Prolific Young Scholar on Armenian Genocide in Holland

Üngör’s research has been facilitated by his background. His family members were largely peasants from village south of the town of Erzincan. He can trace his family back five generations. He feels that “the regional culture of Erzincan, i.e. Anatolian peasant/village life, has strongly affected my childhood (think Balakian growing up in Diyarbekir Armenian culture). And that culture overlaps significantly with Ottoman Armenian culture, which I consider my own as well.”

Historically, Üngör said, “Armenians, Turks and Kurds lived in ethnically mixed villages whose names I used to hear in the family.” Culturally, he was brought into contact with the Armenians of Erzincan through the literary works of Hagop Mntzuri, which were published in Turkish translation by Aras Publishing House in Istanbul. Üngör came to understand the similarity between the different peoples of the region even more through his first personal encounters with Armenians originating there. He said, “I had another eye-opener when I met Ms. Haygan Mardikyan at a Genocide commemoration in Holland. She is the granddaughter of the late Hayganas Cordikoglu (Djordikian), a woman from the Erzincan village of Zimara (which is in our documentary), who survived the Genocide and passed away a few years ago. Haygan was the first ‘Yerznkatsi’ Armenian I ever met, and it felt like looking into a mirror: she talked, gesticulated, and cooked just like any Erzincan woman in my family. It sounds naïve and obvious, but back then it felt like a revelation to me. It also conjured questions: why were these people, who were so similar to us, excluded from this society?”

His family background helped provide him with useful linguistic skills. Üngör speaks several Western languages and of course knows Turkish fluently. Furthermore, he said, “I consider both Zazaki and Kurmanci mother tongues because both languages are spoken in my family, though my Zazaki is better than my Kurmanci.”

Üngör has made an effort to learn the Armenian alphabet and can understand a little conversationally. However, he is not yet able to use it for research and relied on friends and colleagues for access to Armenian sources. He added that “In principle, I am very motivated to learn Armenian, but whether I actually will depends on future research plans, which in turn depends on employment opportunities.”

Üngör’s ability to study the region is enhanced, he feels, by a combination of inside knowledge and a certain degree of personal detachment or distance which can add objectivity: “I often characterize myself as a ‘local outsider’: I was born in Turkey but raised in the Netherlands. My background facilitated the research a lot. My family provided the personal contacts I used to delve deep into the local memories. Being educated abroad then provided me with a sense of immunity from the dense moral and political field in which most of this research is embedded.”

He has evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of the state of Armenian Genocide studies in a number of places, including a chapter in New Directions in Genocide Research ((http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415495974/). While he feels that the “dedication of its scholars, the quantity and quality of Armenian memoirs, and the relatively well-researched and well-documented international context” are its strong points, Ottoman operative documents, a thorough analysis of the workings of the Young Turk regime from 1913-18, and local or regional histories showing how genocide was perpetrated by ordinary soldiers, gendarmes and others are lacking.  Üngör is convinced that an exploration of the Ottoman land registry archives (Tapu Kadastro), the military archives (ATASE), the General Security Directorate (Emniyet-i Umumiye Müdüriyeti) of both the Ottoman and Republican periods and the Foreign Ministry archives would lead to major discoveries, yet, he concludes, access will not be freely given in the near future because “just as the Turkish government is afraid of its own population’s collective memory, so it is of its own archives.”

Placing Armenian Genocide in a comparative context helps show that a search for the document proving “intent” is fruitless as no such document exists in any genocide, while “what makes the Armenian genocide genocidal is simply that Ottoman Armenians were targeted for an abstract category of group identity: all Armenians, loyal or disloyal, secular or religious, rural or urban, working class or intelligentsia, were deported and massacred.” Furthermore, genocide is more than just mass murder: “It is a delusional attempt to destroy a hated collective identity, for example through destruction of material culture (long after the victims are dead), and forced identity change (such as conversion to Islam, or change of place names).”

Making his work on Armenians, Kurds and Turks accessible to people of other backgrounds has been a challenge. At present, he said, “I teach mostly middle-class Dutch students who come from similar backgrounds and have hardly heard of Armenians, let alone their history. They struggle trying to imagine and make sense of a society 100 years and 4,000 kilometers away. In the UK the problem was comparable, but with in-depth reading and plenty visual material in an intensive history course the kids could reach a reasonably high level of sophisticated knowledge.” It is not all that much different in broader historical circles, as the Armenian Genocide has only very recently begun to be integrated into broader histories such as those of World War I.

Üngör was featured in a documentary which aired on Dutch public television on April 24, 2008 called “The Country of Our Grandparents,” in which he and Armenian scenario writer Alexander Geokjian (also co-director of this film) travel together to the sites of their respective ancestors’ origins in Turkey. Geokjian’s family was originally from Sis or Kozan in Cilicia. The film was awarded the prize of Best Documentary by the Pomegranate Film Festival in Toronto in 2008.

Üngör himself would “love to make” a documentary using oral histories of ordinary people in Turkey who are children or grandchildren of eyewitnesses to the Armenian Genocide. He already has conducted many such interviews in 2002 and 2004-7, and may also write an article based on them. He points out that “Elderly Turks and Kurds often remember vivid anecdotes from family members or villagers who had witnessed or even participated in the massacres.” He does not have the resources himself to transcribe and publish these interviews and others but he feels that this would be a great project to launch with the goal of publishing in 2015. Its value, he said, is that “it would undoubtedly prove that there is a clash between official state memory and popular social memory: the Turkish government is denying a genocide that its own population remembers.”

Üngör is currently occupied with a variety of new projects. He is writing a comparison of the Armenian Genocide with the Soviet deportation of Chechens and Crimean Tatars in 1944, as the study of the former can also help us understand the nature of deportations, or “forced migration.” Having already published an article on Kurdish collaboration in the Genocide and already having used new Kurdish materials, he is curious to learn more about what the Kurdish intelligentsia wrote about in this period. He is working with a close friend on authoring the history of the Kurdophone Shirnak Armenians, who survived due to the protection of a major Kurdish tribe of that region.

As far as upcoming books go, Üngör is shifting to larger-scale studies, such as a book on genocidal violence in the Hapsburg, Ottoman and Russian Empires. Üngör said, “Currently I’m broadening my intellectual horizon. So far my research and teaching have focused on nation formation and ethnic conflict during the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, including the Armenian Genocide. I would still like to keep one foot anchored in this field, but also reach out the other foot to the global problem of mass violence in general. After all, I came into Armenian Genocide studies through Holocaust studies, and have also worked on Rwanda and the Balkans.” He also is in the early phase of writing a more general book on mass violence.