In The Ottoman Empire 1700–1922, Donald Quataert provides a detailed account of changes in the state apparatus and practices throughout the nineteenth century,⁵ devoting a section subtitled ‘Centre–Province Relations’ to this issue. However, under this subtitle he elaborates only on the 1840s with regard to Damascus and Nablus, whereas one of the most important processes was taking place in the eastern provinces. Nor does Quataert dwell on the Ottoman legacy of the first two decades of the twentieth century. Şerif Mardin, a sociologist who has worked extensively on the modernisation processes of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic,⁶ examines centre–periphery relations in his study of Ottoman state structures and their functions. Mardin considers two important turning points in relation to centre–periphery relations during the early Republican period: the Sheikh Said revolt in 1925 in the east and the Menemen incident in the west.⁷ According to Mardin, the suppression of the Sheikh Said revolt took place in a context of ‘nightmarish fissions before and during the War of Independence’, while the Menemen incident was regarded as yet another treason of the periphery against the centre: ‘The province, the primary locus of the periphery was once more identified with treason against the secularist aims of the Republic.’⁸ As Cihangir Gündoğdu and Vural Genç also reveal in their recent book, the absence of state sovereignty in the eastern provinces in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries were decisive in the policy making of the state in terms of centre–periphery relations; the authors argue that the intended solutions especially after the Tanzimat period are worthy of scrutiny.⁹ The line of continuity in the approach of the state can be clearly traced both in the language used before and after 1923 and, in practice,¹⁰ through the layihas.¹¹

While the problematisation of the absence of control in the context of the eastern provinces made an important contribution to the literature, a second aspect – the nature of centre–periphery relations in relation to the different groups in the nineteenth century and afterwards – also deserves scrutiny. Acording to Martin van Bruinessen, one can assume that there were simultaneous tendencies of both centralisation and decentralisation.¹² The problem that was formulated in the second half of the nineteenth century as the ‘Eastern Question’ was a multi-layered issue of the execution of power. Both the agreements with the Kurdish tribal chiefs in 1840s and the administrative changes undertaken thereafter – such as Vilayet Reformu (1864, Reform of the Provinces), Arazi Kanunnamesi (The Land Code, 1858),¹³ and the change in administrative structures – can be regarded as a process of colonisation in the widest sense. Hans-Lukas Kieser refers to the process of negotiations with Kurdish tribal chiefs as a process of ‘internal conquest’ (binneneroberung / iç sömürgeleştirme).¹⁴ In their study of the layihas, Cihangir Gündoğdu and Vural Genç provide valuable data as well as analyses regarding the centre–periphery relations for the region of Dersim, a region populated densely with Armenians, as well as Alewis and Kurds. The authors regard Arazi Kanunnamesi and Vilayet Reformu as policies that aimed to strengthen the power of the Sultan as the head of the Empire and to undermine the influence of local power centres.¹⁵ Drawing on Ussama Makdisi's work, where he asserts that ‘[i]n an age of Western-dominated modernity, every nation creates its own Orient. Nineteenth century Ottoman Empire was no exception’,¹⁶ they argue that Dersim was the ‘East’ of the Ottoman ruling elite.¹⁷ As an example, they point to a layiha by Mikdad Mithad Bedirhan, where he refers to Dersim as the ‘vahşi Afrika akvamı’ (‘savage African tribes’) of the Ottoman world and suggests such measures as those of the British colonists in Sudan.¹⁸ The authors assert that, as in the case of North Africa and the Arab provinces, the Ottoman elite created its own pre-modern discourse in Dersim.¹⁹

Although the past decade has seen a considerable amount of publications on the Ottoman Empire and colonialism, especially on the Arab Provinces,²⁰ the literature hardly ever considers the policies dealing with the requests of Armenians in the context of the colonial exertion of power during the same period, i.e. during the second half of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Lawyer and parliamentarian Krikor Zohrab's article ‘Pnagch‘ut‘iwn’ (‘Population’) on the demography and tailoring of the borders of the provinces starting in the 1880s contains some interesting pieces of data.²¹ Zohrab assumes that the restructuring of the smaller vilayets and the inherent demographic engineering, as with the Rums and Bulgarians in Rumelia, aimed at turning the Armenians into a minority in the eastern provinces.²² As for the period before the shaping of the provinces, drawing upon the official reports or petitions (takrir) which were received from the provinces and submitted to the government by the Patriarchate, Masayuki Ueno investigates the local problems in the provinces and their repercussions in Istanbul.²³ According to the minutes of the Armenian National Assembly in 1849–69, 539 takrirs were evaluated involving complaints to the government, the majority of them coming from the eastern provinces.²⁴ For the most part, the takrirs were about violence against Armenians (210), complaints against local officials (122), and problems related to tax collection (76).²⁵ Although the response of the Patriarchate was limited until 1860, Ueno states that newspapers started to bring the issues of the eastern provinces to the attention of the Istanbul Armenians.²⁶ The issue remained on the community agenda; after the election of Khrimyan as Patriarch, he placed the issue of ‘oppression in the provinces’ on the agenda of the Assembly itself, as well as referring to the problem in his talks.²⁷ Thus, starting from 1840s, there are reports of complaints from the provinces, which reportedly increased from the 1860s to the 1870s as observed by newspapers. We can thus assume that the issues related to violence against Armenians, including the security of life and property, were not tackled. The complaints did not receive satisfactory answers or solutions and, during the Hamidian period, they were followed by massacres. In my opinion, more research is needed on two points: centre–periphery relations in the context of Armenian administration within the Ottoman Empire, i.e. correspondences between the Armenian Patriarchates and Catholicosates, as well as the nature of parallel relations, the Ottoman administration of Kurdish–Armenian relations at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

As Ueno shows, the Armenian populations’ requests in the eastern provinces added yet another layer to centre–periphery problems in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, which I read as a period of constant efforts to bring a peaceful solution to the various sets of problems that were later brought under the umbrella of the formulation ‘the Eastern problem’. The state decisively took a genocidal turn, after which not only were all the efforts in vain, but also the entire context itself changed. Consequently, the troublesome centre–periphery relations of the nineteenth century carried over to the post-1923 period, with the additional heavy burden of the genocidal turn. Regarding the policies during the post-1923 period, Mardin has pointed out that the periphery remained under close scrutiny in 1923–46, since it was considered an area of potential dissatisfaction:²⁸

The official stand of the Republic was to dismiss the checkerboard structure of Anatolia by passing it under silence. The generations that were socialized into the ideology of the Republic were thus ready to dismiss local religious and ethnic groups as irrelevant survivals from the dark ages of Turkey. Whenever encountered they treated them as such.²⁹

Silence, dismissal and the view on ‘local religious and ethnic groups as irrelevant survivals from the dark ages’ have direct implications for the last period of the Empire, and therefore connote genocidal policies and denialism, in a gentler formulation. Non-Muslims still remained in Asia Minor and Northern Mesopotamia after 1915; their very existence had to be denied or erased, where possible, by various local or central policies. From the perspective of the state, non-Muslims in Istanbul could at least be kept under strict control, whereas those remaining in Asia Minor and Northern Mesopotamia eventually had to be ousted.

In contrast to decades of scholarship that disregarded and omitted the issues and policies related to eastern provinces, Ottomanists and historians of the Turkish Republic from younger generations consider this topic of utmost importance. Hans-Lukas Kieser too underscores the importance of the passage from the nineteenth century to the twentieth:

No other state of the nineteenth and twentieth century has changed the ethnic map of the land under its authority in such a calculated and systematic way. No other state went so far as to use all modern tools of its times – such as the military, the telegraph, the press and the railway – within a territory that is proclaimed ‘national’, by annihilating the physical and cultural existence of a whole group of people.³⁰

This violent turn in the state and administration mechanisms, law making and social practices, especially after 1908, has been omitted for quite a long time from historiography, and its imprint on the state and society was also ignored until recently. The differences of the use and organisation of power in the context of the state and the government is a topic for research in its own right;³¹ I maintain, however, that the policies regarding Armenians and the eastern provinces in particular during the Republican period can be useful sources in unravelling the continuity in the mentality and the organisational practices of the state. We may thus suggest that the Republican state took over the legacy of the centre–periphery tension, but this time in a post-genocidal context.

In his memoirs, Patriarch Zaven Der Yeghiayan records an administrative meeting at the Board of Governors (Meclis-i İdare) that took place in 1911, when he was the religious leader of the province (vilayet) of Diyarbekir. He writes that, before the meeting started, he entered the office of the Governor (vali) and saw Ali Ulvi and Principal Clerk (Mektubci) Muhtar Bey, who stopped talking as soon as they saw him. After some moments of silence, Governor Galib Pasha asked Der Yeghiayan why Armenians kept complaining about the Ottoman government. Der Yeghiayan took out the articles published in the provincial newspaper Diarbekir – the editor-in-chief was the Mektubci himself – and showed the headlines to Galib Pasha. There was an article in the newspaper about ‘foreigners and Christians’ explaining how one should deal with foreigners when they wanted to establish churches, schools or other charity organisations. Der Yeghiayan stated that Armenians were natives of this land and not newcomers, that, ‘as subjects and citizens’, Armenians had never had any p...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Transliteration System
• Note on Transliteration
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Social Conditions of Armenians Remaining in Istanbul and in the Provinces
• 2. The Legal Context
• 3. State Surveillance and Anti-Armenian Campaigns
• 4. The Patriarchal Election Crisis: 1944–50
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Back Cover