‘With Giant Steps into the 100th Year’: Ragip Zarakolu Honored in Berlin

In his acceptance speech, Zarakolu traced the history of commemorations of the Genocide and in contrast, the history of the Turkish establishment’s denial and persecution. Just six months after the end of World War I, he said, there were events in three churches in Istanbul, attended by some diplomats, and later April 24 became the date recognized as the beginning of the genocide. Arrests of intellectuals, he said, occurred repeatedly at different times, for example, after the 1971 military coup, and again after the 1980 coup. They may not have been killed, but were imprisoned and those who could left the country.

Following the 1919 trials that condemned Young Turk leaders in absentia, and later jailing of perpetrators, the tide turned with the founding of the republic. “The denial of the genocide,” he stated, “constituted from the beginning of the republic a solid component of state security policy. In 2001 denial was taken to extremes in an organized form; the ‘Committee for the Coordination of Combating Unfounded Assumptions about Genocide against the Armenians’ (ASIMKKA) was founded.” Beginning with Abdullah Gül, this Committee would be under direction of the future foreign ministers. Zarakolu explained that what prompted the establishment of this organ was a forum, sponsored by the French Senate, for dialogue among intellectuals from Armenia and Turkey, a forum with which he was associated and which influenced French support for recognition.

The response of Turkish officialdom came quickly, in the form of a discreet mobilization of academics, commissioned to draft arguments refuting the claims of genocide. Under the coalition of Bülent Ecevit and Devlet Bahceli, a Commission to combat Armenian claims was officially announced. Zarakolu identified militarism, issuing from the 1997 coup, as the “driving force” behind this. “The two traditions of the Committee of Union and Progress, namely Turanism and Kemalism, formed after World War I, came together for the first time.” Although intellectuals and human rights activists had not been taken seriously in the 1990s, with the coup this changed, and “denial of the Genocide became a central element of the new design of the Turkish state, which was to last for 1000 years.” This included “a hostile attitude towards Christendom,” expressed in hate campaigns. Denial literature was spread in conferences and seminars, while CDs and books flooded the schools. This period reached its climax in January 2007 with the assassination of Hrant Dink, which also provoked a breach in civil society. Zarakolu reported on the political infighting, in the course of which revealing documents came to light, including plans to murder leading Armenian and Greek clerics, as well as a “black list” of genocide scholars. Though somewhat low key, the Committee to combat Armenian claims continued its work, supported by deputy governors.

And 2015?

Turning to the perspectives for next year, Zarakolu said the theses that the CUP government had issued in 1916 in a position paper on the genocide would “be repeated in a rigged form.” The theses, as he summarized them, are the stock and trade of denial literature: that there was no extermination plan, no deportation order but rather a resettlement plan; losses in life were due to the Armenian revolutionaries; such war losses are “normal”; the Russian-backed Armenians also organized massacres; since no one talks about Muslims expelled from the Balkans, no need to discuss 1915, etc.

In addition, Zarakolu thinks Turkey will try to “neutralize and legalize” the memory of the genocide by “thrusting other dimensions of World War I into the foreground.” He mentioned Turkey’s attempt to focus on the Dardanelles war, and stress its fight for survival in the midst of Armenian “betrayal,” etc. He stated, however, that the Jihad proclaimed together with Germany then will be ignored, in an effort to avoid any comparison with the crimes being committed in the Near East today. “The ideology of Jihadism and ethnic cleansing or genocide display parallels,” he noted. If, he suggested, an “apology” might be forthcoming due to foreign pressure, they will be no reparations. Gestures to the diaspora might perhaps include visa facilitations and passports. In Zarakolu’s view such gestures could serve the government’s political aims domestically against the Kemalists.