New Social Movements and the Armenian Question in Turkey: Civil Society vs. the State [1st ed.] 9783030593995, 9783030594008

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MODERNITY, MEMORY AND IDENTITY IN SOUTH-EAST EUROPE

New Social Movements and the Armenian Question in Turkey Civil Society vs. the State

Özlem Belçim Galip

Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe Series Editor Catharina Raudvere Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies University of Copenhagen Copenhagen, Denmark

This series explores the relationship between the modern history and present of South-East Europe and the long imperial past of the region. This approach aspires to offer a more nuanced understanding of the concepts of modernity and change in this region, from the nineteenth century to the present day. Titles focus on changes in identity, self-representation and cultural expressions in light of the huge pressures triggered by the interaction between external influences and local and regional practices. The books cover three significant chronological units: the decline of empires and their immediate aftermath, authoritarian governance during the twentieth century, and recent uses of history in changing societies in South-­East Europe today. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15829

Özlem Belçim Galip

New Social Movements and the Armenian Question in Turkey Civil Society vs. the State

Özlem Belçim Galip The School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography University of Oxford Oxford, UK

ISSN 2523-7985     ISSN 2523-7993 (electronic) Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe ISBN 978-3-030-59399-5    ISBN 978-3-030-59400-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59400-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To M. S.

Acknowledgments

This book developed out of a postdoctoral project in Armenian Studies at the University of Oxford started in 2015 when everybody was more hopeful for the democracy and freedom of all the people of Turkey. However, I truthfully believe that until the last bit of struggle and resilience perishes, there is hope for the people of Turkey. I know there is. I am grateful to Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation for their generous grant, without which this research would not be possible. It is also a great opportunity to thank the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) for the grant which enabled me to complete the fieldwork of this research in several cities in Turkey. My thanks go to Selahattin Demirtaş, Rober Koptaş, Pakrat Estukyan, Sevan Değirmenciyan and Jinda Zekioğlu for helping me to reach the participants who were hard to reach out to. Your contribution has been very precious. I also owe a special note of thanks to Prof Theo Maarten van Lint, with deepest gratitude for his mentoring and encouragement throughout the research and beyond. Whenever I need inspiration, he will always shed light on my dark paths. Special thanks also go to my best friend Nazan Kara. I know you have nothing to do with this book or any of my books, but it does not matter. You have been present with your thoughts and soul in every action I have taken throughout the two decades of our friendship.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would finally also like to acknowledge the support and love of the Galip family with gratitude, and I appreciate having such a forward-­ looking and resilient family. Last but not least, the latest member of the Galip family, my daughter Uma-Marie Theodora Xezal, who has enriched and blessed our life with her presence—thank you for just being you! It is a blessing to have you as a precious part of my journey.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 1.1 Rationale for This Book  6 1.2 Theoretical Approaches: A New Social Movements and Resource Mobilization Theory Perspective  9 Bibliography 17 2 Revisiting Armenians in the Ottoman Empire: Deportations and Atrocities 21 Bibliography 34 3 From Ottoman Millet to Turkish Citizens: 1923–2002 37 3.1 Denialism in Turkish Academia and Literature 47 Bibliography 56 4 Hopes and Loss of Democratization Under AKP Government: From 2002 Onward 59 4.1 After the First AKP Victory: A Relatively Liberal Environment 60 4.2 Dink’s Assassination Followed by ‘Democratic Opening’ 72 4.3 Intolerance Toward Non-Muslims: Being Armenian in Turkey 78 4.4 Erdoğan’s ‘New Turkey’: One-Man Rule 83 Bibliography 98

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Contents

5 Challenging the Turkish State’s Denial of the Armenian Genocide103 5.1 The Rise of Civil Society: “We Are All Hrant, We Are All Armenians”104 5.2 Resource Mobilization: The Apology Campaign, Electoral Advocacy, Gezi Park Protests117 5.3 Mobilization Among Armenians in Istanbul121 5.4 Cultural and Symbolic Tactics: Networked Activism and Initiatives by Civil Society128 5.5 Retrieving ‘Silenced Memories’ Through the Movements137 5.6 Resistance Performance: Alternative Art, Music and Media146 5.7 The Rise and Revelation of Islamized Armenians151 5.8 The Kurds in the Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation Process156 Bibliography176 6 Concluding Remarks185 Bibliography192 Bibliography195 Index215

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Although the number of Armenians living in Turkey today is estimated to be only 60,000, less than 2 per cent of the country’s population (Dündar 2000; Hür 2008),1 the controversies described variously as the Armenian Question (Ermeni meselesi or Ermeni Sorunu),2 the 1915 events, Armenian deportation (Ermeni tehciri), the Armenian Genocide (Hayots Tzeghasbanutyun in Armenian, Ermeni Soykırımı in Turkish) or the Great Crime (Medz Yeghern) depending on one’s political standpoint, remain highly sensitive. In the Turkish historiography based on Ottoman and Turkish language state documents, memoirs of state officials and certain consulate reports, deportation [tehcir] or civil war [iç savaş] are the predominant concepts adopted to refer to the events of 1915. Yet Armenians claim that these terms trivialize and downgrade the crimes committed by the Ottoman Empire. The argument between Armenian and Turkish historians has not changed for decades. While the Armenian side states that Armenians were deported en masse, and that many of them were massacred as part of an ideological agenda which they refer to as ‘genocide’,3 the Turkish side responds that the deportation occurred as a natural and unavoidable result of war and that the Young Turks did not intend to eliminate the Armenians as a people. The number of losses has also not been agreed. In Armenian history there are two dates that represent a major point for the Anatolian Armenians. These are 24 April and 23 May 1915. The former refers to the general arrests of the Armenian élites in © The Author(s) 2020 Ö. B. Galip, New Social Movements and the Armenian Question in Turkey, Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59400-8_1

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Constantinople, and the latter is the date when the general deportation order to annihilate the Armenians was given. According to the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), the death toll between 1915 and 1916 was ‘more than a million’; the Turkish Republic estimates the total to be 300,000. Although the tragedy took place more than a century ago, because the Turkish Republic has never confronted its past and responded to the demands of descendants of the victims, any debate on these events triggers further controversy, and the issue continues to be, as many have described it, a ‘bleeding wound’ (kanayan yara). However, whenever the events are denounced as genocide by any country or figure, this has always led to a deterioration in relations between Armenians and Turkey. For instance, in 2015, Pope Francis described the large-scale killings as the “first genocide of the twentieth century” during a mass marking the 100th anniversary of the deaths. Turkey summoned the Vatican ambassador to Ankara and recalled its own ambassador to the Vatican. In the following year, Pope Francis again used the word ‘genocide’, this time during his Yerevan visit, which again evoked anger from Turkey. In the same year, the German Parliament recognized the Armenian Genocide, and this was denounced angrily by Turkey. During the century since the Armenian Genocide, despite the recognition of many European parliaments, the Turkish state has never wavered in its denial. In fact, since 1915, there has been an ongoing struggle in Turkey about how to narrate the story of the country’s past. Uğur Ümit Üngör (2014, p.  161) discusses the dynamics of memory and identity, and describes Turkish and Armenian histories as polarized opposites, where “Armenians wish to remember a history that Turks would like to forget.” But as this book argues, even non-Armenians want to remember what happened to Armenians for the sake of their own future and in the name of democracy by raising awareness, activism, mobilization and social empathy. In this context, I follow the thesis that the waves of mobilization represented by new social movements (NSMs) and their predecessors appear in phases of crisis, and Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink’s assassination is one such crisis. The public outrage and rally in protest at the 2007 assassination of Dink constituted a momentous event; it was far outpaced by its glorification in the public sphere as a mythical turning point in terms of social transformation and minority issues. In this respect, civil society within Turkey has used every tool available to challenge the state’s denial discourse, especially through the politics of remembering and reliving memory, but the assassination of Dink also triggered calls for truth and

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reconciliation. Many individuals participated in new social movements to express dissatisfaction with specific policies or to criticize general social norms. The emergence of these initiatives, civic groups, non-­governmental organizations (NGOs) and intelligentsia in contemporary Turkey represents a form of political contestation complying with the definition of processes of mobilization delineated by the new social movement theorists, who include the struggles of political parties, ethnic groups, civilian groups and lobbying by peaceful social movements and solidarity groups, through to revolutions, as mobilization actors and “horizontal networks needing no leader, capable of organising without a central authority” (Abdelrahman 2013, p. 571). These social groups demand that “democracies open their political process to a more diverse and citizen-oriented set of interests” (Dalton et al. 1990, p. 3). Accordingly, centennial commemorative events were organized by NGOs in Istanbul, Diyarbakır and other Turkish cities for the victims of the genocide in which democracy is requested not just for Armenians but for all Turkish citizens. These initiators and activists have created the possibility for the past to be remembered differently from officially imposed history or discourse. On the other hand, state censorship, intimidation, obfuscation of historical realities and the re-writing of history are still predominant elements of the Turkish government. Hence, there is a conflict between the official version of history and several competing historical narratives. Open discussion of Armenian issues, including the genocide, became possible when the Alliance for the Public with The Justice and Development Party (AKP) was first elected in 2002, as a consequence of the liberalization associated with its campaign for EU membership. This lasted until 2005, though even when Dink was assassinated in 2007, there was a relatively liberal atmosphere compared to later (especially after 2013), and this provided the environment in which hundreds of thousands of civilians could protest against Dink’s assassination. Since then, annual commemorations of his assassination as well as Armenian Genocide commemorations have attracted the support of a large number of activist groups, NGOs, publishers, intellectuals and political figures to voice their call for the government to acknowledge that genocide took place in 1915 and to find Dink’s real murderers.4 Hrant Dink is considered to be the latest victim of the genocide, and his assassination brought the unspoken Armenian Question to the fore for the first time, resulting in contentious mobilizations of intelligentsia, human rights and democracy activists and NGOs. Many civil groups and initiatives have been established to fight against

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inequality, censorship and oppression in Turkey, using Dink’s assassination as the starting point. After Dink, new associations were formed and new initiatives put in place to enhance civic values, by promoting a solidarity that works to maintain and create social cohesion. A new form of social mobilization and new possibilities for political interaction or contestation have come to the surface. The aim of this book is to understand how the social movements led by such intellectuals and activists challenge state hegemony on the Armenian issue, thereby promoting the democratization of Turkey with regard to inequality, the Kurdish issue and freedom of speech. This study focuses on public figures and specific groups or individuals who have aimed to mobilize the masses or open up public debate on Armenians or the massacres in particular. It does not directly engage with how Armenians see or define themselves in modern Turkey. This book particularly aims to investigate the importance of political protest and contemporary social movements as a way for diverse sections of the community to express their views. Parliamentary politics and traditional political organizations do not necessarily bring freedom or democracy to society. The new social movements provide new opportunities for the individual to learn about democracy and participate with others in a multitude of projects. My goal here is to elaborate empirically the new social movements theory (NSMT) on the national political contest and mobilization patterns regarding Armenian-related issues, that is, Islamized Armenians, Dink’s assassination, state denial of genocide, confiscation of Armenian properties and so on. The movements related to Armenians display a markedly different set of features to traditional social movements so it is hard to define their activities under one title. Such clusters of movements usually constitute a specific ‘movement industry’ (McCarthy and Zald 1977) or ‘movement family’ (Della Porta and Rucht 1991). I argue that the theories of new (also named ‘contemporary’) social movements can be applied to the activities and campaigns on the Armenian Question at least during the last decade. Many theories on new social movements involve either implicit generalization about movements or dismiss other small-scale specific mobilizations. For this reason, the activities concerning Armenian-related issues could be considered not to fit under the conceptual framework of new social movements. However, I argue that a closer look at the more specific strategies and actions of individual or groups is needed, as this reveals differences and parameters which lead one to acknowledge the fact that new categories should be created in order not to neglect the

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specificity of particular movements. In this regard, this book argues that the series of actions or strategies for the recognition of the genocide, urging the state apparatus to come to terms with the past atrocities against Armenians (non-Muslims in general), for fair trial over Dink’s assassination and for a change to more positive policies toward Armenians, should be understood under the conceptual framework of NSMT. A social movement is any broad social alliance of people who are connected through their shared interest in blocking or affecting social change. Activism is the key component of a social movement, in which multiple alliances may work separately for common causes by using extra-­ institutional means (Olson 1965). Mobilizing structures or activism here refers to organizations or groups which stimulate the social movement by providing membership, leadership, communication and social networks in Turkey such as Dur De platform (Say Stop Platform) and Nor Zartonk (New Renaissance), which were founded after Dink’s assassination, and ̇ NGOs such as Mazlumder (Insan Hakları ve Mazlumlar için Dayanışma Derneği [Association of Human Rights and Solidarity for Oppressed ̇ People]), the Human Rights Association (Insan Hakları Derneği, IHD) and Anatolia Culture (Anadolu Kültür), which have been acting as mobilizing structures through various events and activities to address the Armenian Question through Dink’s assassination. Mobilizing structures are “those collective vehicles, informal as well as formal, through which people mobilize and engage in collective action” (McAdam et al. 1996), which not only includes preexisting groups, but also movement organizations and the informal networks among potential activists formed after the specific event. New social movement activists are generalized to be ‘loose organizational forms’ (Koopmans 1995; Della Porta 1995; Tarrow 2011). In other words, organizations engaged in social movements have often been described as loose structures, decentralized and prone to engage in contentious political challenges or countercultural practices. This research has shown the plurality of those activities and, despite the detachment, that they contribute to each other for the same cause and should be studied as part of the debates around new social movements. I examine aspects and tactics, but also the form of networks submerged in everyday life which play a great role in mobilization. Relatively fluid networks of social contacts grow out of frequently changing involvements in diverse local initiatives, campaigns and political groupings, and indeed, these networks make mobilization possible and as such constitute the latent or hidden efficacy of social movements (Melucci 1989, p. 73).

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Along with the analysis of in-depth interviews conducted in Turkey, I attempt to highlight the forces, first triggered by the elite class but then spread more widely, for the advocacy of Armenians and their minority rights in Turkey, based on the data obtained from two-year fieldwork there. In this context, several interrelated key questions are raised: What changes have occurred since the assassination of Hrant Dink in terms of recognition of the suffering of Armenians? How has the perception of Armenians changed within Turkish society since 2007? How have descendants of Islamized Armenians, as representatives of a neglected and repressed minority in Turkey, expressed themselves in academic, media and literary circles? In order to address these questions, between March 2016 and January 2017, I conducted in-depth interviews in Istanbul, Diyarbakir, Mardin and Ankara with 30 actors, including NGOs, journalists, individual actors, activist groups, academics, MPs, publishing houses and film directors, who have contributed to voicing the Armenian issue and promoting the democratization of Turkey by drawing attention to human rights violations and anti-democratic treatment of other marginalized groups. Through the analysis of these 30 interviews and a comparative assessment and observations of the socio-political context of Turkey since 2002 based on the key concepts of new social movements, resource mobilization, collective action and collective identity, I aim to contribute to the subversion of nationalist mobilization and to help to enable wider political development toward reconciliation and dialogue for the democratization of Turkey, also helping to assess AKP’s policies against Armenians throughout its time in government up to the present day.5 In order to understand the escalating movements after Dink’s assassination in 2007, it is essential to understand the years when the massacres took place, the oppression that Ottoman Armenians experience, the restrictive policies regarding Armenian education and religion, the constant denialism of the Turkish state apparatus and the changing attitude of AKP toward democracy and pluralism from its victory to the present.

1.1   Rationale for This Book In general terms, Turkey was founded as an authoritarian unitary nation-­ state. Although its population was highly heterogeneous, Turkey repressed many ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious elements. A period of serious political polarization and violence in the 1960s and especially in the

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1970s involving university students, workers, police, teachers and even bureaucrats ended with a military intervention in 1980. The military council and ensuing governments tried to exercise strict control over all kinds of voluntary organizations, associations and foundations, especially Leftist ones, which were highly active in the political sphere before the coup. On the one hand, Turkey implemented liberal economic policies in order to integrate the national economy into world markets, while on the other developing conservative attitudes in the cultural and political spheres. Prompted by the tension between these liberal and conservative policies, an array of social movements gained prominence in the public sphere in the absence of the umbrella ideologies of the 1960s and 1970s such as Marxism and ultra-nationalism (Şimşek 2004, p.  112). The Kurdish movement, Islamism, feminism, the Alevi cultural movement, environmentalism and human rights activism have been the main social movements since the mid-1980s in Turkey. However, the wave of mobilization on the Armenian Question after Dink’s assassination has not been seen as a social movement, and neither has it been extensively studied. On the one hand, there have been self-proclaimed groundbreaking ‘firsts’ by Turkish contributors in the form of popular productions such as the journalistic book about Armenians of Armenia and of the diaspora, Ağrı’nın Derinliği (Deep Mountain, 2013) by Ece Temelkuran; the first-person account by a leading perpetrator’s descendant, 1915: Ermeni Soykırımı (1915: Armenian Genocide, 2012) by Hasan Cemal; and most recently a film, The Cut (2014), by Fatih Akın. On the other hand, the national and international conferences, essays and articles addressing the widening public debate on the Armenian issue after Dink’s assassination usually attribute a leading role to the ‘Apology Campaign’ (Özür Diliyoruz) initiated by a number of Turkish intellectuals, and somewhat ignore other crucial efforts by activist groups, initiatives, NGOs and local networks. In this book, I also underline the fact that new social movements can also involve cultural and symbolic forms of resistance rather than just the conventional political forms of contestation (Cohen 1985), which is why the films, music, exhibition, meetings, academic meetings open to the public and speeches on the Armenian Question are valid forms of resistance which need to be taken into consideration. This cultural emphasis rejects conventional goals, tactics and strategies in favor of exploration of new identities and meanings, so I argue that the individuals involved do not create connectedness solely through organizational memberships, but also through their participation in various types of social and cultural activities

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(music festivals, theatres, meetings, conferences). Memories can also be embodied, triggered or provoked by texts, music, history groups and other media, and each one does so in a specific way. That is why in this research I have also concentrated on different media (cinema, art, literature, music) and sought to understand how these have contributed in their own way to our understanding of the relationship between the remembrance and the denial of the genocide in modern Turkey. In this research, I have used interviews to collect data from actors who were affiliated with one or more social justice organization in the activist, social or political networks. The open-ended questions associated with the active interview process provide a framework for the participants to describe a particular theme or incident. Based on semi-structured interviews and document analysis, I also analyze the tactics applied by these activists, focusing on organizations and public activities (i.e., demonstrations, protests). These organizations and initiatives can also work together to bring change, and such events can lead to broader changes and mass mobilizations. The new alternative milieus and changing networks of movement organizations, citizen initiatives, alternative groups and subcultures generally maintain the material and social infrastructure for further mobilization. So I make use of theoretical tools of new social movements and resource mobilization to understand public mobilization in Turkey and to structure my argument. It should also be noted that during the fieldwork for this research in Istanbul, Mardin and Ankara, the political atmosphere was already very tense, and mass arrests had been taking place since the attempted military coup in July 2016. For instance, after the interviews with Osman Kavala, the chair of Anadolu Kültür foundation (Anatolian Culture), he was 1 of 16 people accused of ‘organizing and financing’ the Gezi Park protests in 2013 and attempting to overthrow the government and was imprisoned on 17 October 2017. Furthermore, the former Halkların Demokrasi Partisi (HDP [Peoples’ Democratic Party]) co-chair Selahattin Demirtas was arrested on 4 November 2016 along with the other co-chair, Figen Yüksekdağ, and other HDP parliamentarians, accused of spreading propaganda for militants fighting the Turkish state. After my interview with him, the co-director of the independent human rights organization Hafıza Merkezi (Truth Justice Memory Centre), Murat Çelikkan, was sentenced to 18 months in prison under the Anti-Terror Law due to alleged involvement in terrorist propaganda because of his participation in the pro-­ Kurdish newspaper Özgür Gündem’s editor-in-chief on Watch Campaign.

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He was arrested on 16 May 2017 and kept in prison until 21 October 2017, when he was released with a travel ban and was obliged to give his signature at a police station four days of week. Again, the former HDP deputy Osman Baydemir, whom I also interviewed for this book, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for violating the law on demonstrations and meetings, as he attended public protests in 2015 when the authorities declared military curfews in the eastern and southeastern cities of Turkey. Osman Baydemir could therefore not return to Turkey after a trip to Europe, and currently lives in the UK. After the coup attempt in Turkey in 2016, numerous critical media for which Armenian journalist Hayko ̇ Bağdat had worked were banned or closed. His book publisher Inkılap Yayınevi can no longer publish his books. Thus he was deprived of his working basis in his home country, and he moved to Berlin. Even in Germany, he is under threat from Erdoğan’s Turkish supporters, and lives under the protection of German security forces.6 The book progresses chronologically. The introductory chapter discusses the theoretical concepts which are related to mobilization over the Armenian Question or Dink’s assassination. The second chapter covers the Ottoman Empire up to the establishment of the Turkish Republic. The importance of Kurdish tribes or Hamidiye Cavalry for today is explained, as Kurdish public figures, intelligentsia or politicians, have become significant actors in pushing Turkey to come to terms with its past. The third chapter covers the period between the establishment of the republic and the election of the AKP government in 2002. The final chapter deals with the initial victory of AKP up to the present, covering the evolving politics, discourses and strategies regarding the Armenian Question and the reactions of civil society in the form of a series of events or mobilizations.

1.2   Theoretical Approaches: A New Social Movements and Resource Mobilization Theory Perspective Social movements have been considered by many sociologists as agents of social transformation. The emergence, dynamics and development of social movements not only signal major transformations of societies, but social movements are indicators of societal conditions, and capable of influencing social and political structures as well, and this blurs the borders

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between old and new social movements. There is always a risk when a conceptual framework developed to analyze the social reality in Western Europe is used to analyze another initiated by elites and civic organizations along with a broad array of collective and individual actions. For sure, such collective actions and mobilizations do not resemble the paradigmatic movements such as the civil rights movements in Latin America, student activism in the USA in the 1970s or LGBT activists, which have provided empirical data for the scholars of social movement theory (McAdam et al. 1996; McAdam 1999; Tarrow 2011; Tilly 2004). A new style of political action developed as citizens shifted from traditional methods of interest representation to a more participatory political style (Barnes and Kaase 1979; Jennings and van Deth 1990) which in a way has led the scholars to think beyond ‘social movement’ discussions and to expand the concept of ‘social movement’ with new attributions. New social movements were different from their older counterparts in many respects, ranging from their aims to their symbols to class background and style of organization after 1980, via advances in technology and global communications. To start with, they are decentralized, participatory, innovative and theatrical in performance (Heywood 1997, pp.  265–266). Habermas (1981) elaborates on the fact that new social movements are the ‘new politics’, which is about quality of life, individual self-realization and human rights, whereas the ‘old politics’ focus on economic, political and military security. By identifying ‘discontent’ as the most significant cause of social movements, early theories could not adequately explain how individual discontent translates into collective phenomena. The term ‘new social movement’ is still problematic. Some do not see it in the framework of a particular theory, but as just an approach. Some think it is no longer ‘new’. There are many theorists writing about ‘new social movement’ in order to distinguish them from the old. Prominent social movement scholars, particularly Alain Touraine (2007, 2009) and Alberto Melucci (1989), have made a significant contribution to the new social movements literature. Like old social movements, new social movements continue the theme ‘society against state’ (Cohen 1985, p. 665). But new social movements are no longer chronologically new, and they also manifest old characteristics. Some theorists see new social movements as rooted in new middle classes (Eder 1985; Kriesi 1989, 1995), but others argue that these new movements are no longer rooted in the class structure but rather in other statuses such as gender, race, age and sexual orientations, which are central to mobilizing such movements (Dalton

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et al. 1990), a position which I also follow in this book. Claus Offe compares new social movements (proposed by sociologists such as Alain Touraine, Alberto Melucci and Louis Maheu) with classical movements with respect to their actors, themes, values and forms of mobilization. The actors of classical social movements are socio-­economic groups struggling primarily for their material interests such as better distribution of income, whereas those of new social movements are groups and individuals gathering around various themes on behalf of diverse sections of society. The themes and issues raised by old movements are economic growth, income distribution, military and social security and social control, whereas new social movements have the maintenance of peace, environment and human rights on their agenda. New social movements champion individual autonomy and identity against central control. The theories on new social movements (NSMs) were introduced to explain the emergence in Western Europe during the 1970s of post-­ materialist and identity-focused citizen action groups (Reiter 2010, p. 154), a way of qualitatively representing new aspects of citizen politics in Western democracies (Dalton et al. 1990, p.  3). The NSM concept originated among social scientists in West Germany, where such movements marked a dramatic development that captured the attention of political observers. NSMs refer to a style of unconventional political action, based on direct action that contrasts with the traditional, neo-corporatist, pattern or interest intermediation in many contemporary democracies. In other words, the defining characteristic of new social movements is their advocacy of a new social paradigm, which contrasts with the dominant goal structure of Western industrial society. Even the organizational structures of these movements are supposedly unique, stressing participatory decision-­making, a decentralized structure and opposition to bureaucratic procedures (Dalton et al. 1990, p. 5) in contrast to the centralized, hierarchical structure of old social movements. There is also no real agreement within the social movement literature as to what ‘new’ social movements refer to. Nor is there consensus that a new classification of collective behavior is needed. However, several theorists do argue that there is something distinct about a subset of contemporary social movements, namely peace, feminist, ecological and local-autonomy movements in the West since the mid-1970s. The immediate question which arises is what is ‘new’ in the new social movement concept? To Cohen (1985, p. 664), contemporary movements abandon revolutionary dreams in favor of the idea of structural reform, along with a defense of

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civil society that does not seek to abolish the autonomous functioning of political and economic systems. Instead of forming unions or political parties of the socialist, social democratic or communist type, they focus on grassroots politics and create horizontal, directly democratic associations that are loosely federated on national levels. Moreover, they target the social domain of ‘civil society’ rather than the economy or state, raising issues concerned with the democratization of structures of everyday life and focusing on forms of communication and collective identity (Cohen 1985, p. 667). Buechler (1995, 1999) argues that there is in fact no single new social movements theory, but a set of new social movement theories, each a variant on a general approach to ‘something called new social movement’, which he cautiously defines as a “diverse array of collective actions that has presumably displaced the old social movement of proletarian revolution” (Buechler 1999, p. 46). There are two central claims underlying new social movements theory. First, that the rise of the post-industrial economy is responsible for a new wave of social movement, and, second, that those movements are significantly different from previous social movements of the industrial economy, the primary difference being in their goals, as the new movements focus not on materialistic issues such as economic well-being, but on issues related to human rights such as gay rights. They represent a quantitatively new aspect of contemporary democratic politics in which the groups prefer a decentralized, open and democratic structure that is more in tune with the participatory tendencies of their supporters (Melucci 1989; Johnston et al. 1994). The fluid organizational structure of new social movements is most visible among locally based citizen action groups or small branches of national organizations. So in contrast to the old movements, NSM groups and organizations seem to act more independently from each other (Rucht 1994, p.  158). The emphasis is on the role of independent and small groups and the importance of local activities, not necessarily because of lack of resources and organizational skills, and they promote grassroots politics (Gundelach 1984; Rucht 1994). In addition, the loose networks of NSM groups and activists as well as their overlapping issues and positions allow for a broad dissemination of ideas, experiences and forms of action. According to Rucht (2017), new social movements adopt two general strategies. The first is power-oriented and its logic of action is ‘instrumental’ (aiming for political participation, bargaining), the other is identity-­ oriented and its logic of action is ‘expressive’ (aiming for reformist

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divergences, countercultural challenge). The ‘expressive’ should be considered literally and includes a great range of social movement actions. This identity-oriented strategy seeks to change behavior by espousing and adhering to deviant cultural, social and political practices. Further, new social movements are located in civil society or the cultural sphere as a major arena for collective action rather than instrumental action by the state. Claus Offe (1985) characterizes this as “bypass[ing] the state.” There is little concern with directly challenging the state; new movements are regarded as anti-authoritarian and resist incorporation into institutional levels. Rather than attempt to develop a total politics under a single focus, the ‘new social movements’ stress the grass roots in their aim of representing the interests of marginal or excluded groups. Parallel with this ideology, the organization form of new collective actions is also locally based, centered on small social groups and loosely held together by personal or informational networks such as radios, newspapers and posters. Habermas’s (1991) conception of the ‘public sphere’ and participatory democracy is applicable here. But the people involved with the new social movements are more concerned with ‘direct democracy’ rather than the ‘representative one’. Under representative democracy, the citizen is expected to be relatively passive. Democracy today is not just a set of institutions and political procedures and that democracy is being continually forged and reshaped through the activities of members of society. The four characteristics below, which have been identified mainly in instances of European social and political mobilization, will be used as a referential framework throughout the book: • New social movements basically exhibit post-Marxist, post-­modernist and post-traditional tendencies. • New social movements are post-material, identity-oriented initiatives: they demand room in the political and public spheres for their cultural characteristics, interests and problems. • New social movements are proactive and particularistic movements: they do not appear merely as reactions to some kind of oppression or deprivation. Instead, they are voluntary and enthusiastic initiatives to raise public consciousness about a particular issue or to put a particular problem on the political agenda. • New social movements display relatively decentralized and less hierarchical modes of organization as well as new forms of action.

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Scholars also introduced new social movements theory as an alternative to the resource mobilization theory. Within this paradigm, these theorists emphasize different themes, have different approaches and relate to traditional theories in a number of ways in an attempt to better analyze the shifts in contemporary forms of organizing that began in the 1980s. However, resource mobilization theory (mainly based on the experiences of American mobilization) will also be utilized in this book. The core elements of this theory are organization, interests, resources, and opportunities and strategies rather than real social movements. The apology petition, Baskin Oran running as an independent candidate for the Turkish parliament, the civil society groups and initiatives, NGOs such as IHD (Insan Hakları Derneği [Human Rights Foundation]) and Open Society Foundation (Açık Toplum), which offers funding to organize events, can be named as examples of agents for resource mobilization. Resource mobilization theorists presume that political dissatisfaction and social conflicts are inherent in every society; thus the formation of social movements depends not on the existence of these interests but on the creation of organizations to mobilize this potential. This perspective led researchers to focus their efforts on examining the organizations, which mobilize people, money and other resources in pursuit of causes such as Anadolu Kültür and the Open Society Foundation. Current social movement research continues to examine the importance of resources, focusing on three broad types: money, people and organizations, also highlighting the importance of individual entrepreneurs in creating and directing these organizations, such as Osman Kavala. Although Anadolu Kültür has never been seen as a social movement organization (SMO), the funds grants and opportunities provided to a wide range of individuals, groups and civil societies indicate the effectiveness of the organization in facilitating subsequent mobilization (Van Dyke et al. 2007), contributing to the achievement of a range of movement outcomes (Greve et  al. 2006; Johnson 2008) and gaining media coverage. These initiatives would not exist without the actions of a single individual or group of people, even though public interest in the cause may be long-standing. In short, the resource mobilization model provides an integrated theory of how organizations are formed, public support is mobilized, organizational behaviors developed and political tactics decided (Dalton et al. 1990). Proponents of new social movements theory criticize the resource mobilization paradigm most frequently and radically on the grounds that

1 INTRODUCTION 

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it neglects the cultural dimension of social movements. Resource mobilization perspective, which is the dominant perspective on social movements and social change, refers to resources such as organizational strength and the presence of elite allies. It argues that social movements succeed through the effective mobilization of resources and the development of political opportunities for members. Material and non-material resources are understood here to include knowledge, money, media, labor, solidarity, legitimacy and internal and external support from a power elite. The foundation of the theory is that social movements develop when individuals with grievances are able to mobilize sufficient resources to take action. In the case of the Armenian Question, elites, NGOs and intellectual activists have acted collectively, utilizing their resources to challenge hegemonic dominance and to promote political liberalization within Turkey. One of the most prominent examples of such mobilization is the Apology Campaign (Özür Diliyoruz) following Dink’s assassination in January 2009, which was led by a group of Turkish elite (notably scholars such as ̇ Ahmet Insel, Baskın Oran and Cengiz Aktar) and attracted great attention as these signatories are in a position to use media in other languages, enabling them to lead the dissemination of the issue within the international community. This elite-led unofficial apology quickly stimulated public debate and dialogue through dispersion on blogs and in newspapers.7 While the text of the apology addresses the incidents of 1915, it metaphorically also addresses the problem of denial that has undermined Armenian identity for the last century (Langman 2013, p. 784). In addition to this groundbreaking apology, since Dink’s assassination, in any international discussions, elite-led solidarity networks have played an integral role in launching the public debate on the Armenian issue, a pioneering step toward marginalized communities and the creation of awareness within the elite groups, but one which has not mobilized the rest of society. Many Armenian, Kurdish and Turkish political organizations, LGBT groups, political figures and directors have played a role in the social movement which arose from Dink’s assassination. National and international conferences, essays and articles addressing the widening public debate on the Armenian issue after the assassination usually attribute a leading role to the ‘Apology Campaign’, and somewhat ignore other crucial efforts by activist groups, initiatives, NGOs and local networks. In addition, the movements which originated from the musical and artistic sectors are also significant for the mobilization of wider groups aims to bring about “institutional change, new elites and cultural innovation”

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(Melucci 1995, p. 112), as is characteristic of new social movements, and is particularly emphasized in this book.

Notes 1. The Armenian population is an estimate, as each source differs. For instance, according to Turkey’s state statistical data, there are 37,000 Armenian families in 17 cities—a total of about 200,000 (including 50,000–60,000  in Istanbul). See also: http://asbarez.com/128378/2-5-mil-muslim-armenians-estimated-in-turkey/. The population keeps changing, while many Armenians have migrated from Turkey, particularly after the failed military coup in 2016 and the ensuing clampdown by the AKP government, others from the Republic of Armenia have been moving to Istanbul for work and settlement opportunities. 2. The term ‘Armenian Question’ does not only refer to Turkey’s denial of genocide or Armenian demands regarding the genocide as it is relates to the current situation as well. It dates back to the mid-nineteenth century, particularly the period of the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878), in which other European powers intervened, aimed to protect Ottoman Armenians. As it is a comprehensive term, I will use it throughout this book to refer to any issues related to Armenians, not just the genocide. 3. In Article II of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (9 December 1948), “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” 4. Dink was not the only public figure and intellectual assassinated. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), 20 journalists were killed in Turkey between 1992 and 2012; 78 per cent of the murders have gone unpunished. Dink’s murderer, Ogün Samast, was arrested shortly after the incident, but it became apparent that he was working alongside approximately 18 other suspects in coordinating the assassination. MIT and Security Forces are believed to be involved in the incident. The trial continues, and at the time of writing (May 2019), 93 hearings regarding the assassination have taken place. 5. Interviews undertaken between 2016 and 2017  in Mardin, Ankara and Istanbul: Sevan Değirmenciyan (Armenian philologist and educator), Sayat Tekir (founder of Nor-Zartonk and Armenian activist), Pakrat Estukyan

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(editor-in-chief of Agos weekly), Yetvart Tomasyan (founder of Aras Publishing House), Etyen Mahçupyan (former Principal Advisor of Turkish prime minister Ahmet Davutloglu), Zeynep Taşkın (spokesperson for the Hrant Dink Foundation), Hayko Bağdat (journalist and public speaker), Rober Koptaş (editor-in-chief of Aras Publishing House), Selahattin Demirtaş (former co-president of HDP, Hakların Demokratik Partisi [People’s Democracy Party]), Osman Baydemir (former MP for Urfa, HDP), Ahmet Türk (former Mayor of Mardin), Karin Karakaşlı (Armenian journalist and writer), Abdullah Demirbaş (former mayor of Sur Municipality), Garo Paylan (Istanbul MP, HDP), Vedat Yıldırım (musician), ̇ Abdullah Keskin (owner of Kurdish publishing house Avesta), Ahmet Insel (Turkish scholar based in France), Bülent Bilmez (historian and scholar at Istanbul Bilgi University), Aybars Görgülü (research director at Public Policy and Democracy Studies [PODEM]), Namık Kemal Dinç (historian), Murat Çelikkan (co-director of Truth Justice Memory Centre), Osman Kavala (head of Anadolu Kültür [Anatolian Culture]), Cafer Solgun ̇ (Kurdish journalist and activist), Irfan Aktan (Kurdish journalist), Eren Keskin (human rights lawyer and co-head of the Human Rights Association [IHD]), Baskın Oran (Turkish scholar based in Ankara University), Hale Güzin Kızılaslan (director and photographer), Kaos GL (Turkey’s largest LGBT civil group), Açık Toplum Merkezi (Open Society Foundation) and ̇ Mazlumder (Insan Hakları ve Mazlumlar için Dayanışma Derneği [Association of Human Rights and Solidarity for Oppressed People]) and Selina Doğan (Istanbul MP, Republican People’s Party, Cumhuriyetçi Halk Partisi [CHP]). 6. Together with veteran journalist Can Dündar, he founded in Germany the bilingual journalistic platform Özgürüz (We Are Free), which went online on 24 January 2017. 7. Eleven counter-petitions were created online expressing the view that ‘we are ashamed of you for apologizing’. One of the counter-petitions was created by ex-diplomats and was widely publicized in the media, reinforcing the state narrative of denial and illuminating the scale of the challenge to initiate dialogue about the genocide.

Bibliography Abdelrahman, M. (2013). In praise of organization: Egypt between activism and revolution. Development and Change, 44(3), 569–585. Barnes, S., & Kaase, M. (1979). Political action: Mass participation in five Western democracies. Beverly Hills/London: Sage Publications. Buechler, S. (1995). New social movement theories. Sociological Quarterly, 36(3), 441–464.

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Buechler, S. (1999). Social movements in advanced capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cohen, J. L. (1985). Strategy or identity: New theoretical paradigms and contemporary social movements. Social Research, 52(4), 663–716. Dalton, R. J., et al. (1990). The challenge of new movements. In R. J. Dalton & M.  Kuechler (Eds.), Challenging the political order: New social and political movements in Western democracies (pp. 3–22). Cambridge: Polity. Della Porta, D. (1995). Social movements, political violence and the state. New York: Cambridge University Press. Della Porta, D., & Rucht, D. (1991). Left-libertarian movements in context: A comparison of Italy and West Germany 1965–1990. Discussion paper FSIII91–102. Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin. Dündar, F. (2000). Türkiye Nüfus Sayımlarında Azınlıklar [Minorities in the national census of Turkey]. Istanbul: Chivi Yazıları Publishing House. Eder, K. (1985). The “new social movements”: Moral crusades, political pressure groups, or social movements? Social Research, 52(4), 869–901. Greve, H. R., et al. (2006). Vox populi: Resource partitioning, organizational proliferation and the cultural impact of the insurgent microradio movement. American Journal of Sociology, 112(3), 802–837. Gundelach, P. (1984). Social transformation and new forms of voluntary associations. Social Science Information, 23(6), 1049–1081. Habermas, J. (1981). New social movements. Telos, 49, 33–37. Habermas, J. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Heywood, A. (1997). Politics. London: Macmillan. Hür, A. (2008). Türk Ermenisiz, Ermeni Türksüz olmaz! Taraf. http://web. a r c h i v e . o r g / w e b / 2 0 0 8 0 9 0 2 1 1 0 7 4 5 / h t t p : / / w w w. t a r a f . c o m . t r / yazar.asp?id=12 Jennings, M.  K., & van Deth, J.  W. (1990). Continuities in political action: A longitudinal study of political orientations in three Western democracies. Berlin: W. de Gruyter. Johnson, E. (2008). Social movement size, organizational diversity and the making of federal law. Social Forces, 86(3), 967–993. Johnston, H., et al. (Eds.). (1994). New social movements: From ideology to identity. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Koopmans, R. (1995). Democracy from below: New social movements and the political system in West Germany. Boulder: Westview Press. Kriesi, H. (1989). New social movements and the new class in the Netherlands. American Journal of Sociology, 94(4), 1078–1116. Kriesi, H. (1995). The political opportunity structure of new social movements: Its impacts on their mobilization. In J. C. Jenkins & B. Klandermans (Eds.), The politics of social protest: Comparative perspectives on states and social movements (pp. 167–198). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Langman, L. (2013). Occupy: A new new social movement. Current Sociology, 61(4), 510–524. McAdam, D. (1999). Political process and the development of black insurgency 1930–1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McAdam, D., et al. (1996). Comparative perspectives on social movements: Political opportunities, mobilizing structures, and cultural framings. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. McCarthy, J. D., & Zald, M. (1977). Resource mobilization and social movements: A partial theory. American Journal of Sociology, 82(6), 1212–1241. Melucci, A. (1989). Nomads of the present: Social movements: Individual needs in contemporary society. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Melucci, A. (1995). The new social movements revisited: Reflections on a sociological misunderstanding. In L.  Maheu (Ed.), Social movements and social classes: The future of collective action (pp. 109–117). London: Sage Publications. Offe, C. (1985). New social movements: Challenging the boundaries of institutional politics. Social Research, 52(4), 817–868. Olson, M. (1965). The logic of collective action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Reiter, B. (2010). What is new in Brazil’s “new social movements”? Latin American Perspectives, 38(1), 153–168. Rucht, D. (1994). The strategies and action repertoires of new movements. In R.  J. Dalton & M.  Kuerchler (Eds.), Challenging the political order (pp. 156–175). Oxford: Blackwell. Rucht, D. (2017). Studying social movements: Some conceptual challenges. In S. Berger & H. Nehring (Eds.), The history of social movements in global perspective: A survey (pp. 39–62). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Şimşek, S. (2004). New social movements in Turkey since 1980. Turkish Studies, 5(2), 111–139. Tarrow, S. (2011). Power in movement: Social movements and contentious politics. New York: Cambridge University Press. Temelkuran, E. (2013). Ağrı’nın Derinliği [Deep mountain]. Istanbul: Everest. Tilly, C. (2004). Social movements 1768–2004. London: Paradigm Publishers. Touraine, A. (2007). New paradigm for understanding today’s world. Cambridge, MA/Malden: Polity. Touraine, A. (2009). Thinking differently. Cambridge, MA/Malden: Polity. Üngör, U. Ü. (2014). Lost in commemoration: The Armenian genocide in memory and identity. Patterns of Prejudice, 48(2), 147–166. Van Dyke, N., et al. (2007). Manufacturing dissent: Labor revitalization, union summer and student protest. Social Forces, 86(1), 193–214.

CHAPTER 2

Revisiting Armenians in the Ottoman Empire: Deportations and Atrocities

The number of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire declined from 2,000,000 in 1915 to fewer than 400,000 after the First World War, when Armenians were officially and popularly blamed for supporting Russia.1 The Young Turks adopted laws and policies—many secret—calculated to kill off Armenians, primarily by marching them into desert regions with inadequate food, water and shelter, at the same time confiscating or countenancing the plunder of their ‘abandoned’ property. It is important to look at the history, as today is in a way continuous from the past, and that’s why today is defined as ‘post-genocide’. In this chapter I provide a brief history of the genocide and the period up to the establishment of the Turkish Republic. The status of Armenians, and non-Muslim communities (Greek Orthodox, Jewish and Syriac Orthodox) in general, in the Ottoman Empire has always been very controversial. To some there was harmony and peace between the empire and its religious minorities until the provocations of “outside agitators” (Suny 2009, p. 932), usually from the Russian Empire, undermined this by disseminating nationalist and separatist notions among them. On the other hand, some argue that the empire, guided by the precepts of Islam, was never compatible with Armenians for religious reasons. Active persecution of non-Muslims was relatively uncommon in the earlier centuries of the empire, “the discrimination was permanent…inherent in the system and maintained by both Holy Law and common practice” (Braude 1982, © The Author(s) 2020 Ö. B. Galip, New Social Movements and the Armenian Question in Turkey, Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59400-8_2

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pp. 3–4). Their testimony was not accepted in Muslim courts. They were not allowed to bear arms. Their properties were subject to the arbitrary checks of state officials. Beginning in the late 1870s and through the following decades, Armenian villages and provinces started to petition the leaders in Istanbul and European consuls with their complaints, but these were not dealt with fairly. But, generally speaking, Armenians lived in a quasi-independent state under Ottoman rule; as long as they adhered to Ottoman laws and paid their taxes, they were, for the most part, left to their own traditions. However, Muslims had higher standing than Christians (not just Armenians but Greeks, Assyrians, as well as Coptic Egyptians) or Jews who were considered as Ahl al-Kitab (people of the book), referring to those who hold monotheistic beliefs. The patrilineal society of the Ottoman Empire also served the homogenization or assimilation of dhimmi (non-Muslim under Muslim rule) in a way which highlighted the superiority of Islam over other beliefs. For instance, dhimmi women were allowed to marry a Muslim man, whereas dhimmi men were forbidden to marry a Muslim woman. However, as the Ottoman Empire started to lose its territories in Europe and became the weakest link among the European powers prior to the First World War, Armenians gradually lost their status of loyal subjects (millet, or millet-i sadika, covering confessional groups such as Greeks, Armenians and Jews) and gained the stigma of being the root cause of the Ottoman Empire’s downfall (Wiesenthal 2017, p. 115).2 So the Ottoman period prior to the Armenian Genocide was not without struggle for Armenians who were effectively living as second-class citizens (Arkun 2005, p. 71). This chapter aims to outline the conditions of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. The Armenian Question was a matter of concern to the empire’s leaders from the 1880s, but the primary focus is on the Armenian Genocide, which occurred primarily between 1915 and 1918, when the ̇ Committee of Union and Progress (CUP, Ittihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti, also known as the Young Turks) eliminated 1.5 million Armenians from their historic homeland and neighboring Anatolia, primarily by means of deportations and massacres under preventive measures which included imposed starvation, abduction into Muslim households and forced conversion to Islam. Despite their name, the Young Turks originally included members of various ethnicities: Arabs, Albanians and Circassians joined the CUP, along with members of the Kurdish elite. However, their worldview was a “complicated amalgam of the old Ottoman and the new Pan-Turkic, of pre-modern Islamic precepts of the inherent inferiority of Christian

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religious groups, and of modernist ideas of the mobilization of nationality and ethnic homogeneity” (Naimark 2011, p. xv). The CUP advocated Westernizing ideals and opposition to Abdul Hamid II (still the titular ruler), unleashing a period of political unrest. The 1863 Armenian National Constitution or Regulation of the Armenian Nation (Nizanname-i Millet-i Ermeniyan) was the approved (by the Ottoman Empire) form of regulations, consisting of 150 articles prepared by Armenian intelligentsia who had mainly studied abroad.3 It was not considered to be a true constitution because it only regulated the affairs of millet within the state and restricted the authority of the clergy and the wealthy class of city-dwellers who associated themselves with the old Armenian aristocracy in the governance of the nation, thereby democratizing and secularizing the governance of the people (Yumul and Bali 2009; Pamukciyan 2003; Karakoç 2010). The Armenian National Assembly, the governing body of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, was established along with the Nizamname in which the Armenian patriarch began to share his powers with the Assembly, his rights being limited by the Armenian National Constitution. In fact, the atrocities against Armenians started well before the emergence of the Young Turks in 1908. Massacres took place in 1894, 1895, 1896 and 1909, and some historians consider that these massacres were precursors of the genocide of 1915, though others argue that they were different in kind. Although historians still work on the causes of the genocide, a variety of explanations has been offered, including Turkish nationalism, racism, religious hatred, social and economic jealousy, PanTuranism (the unity of all Turkic peoples), the fallout from revolutionary politics and clashing nationalisms (Gocek 2011, p. 4). It is with all this in mind that this chapter offers an overview of the socio-political and cultural conditions of Armenia in the Ottoman Empire and examines Armenian-Turkish relations up to the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923. Along with perennial and primordial notions of nationhood, racial nationalists consider the language to be a key marker along with indigeneity and believe that the Armenian nation is more than twice as old as Christianity itself and therefore that Armenian national myths, symbols and historical dates should incorporate, and highlight, pre-Christian elements (Panossian 2002). The Ottoman Empire (Devlet-i Aliye-i Osmaniye) controlled much of south-eastern Europe, western Asia and northern Africa between the

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fourteenth and the early twentieth century, ruling over a heterogeneous population divided by different religions, languages and cultures, along with the millet system. Millet originates from the Arabic milla (‘minorities’ or ethno-religious community in Western terminology) and means ‘nation’ or ‘people’ in Turkish now. The millet system, which is closely linked to Islamic rules on the treatment of non-Muslim minorities, with separate legal courts and personal law, was altered in the nineteenth century by the rise of nationalism within the Ottoman Empire. Along with the Tanzimat (reorganization) reforms, which began in 1839 and ended with the First Constitutional Era in 1876, aiming to encourage Ottomanism among the diverse ethnic groups of the empire and to stem the tide of nationalist movements within it, the power of millets was reduced a great deal. To Bernard Lewis (1968, p. 356): For the Turks, the Armenian movement was the deadliest of all threats. From the conquered lands of the Serbs, Bulgars, Albanians and Greeks, they could, however reluctantly, withdraw, abandoning distant provinces and bringing the Imperial frontier nearer home. But the Armenians, stretching across Turkey-in-Asia from the Caucasian frontier to the Mediterranean coast, lay in the very heart of the Turkish homeland—and to renounce these lands would have meant not the truncation, but the dissolution of the Turkish state. Turkish and Armenian villages, inextricably mixed, had for centuries lived in neighbourly association.

Structural changes within the empire, and especially within its administrative structures, raised tensions during the early nineteenth century,4 tensions which only grew with the Tanzimat under Mahmud II, Abdülmecid I, Abdülaziz I and their ministers from 1839 to 1869. The collective aim of these was to centralize administration, to modernize the state apparatus by creating a bureaucracy and to introduce a revenue system by which the state collected taxes directly from the population. Nizâmnâme-i Millet-i Ermeniyân (the Armenian National Constitution) was approved on 29 March 1863 by the Ottoman government. At the same time, the Armenian National Assembly was established, granting extensive privileges and autonomy, and intended to examine acts of oppression such as land usurpation by Muslim aghas (landowners), forced and illegal taxation, injustices against Armenian peasantry and violence toward women in the regions where Armenians lived. The assembly even submitted reports between 1872 and 1876 summarizing the incidents and offering

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recommendations to the sultan on how to tackle the ethnic conflicts in the region. The 1877–1878 Ottoman-Russian War (’93 War), which caused many political, economic and social traumas for the Ottoman Empire, was also an important turning point in terms of the Armenian Problem becoming internationally recognized. In February 1878, the Russo-Turkish Treaty of San Stefano provided protection and reforms for Armenians. Article 61 of the Berlin Treaty (1883) also stipulated reforms for Armenians. When these failed to materialize, educated young Armenians founded revolutionary parties.5 The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), known as Dashnak, was founded in 1890  in Tiflis, Russian Empire. Dashnak advocated democratic socialism6 and worked for a free Armenia for all inhabitants in the predominantly Kurdish-Armenian eastern provinces, which would mean liberation from the oppressive Ottoman political system and policies. The Dashnak Party, with rural armed self-defense and activism informed by socialist and nationalist revolutionary ideas, directed its efforts against Ottoman authorities and Armenian notables. The Social Democratic Hnchak Party (SDHP), the second oldest Armenian party, was founded in 1887 by a group of Armenian-Russian radical intellectuals in Geneva with the aim of turning Armenians into more active participants in their own history and the history of the Ottoman Empire (2011, p. 84), along with an Armenian national liberation movement which was developed in the early 1860s. With the awakening of Armenian nationalism by Western-educated intellectuals, the status of Armenians within Ottoman society started to be questioned, as protest against a church-led millet structure aimed for redefinition of Armenians as a political rather than religious entity. But the Hnchak Party was aware that transforming Armenians from objects of history into participants would only be possible with the transformation of the Ottoman Empire itself (Ibid.), which would itself only be possible with an armed struggle. Armed resistance to Ottoman oppression and for Armenian independence was the sole goal of the party, but this was abandoned after the sixth party congress in 1909, following the Young Turks’ Revolution and the establishment of a parliamentary system in the Ottoman Empire. Dashnak was critical of this approach, and therefore did not include Hnchak in a federation of revolutionary and oppositional groups. The ideological divergence between these two Armenian parties widened after the 1908 Young Turks’ Revolution, as, while Dashnak embraced the change, Hnchak remained skeptical.

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Excessive taxation, abuse by government officials and murders by Turks, Kurds, Arabs, Circassians and Chechens increasingly became political issues for Armenians and occasionally triggered minor disturbances. In turn, between 1894 and 1896, such frictions triggered massacres of Armenians in provinces such as Bitlis, Diyarbakir, Erzurum, Sivas, Trabzon and Van. Kurds took an active part in massacres through the paramilitary outfit called the Hamidiye Cavalry (in honor of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, r. 1876–1909).7 The Hamidiye Cavalry, a Kurdish tribal militia established in 1891, played the lead role in suppressing and terrorizing the Armenians, killing tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands and orphaning perhaps 50,000 children, mainly between 1894 and 1896, during the so-called Hamidian massacres. In the Hamidian period (1876–1909), Abdul Hamid recognized an irregular mounted force in Eastern Anatolia, drawn mainly from Sunni Kurdish tribes as well as brigands, and supported by Kurdish tribal and religious leaders. The force recruited mainly from the tribes, which had lost much of their power and influence under new Ottoman administrative policies.8 The Kurdish irregulars saw the cavalry as an avenue for power, privilege and gain. Explanations for the establishment of the Hamidiye Cavalry in 1891 differ from one authority to another: inclusion of the Kurdish tribes into the ümmet (Islamic community), bolstering defense against Russia, ensuring the loyalty of the Kurds. “By … providing paid employment of high prestige and a virtual license to raid, the sultan hoped to instil in the Kurds a strong loyalty to him personally,” van Bruinessen suggests (van Bruinessen 2000, p. 186). Uniting the Sunni population (the Turkmens were also Sunnis) by focusing them on common enemies was another possible motivation. As soon as the Hamidiye Cavalry was created, problems broke out. De facto state sponsorship empowered Hamidiye chiefs to murder rivals, to undertake raiding activities and to seize disputed landholdings. Not directly ordered by the state, such crimes were often curtailed by the authorities (Klein 2011, pp.  141–142). When the Young Turks came to power in July 1908, they disbanded the militia but did not want to end the social, economic and political domination of Muslim landlords, mainly Kurds, in the Armenian-inhabited areas of the eastern provinces. Instead, they encouraged the settlement of Muslim refugees, mainly Circassians, in the region as part of their demographic policies. In 1909 the massacres in Adana, considered to be the second series of large-scale massacres of Armenians, and in which an estimated 30,000 Armenians were murdered, was completely ignored by the Ottoman

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rulers. Despite this, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnak), which had supported CUP rule since 1908, continued to believe that the Young Turks would undertake reforms in the eastern provinces. In September 1909, CUP and Dashnak concluded an agreement whereby they promised to work together for progress, the constitution and unity (Akçam 2006). However, the aim of greater administrative centralization, more effective Ottoman state intervention and the resettlement of Muslim refugees were always on the Young Turks’ agenda (Astourian 2011, p. 80). In 1912, the Ottoman Empire lost the First Balkan War, and consequently lost 85 per cent of its land in Europe. Muslim refugees from the lost territories, many of them victims of expulsion and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, flooded into Turkey proper, to the discomfort of their fellow subjects. Up to 850,000 of these refugees were directed to Armenian-­ dominated regions of Anatolia in Turkey. There was no a priori blueprint for the genocide, but rather it emerged from a series of more limited regional measures in a process of cumulative policy radicalization (Bloxham 2011, p.  260). Although anti-Armenian actions and policies were in place based on destruction, arrests and killings, it was only in the spring of 1915 when the first killings and mass murders took place, which can be considered as systematic and well-­ planned attempts to destroy the Armenian population. At this time, about 40,000 Armenian men were serving in the Turkish Army. Ismail Enver Pasha (1881–1922, Ottoman military officer and the leader of the 1908 Young Turks’ Revolution, who became the Minister of War of the Ottoman Empire after the coup in 1913), who constituted one-third of the triumvirate known as the ‘Three Pashas’, along with Cemal Pasha (1872–1922) and Talaat Pasha (1874–1921), ordered Armenian men in the Ottoman armed forces to hand in their weapons to the officials, so they were disarmed, and the conscripts were also executed en masse in what is known as the Red Sunday incident. On 27 May 1915 the Ottoman Parliament passed the Tehcir Law, known as the Temporary Act of Deportation, which authorized the arrest and deportation of the whole Armenian population. Armenians were pushed out of their homeland sites en masse into the Syrian Desert (Der Zor), and the majority of them died under conditions of starvation, dehydration, exposure and disease. Instead of being forcibly marched to the deportation, in some Armenian villages, thousands of Armenians were massacred in situ. The genocide was very clearly gendered. Men were killed, and women and children were sent on forced marches. Women and girls were raped and abducted; some were forced

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into prostitution, both during the genocide and in its aftermath, in order to survive (Ekmekçioğlu 2009, 2016; Tachjian 2009; Derderian 2005). Enver Pasha, Istanbul mayor Cemal Pasha and interior minister Talaat Pasha played key roles in the government after 1908, were largely responsible for the German-Turkish alliance (Cemal Pasha originally having opposed it) and are considered the key architects of the Armenian Genocide. Talaat, who was responsible for the Tehcir Law, was another non-Turk: a Pomak, or Balkan Muslim Slav. Along with Armenians, the ‘Three Pashas’ targeted other Christian groups such as Assyrians, Nestorians and Chaldeans. Not all members of the CUP agreed with the destruction of the Armenians. Some members, including some valis (regional governors), did not want to be part of the whole process of deportation and mass killings. The memoirs of eyewitnesses, journalists, diplomats and itinerant officers and memoranda to the governments, together with the reports published in newspapers, reveal the details of the mass killings and deportations. Although there is no consensus regarding the reasons for the exterminations of Armenians by the Ottoman government, there are several common arguments, which help us to understand the factors behind it. These include the transition of the Ottoman Empire from being a multi-religious imperial state to one of a pan-Turkic and pan-Islamic nature; Turks’ changing attitudes toward Armenians, seeing them as disloyal and separatist, and an “existential threat to their power” (Suny 2011, p. 40) in the shadow of rising nationalism; the illusory economic success and wealth of the Armenians; a reflection of the fear of British and Russian influence on Armenians during the First World War. All these appear as common factors behind the atrocities and massacres in the historiographies of the genocide. According to Turkish officials and research, the intention was to merely remove and relocate Armenians to different regions of the empire, not to massacre them. However, many international researchers and scholars define the displacement of the Armenians as a pretext for mass murder and “economy in violence” (Dadrian 1997) in order to solidify Muslim Turkish dominance in the regions of central and eastern Anatolia. Tens of thousands of Armenian children were forcibly removed from their families and converted to Islam. In May 1915, a commission was founded for the administration of the deportees’ property to serve to transfer the Christians’ goods to Muslims. Along with the atrocities and massacres of Armenians, other non-Muslims such as Chaldeans and Assyrians were also killed, and Greeks were expelled in order to create “a more homogeneous

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nation-state that arose from the ashes of the empire” (Suny 2011, p. 41). These were targeted for ethnic cleansing for some of the same reasons— suspected disloyalty and collaboration with the enemy (Naimark 2002; Mann 2005; Moses 2008). The ‘War of Liberation’ (1919–1923) caused a major exclusion of Ottoman Christians from Anatolia. Armenians continued to face massacres, deportations and persecutions even after 1920. Their goods were confiscated, and their property and lands were distributed to the migrant Muslims who were settled in evacuated villages by the commissions formed for this purpose, supported by the Abandoned Properties Law (emval-i metruke)9 and Liquidation Law, which were passed on 13 September 1915. Between 1920 and 1923, survivors experienced further massacres and expulsions, particularly in interior vilayets, mainly in Cilicia, Adana, Kharput and Maraş. From the early 1920s, precautionary laws and policies were enforced against the return of Ottoman Armenians, especially in relation to Armenian properties. A law was adopted as early as September 1923, stating that no Armenian who had emigrated from Cilicia and the ‘Eastern Provinces’ could return to Turkey. A second law, of 23 May 1927, states that all citizens who had not participated in the war for independence and had not returned to Turkey between 24 July 1923 and the announcement of the law would lose their citizenship. In August 1926, the Turkish government announced that they would retain all property seized before 1926, which meant that of those who survived the deportation in 1915. The recovery of Armenians who were captive in Turkish households and orphanages was also a major problem. The American Near East Relief (NER) and other agencies which attempted to recover hundreds of thousands of Armenian refugees, mostly orphans, were hindered by the Turkish government. According to NER, 10,000 Armenian women were recovered from harems by late 1919 (Marashlian 1998, p. 122). The Armenian Genocide in Turkey created an orphaned generation. Armenian authorities have reported that although several thousand Armenian orphans were rescued by late 1921, roughly 100,000 Armenian orphans were still unrecovered, mostly in the interior towns and cities. In many cases, local Turks and Kurds who took them from their families spared young Armenian children from deportation. The children were coerced into denouncing Christianity and becoming Muslims, and were then given new Turkish names. Forced Islamization was among the policies of the Young Turks and the CUP. Although the number of the resultant

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‘invisible Armenians’ remains unclear, the well-known historian Akçam speaks of 200,000. The First World War ended with defeat for Germany and the Central Powers including the Ottoman Empire in November 1918. Shortly before the war, the main architects of the genocide, Talaat, Enver and Cemal Pasha, fled to Germany, where they got asylum. The military tribunal between the years of 1919 and 1920 sentenced them to death in absentia for their roles in the crimes against Armenians and other Ottoman Christian subjects. However, all attempts to bring the war crime suspects to justice failed and some of them even continued their political activism after 1923, and the Turkish parliament decided to provide aid to the families of the political leaders who had organized and carried out the genocide.10 Ottoman Armenians were again in the headlines when several architects of the genocide, Talaat Pasha (in March 1921), Bahaddin Sakir (in April 1922) and Cemal (in July 1922), were assassinated by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun), along with the series of assassination plots against former Ottoman political and military figures which is referred to as ‘operation nemesis’.11 Western diplomats started to negotiate the Armenian Question at peace conferences in London, Paris and Lausanne between 1920 and 1923, as part of the post-war settlements. At the Paris Peace Conference in January 1920, Ottoman Armenian representatives put forth territorial claims against the Ottoman Empire, and the conference was shown the first map of the Armenian Republic. The European Allies responded by asking the USA to assume guardianship of the new Republic. However, President Woodrow Wilson’s attempt to make Armenia an official US protectorate was rejected by the US Congress in May 1920. The atrocities against Armenians and other minorities were not at the center of the debate. The Treaty of Sevres on 10 August 1920, which abolished the Ottoman Empire and obliged Turkey to renounce all rights over Arab Asia and North Africa, also recognized an independent state of Armenia (Article 88) and imposed strict military restrictions on Turkey. This treaty also legally obliged the Turkish government to bring accused war criminals to justice. However, the treaty was rejected by the new Turkish Kemalist regime and was replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. Turkey’s borders were drawn with the treaties of Gyumri on 3 December 1920, Moscow on 16 March 1921 and Kars on 13 October 1921, and the government of the Great National Assembly effectively ‘closed down’ the Armenian Problem.

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The peace conference held in Lausanne from 20 November 1922 to 4 February 1923, and again from 19 April to 24 July 1923, which was attended by Britain, France, Italy and Turkey as well as by Japan, Romania, Yugoslavia and Greece, is particularly important for Armenians. The Treaty of Lausanne proved to be the longest lasting of the post-war settlements. The treaty was designed to resolve the conflicts between the Ottoman Empire and the allied French Republic, British Empire, Kingdom of Italy, Empire of Japan, Kingdom of Greece and Kingdom of Romania since the beginning of the First World War. The treaty defined the borders of the modern Turkish Republic. Negotiations took place during the Lausanne Conference at which Ismet Inonu was the chief negotiator for Turkey. Armenians wanted to defend themselves in the conference with a committee under the name of the Armenian Republic Committee. Ismet Pasha explained that it was impossible to establish an Armenian state within Turkish borders: The Turkish Nation gives to the minorities the rights that the civilized world recognizes but cannot accept any new offer which would put its independence under risk; the best way of emancipating minorities is not to provoke them to relations which would stain them abroad and to protect them from such relations. They should not depend on compassion coming from abroad. Then, all of them can live among Turkish citizens after the peace treaty. Both sides will recover soon if the organizations working abroad to use the Armenian problem as a maintenance tool or a weapon are destroyed. Armenians who wish to stay in Turkey can live comradely with Turkish citizens. However, there is no possibility that Turkish lands can be separated from the homeland for an Armenian state neither in eastern provinces nor in Cilicia. Turkey has already signed contracts with the current Armenian Republic. Turkey cannot even imagine the establishment of a new Armenia.12

Armenians were not mentioned in the Treaty of Lausanne except as non-­ Muslims of Turkey.13 But the treaty assured non-Muslims of extensive rights to protect them and promote their communal particularities. However, the treaty framework was implemented narrowly, at the expense of non-Muslim minorities’ rights and liberties due to its security-oriented roots (Somer 2010, p. 26). A number of Western powers, particularly the USA, France and Britain, provided international endorsement of denial, which contributed to its institutionalization. In 1923 Kemal and his party had established the secular—and integral nationalist—Republic of Turkey, which major powers

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recognized, and they lost interest in the genocide after the Treaty of Lausanne. The Armenian Question was discussed in the context of negotiations on the protection of minority rights in the sessions dated 12, 13, ̇ 14–20 December 1922 and 6–9 January 1923. Ismet Pasha, as the Turkish delegate, declared clearly in his speech that Armenians who wished to stay in Turkey could continue living as comrades with Turkish citizens, but that not even a piece of Turkish land either in the east or in Cilicia could be given to them. Since the Treaty of Lausanne, all non-Muslim Turkish nationals have had minority status, but only Jews, the Greek Orthodox and the Armenian minority benefited from minority rights under Articles 38–44 of the treaty. No Muslim groups were considered as a minority (azınlık), but only Armenians, Greeks and Jews, as they were considered to be ‘non-Turkifiable’ (Aktar 1998). Positing non-Muslims (Christians and Jews) as ‘minorities’ as a juridical category is also problematic here as ‘minority’ is seen as ‘other’ compared to the Turkish Muslim ‘majority’. ‘Minority’ as a legal term denies the history of the genocide and in a way continues the legacy of annihilation and oppression. As there are no special provisions for Armenians in the Lausanne Treaty, the status of those left in Turkey was regulated in Articles 37 and 45 only in the context of other non-Muslim minorities. With this treaty, the Turkish side considered that the Armenian Question was solved, but Armenians were not content on the grounds that there is no article specific to them in the treaty, that the majority of Armenian lands were left to Turkey, that the establishment of an Armenian state was rejected by the Allied Forces (Great Britain, France and Russia), and that it does not include the issues raised in Sevres. Soon after the establishment of the Turkish Republic, policies of denying the Armenian Genocide were adopted in order to suppress the debate in international public forums.

Notes 1. According to research conducted by the University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, there were 2,133,190 Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1914, declining to 387,800 by 1922. For detailed information on the non-Muslim population of the Ottoman Empire, see Braude and Lewis (1982) and Karpat (1982). 2. The millet system was created by the Pact of Umar in the seventh century to organize and protect distinct religious communities in exchange for payment of a tax, or cizye. The millets communicated with Ottoman authori-

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ties through intermediaries but retained the ability to self-regulate internal matters. Though there were three main millets, Greek, Jewish and Armenian, these groups were internally diverse and incorporated smaller minorities. The millet system by the end of the nineteenth century included a ‘Greek’ Orthodox (Chalcedonian) millet, an Armenian Apostolic millet (non-­Chaldean Christians), an Armenian Catholic millet, an Armenian Protestant millet and a Jewish millet, all representing what were increasingly understood as ethno-national entities. For more on the millet system, see Kemal Karpat (1982); Barkey and Gavrilis (2016). 3. Some of them being: Nahapet Rusinian, Dr. Servichen, Dran Nazariantz, Nigogayos Balyan, Krikor Odian, Krikor Margosian 4. On the gathering decline of the Ottomans, see J. J. Reid (1994) Crisis of the Ottoman Empire (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner); A.  Palmer (1994) The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (New York, NY: M.  Evans); H.  Inalcik (2000) The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age 1300–1600 (London: Phoenix) and D.  Goffman (2002) The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press). 5. See E.  J. Erickson (2013) Ottomans and Armenians (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan) for Armenian revolutionary movements between 1878 and 1915. 6. Dashnak has been a full member of the Socialist International since 2003 and has affiliates in more than 20 countries. 7. See Ely B. Soane’s travel notes on the massacres and vandalism in Diyarbakir in 1895 in E. B. Soane (1912) Mesopotamia and Kurdistan in Disguise: With historical notices of the Kurdish tribes and Chaldeans of Kurdistan (London: J. Murray). 8. On the Hamidiye Cavalry, see Martin van Bruinessen (1992) Kurdish Society, Ethnicity, and Refugee Problems, in P. G. Kreyenboek and S. Sperl (eds) The Kurds: A Contemporary Overview (London: Routledge); J. Klein (2007) Kurdish Nationalists and Non-nationalist Kurdists: Rethinking Minority Nationalism and the Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, 1908–1909, Nations and Nationalism 13(1): 135–153; S. Deringil (2009) The Armenian Question Is Finally Closed: Mass Conversions of Armenians in Anatolia During the Hamidian Massacres, 1895–1897, Comparative Studies in Society and History 51(2), 344–371. 9. For more on the abandoned properties, see N.  Onaran (2000) Emval-I Metruke Olayı: Osmanlı’da ve Cumhuriyette Ermeni ve Rum Mallarının Türkleştirilmesi [Abandoned Properties: The Turkification of Armenian and Greek Properties Under the Ottoman and Republican States], Istanbul: Belge. 10. Taner Akcam, in his book titled A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, analyzes the discussion which

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took place in the parliament in 1918 and analyzes the details of the trials of crime suspects. 11. ‘Operation Nemesis’ was a covert operation and assassination campaign by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaksutyun) carried out between 1920 and 1922. A number of former Ottoman political and military figures were assassinated for their roles in the Armenian Genocide. For more, see Eric Bogosian’s Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot that Avenged the Armenian Genocide (2015); Edward Alexander’s A Crime of Vengeance (2000). 12. Ali Naci Karacan, Ali (1896–1955), a Turkish journalist and publisher who participated in the Treaty of Lausanne, was the Switzerland press attaché ̇ for a long time (1935–48), wrote a book titled Lozan Konferansı ve Ismet ̇ ̇ pașa (1943) on the Conference of Lausanne and Ismet Inönü, second president of Turkey. Also see, ‘Ali Naci Karacan’in Gözüyle Lozan Konferansı ̇ ve Ismet Paşa’ (Conference of Lausanne and Ismet Pasha from the Eyes of Ali Naci Karacan) by Fatih Tuğluoğlu (2013), Ankara Üniversitesi Türk ̇ Inkilap Tarihi Enstitüsü Atatürk Yolu dergisi, 53: 285–328. 13. The coverage of non-Muslim minorities in the treaty was restricted to just Armenians, Jews and Orthodox Greeks, leaving out other non-Muslim groups, including Assyrians, Chaldeans, Catholics and Protestants. These groups’ rights and demands are either ignored or they consist of being allowed to practice their own religion without having been officially granted cultural, educational and religious institutions. See N. Kaya (2009) Forgotten or Assimilated? Minorities in the Education System of Turkey, London: Minority Rights Group.

Bibliography Akçam, T. (2006). A shameful act: The Armenian genocide and the question of Turkish responsibility. New York: Metropolitan Books. Aktar, A. (1998). Homogenizing the nation; Turkifying the economy. In Conference on the compulsory exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey. Oxford: University of Oxford. Arkun, A. (2005). Into the modern age 1800–1913. In E. Herzig & M. Kurkchiyan (Eds.), Armenians: Past and present in the making of national identity (pp. 65–88). London/New York: Routledge. Astourian, S. H. (2011). The silence of the land: Agrarian relations, ethnicity, and power. In R. G. Suny et al. (Eds.), A question of genocide: Armenians and Turks at the end of the Ottoman Empire (pp. 55–81). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barkey, K., & Gavrilis, G. (2016). The Ottoman millet system: Non-territorial autonomy and its contemporary legacy. Ethnopolitics, 15(1), 24–42.

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Bloxham, D. (2011). The first world war and the development of the Armenian genocide. In R. G. Suny et al. (Eds.), A question of genocide: Armenians and Turks at the end of the Ottoman Empire (pp.  260–277). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Braude, B. (1982). Introduction. In B. Braude (Ed.), Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire (pp. 1–5). Boulder: Lynne Rienner. Braude, B., & Lewis, B. (1982). Christian and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The functioning of a plural society. New York, NY: Holmes and Meier. Dadrian, V. N. (1997). The history of the Armenian genocide: Ethnic conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus. New York: Berghahn Books. Derderian, K. (2005). Common fate, different experience: Gender-specific aspects of the Armenian genocide 1915–1917. Holocaust Genocide Studies, 19(1), 1–25. Ekmekçioğlu, L. (2016). Recovering Armenia: The limits of belonging in post-­ genocide Turkey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gocek, F. M. (2011). Introduction: Leaving it to the historians. In R. G. Suny et  al. (Eds.), A question of genocide: Armenians and Turks at the end of the Ottoman Empire (pp. 3–14). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Karakoç, E. (2010). Osmanlı Hariciyesinde Bir Ermeni Nazır: Gabriyel Noradunkyan Efendi [An Armenian minister in Ottoman foreign relations: ̇ kiler, VII(25), 157–177. Gabriyel Noradunkyan]. Uluslar Arası Iliş Karpat, K.  H. (1982). Millets and nationality: The roots of the incongruity of nation and state in the post-Ottoman era. In B.  Braude & B.  Lewis (Eds.), Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire (pp.  142–169). New  York, NY: Holmes and Meier. Klein, J. (2011). The margins of empire: Kurdish militias in the Ottoman tribal zone. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lewis, B. (1968). The emergence of modern Turkey. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mann, M. (2005). The dark side of democracy: Explaining ethnic cleansing. New York: Cambridge University Press. Marashlian, L. (1998). Finishing the genocide: Cleansing Turkey of Armenian survivors, 1920–1923. In R. Hovannisian (Ed.), Remembrance and denial: The case of the Armenian genocide (pp.  113–145). Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Moses, A. D. (2008). Empire, colony, genocide: Conquest, occupation, and subaltern resistance in world history. New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books. Naimark, N. N. (2002). Fires of hatred: Ethnic cleansing in twentieth-century Europe. Boston: Harvard University Press. Naimark, N. M. (2011). Preface. In R. G. Suny et al. (Eds.), A question of genocide: Armenians and Turks at the end of the Ottoman Empire (pp. xiii–xx). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pamukciyan, K. (2003). Ermeni Kaynaklarından Tarihe Katkılar [Contributions to history from Armenian sources]. Aras: Istanbul.

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Panossian, R. (2002). The past as nation: Three dimensions of Armenian identity. Geopolitics, 7(2), 121–146. Somer, M. (2010). Media values and democratization: What unites and what divides religious-conservative and pro-secular elites. Turkish Studies, 11(4), 555–577. Suny, R. G. (2009). Truth in telling: Reconciling realities in the genocide of the Ottoman Armenians. American Historical Review, 114(4), 930–946. Suny, R.  G. (2011). Writing genocide: The fate of the Ottoman Armenians in Western historiographies. In R. G. Suny et al. (Eds.), A question of genocide: Armenians and Turks at the end of the Ottoman Empire (pp. 15–41). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tachjian, V. (2009). Gender, nationalism, exclusion: The reintegration process of female survivors of the Armenian genocide. Nations and Nationalism, 15(1), 60–80. Van Bruinessen, M. (2000). Mullas, sufis and heretics: The role of religion in Kurdish society. Collected articles. Istanbul: The Isis Press. Wiesenthal, A. (2017). The Sultan-Caliph and the Heroes of Liberty: Heroism, Revolution, and the contestation of public persona in the late Ottoman Empire, c. 1900–1918. Unpublished MA thesis. British Columbia: Simon Fraser University. Yumul, A., & Bali, R.  N. (2009). Ermeni ve Yahudi Cemaatlerinde Siyasal Düşünceler [Political thought in Armenian and Jewish societies]. Modern Türkiye’de Siyasi Düşünce, 362–366.

CHAPTER 3

From Ottoman Millet to Turkish Citizens: 1923–2002

The Turkish Republic has sought to create an ethnically homogeneous state by force. Although until the 1870s in the Ottoman Empire Armenians were considered trustworthy subjects in the millet system whereby they were allowed to rule themselves, official state discourse of the republic started to portray Armenians as enemies or traitors for stabbing the Turks in the back, thereby establishing the arena for the clash between private and public narratives, the former represented in the efforts of authors, journalists, academics, intellectuals, civil societies and various initiatives to persuade Turkey to come to terms with its past, including the traumatic events involving the Armenians. In Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present and Collective Violence Against the Armenians, 1789–2009, Turkish historian Fatma Müge Göcek (2014) explores the roots of the denial of the collective violence committed against the Armenians and demonstrates its occurrences before 1915. On the basis of this analysis, Göcek argues that this denial is a multilayered historical process, which developed through four stages. It began with the imperial denial of the origins of collective violence committed against Armenians, which started in 1789 and continued until 1907. It was followed by the Young Turks’ denial of violence lasting for a decade from 1908 to 1918, then early republican denial taking place between 1919 and 1973, culminating with the late republican denial of the responsibility for the collective violence, starting in 1974 and continuing to this day. © The Author(s) 2020 Ö. B. Galip, New Social Movements and the Armenian Question in Turkey, Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59400-8_3

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The new republic differed from the Ottoman Empire by emphasizing ethnicity in its definition of national identity (Maksudyan 2005; Isyar 2005). Since the establishment of the Turkish Republic, despite holding citizenship, the country’s Christian minority has been subjected to discriminative politics such as restricted property rights for their foundations, special taxes, pogroms in the 1950s, restricted appointment to certain state posts and so forth. In addition, restrictions on travel to Armenia, due to the lack of diplomatic relations between the two countries originating from the Nagorno-Karabakh conflicts, have become a serious concern for Armenians. Therefore, Armenians living in Turkey had an unsettled relationship with the state until the election of the AKP government in 2002. This chapter aims to portray the Armenian community from the establishment of the Turkish Republic through to the victory of the pro-Islamic AKP in 2002. There are several published works which contribute to the understanding of Armenians in Turkey in the post-genocide period. Talin Suciyan (2016) attempts to understand the socio-political existence of Armenians in the context of denial up to 1950 through various newspapers, periodicals, memoirs and oral history accounts. Reading Armenian texts and images produced in Istanbul from the close of the First World War through to the early 1930s, Ekmekçioğlu (2016) gives voice to the community’s most prominent public figures, notably Hayganush Mark, a renowned activist, feminist and editor of the influential journal Hay Gin (Armenian Woman).1 The Hrant Dink Foundation, through the researcher Ferda Balancar, has also conducted extensive research, giving space to narratives by Armenians living in different cities (Diyarbakir, Izmit, Ankara) describing their daily struggles, published in four volumes under the title Sessizligin Sesi (The Voice of Silence).2 Melissa Bilal conducted her MA (2004) and PhD (2013) on lullabies, aiming to understand the capacity of Armenian women’s everyday performances of remembrance to produce historical knowledge, and published an article on the perception of ‘home’ for Armenians in Istanbul (2006) and an article in Turkish titled “Türkiyeli Ermenileri Anlamak” (Understanding the Armenians from Turkey) published by Birikim, based in Istanbul, in 2005. However, historical analysis of the formation of Turkey’s minority regime and its impact on Armenians has so far mainly only taken us up to a certain point, and there is little coverage of more recent times. This chapter covers the changing strategies and identity politics employed against Armenians between 1923 and

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2002, emphasizing how Armenians as minorities have been perceived as second-class by the Turkish state throughout the twentieth century. Crucially, the boundaries of the millet system as it existed at the end of the Ottoman Empire were codified as minority rights in the relevant portion of the Treaty of Lausanne which internationally recognized the Republic of Turkey in 1923, Section III, Articles 37–45. Together with other non-Muslims, the Armenians obtained minority status in accordance with the treaty. However, soon after the establishment of the Turkish Republic, the government adopted a policy of denying the Armenian Genocide and waged a vociferous campaign to prevent its official recognition in international and public forums. The secular state of Turkey was established under Kemal’s leadership in 1923, turning a multi-ethnic empire into a nation-state set upon homogenizing its population in its everlasting nationalist search for identity (Dündar 2011, p.  290). “The notion of ethnic homogeneity as the basis for a national republic of the Kemalist type” (Lewis 1968). Within official Turkish discourse, the concept of ‘Turkishness’ refers simultaneously to a civic and to a territorial identity, and to one that was specifically ethnic. Although 1923 is arguably the turning point of Ottoman-Turkish history, it has also been argued that there was an ideological and organic continuity of the Turkish-nationalist political elite in the era 1908–1950 (Zürcher 2000). Hence, along with the Young Turks’ social and demographic engineering and nation formation, a relatively dictatorial policy of ethnic homogenization continued after the establishment of the republic. First the Armenian Genocide, then the expulsion of the Greeks and the deportation and dislocation of Kurds contributed to the demographic engineering involved in building the nation state. Although Kurdish tribal leaders supported the Turkish national resistance along with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk against the Armenians and Greeks, he did not keep his promises to them by providing special rights and privileges. Atatürk dissolved the National Assembly. Within Turkey’s state discourse, the concept of Turkishness came to refer simultaneously to a civic, territorially defined identity, as well as to an ethnic identity (Secor 2004, p. 355). Along with the institutionalization of Kemalism and the single party period, state policies after 1923 such as the introduction of Vakıflar Kanunu or the single trustee system (1938–1949), Cemiyetler Kanunu (Law of Association, 1909), the religious and social mechanism of the community has weakened. For instance, the patriarch was stripped of his role in the social, economic and political life of the

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community and left only with a religious function. Armenian schools and foundations were faced with state interventions and control. Today, slightly more than 60,000 Armenians remain, of whom 50,000 are believed to live in Istanbul. Armenians have their own Patriarchate in Istanbul. The activities of Armenian organizations are strictly restricted to the religious, social and educational fields under the authority of the church and religious groups. While Turkish authorities have hindered the maintenance of churches, some of them were diverted from their original purpose (i.e., converted into mosques or used as storage spaces or jails).3 Armenians can only run private schools (19 of them) providing primary and secondary education in their mother tongue, but there has been pressure by Turkish authorities to restrict teaching in Armenian (only four hours of teaching in Armenian is allowed, the remaining subjects have to be taught in Turkish) and Armenian topics in schools. Students in such Armenian minority schools are not allowed to learn Armenian history. Despite the shortage of Armenian teachers, non-Turkish citizens are not allowed to work as teachers at Armenian schools, by contrast with Greek private schools. However, the deputy head teacher of an Armenian school is always an ethnic Turk who is responsible for countersigning all school correspondence. Armenians have reported that Armenian schools, businessmen and religious institutions have received threats by email, letter and phone (Minority Rights Groups International, Turkey-­ Armenians).4Throughout the 11 years of the Single Trustees System, the Armenian community foundations have been severely affected by the trustees being appointed from among people with no notion of administering a foundation and with no ties to the community (Suciyan 2016, p. 100). All these policies have affected the bond and relationship between Armenians in Turkey and Armenian communities around the world. After the Turkish Republic was established, some of the late Ottoman cultural institutions, such as Turkish Hearths (Türk Ocakları),5 were closed down as a result of rising Turkish nationalist sentiments, and turned into the Committee for Inquiry into Turkish History (Türk Tarihi Tetkik Cemiyeti) which then became the Turkish Historical Association (Türk Tarih Kurumu). The ‘Turkish History Thesis’ (Turk Tarih Tezi) bringing the Turks’ Asian historical background (their having migrated in several waves from central Asia) together with Kemalist ideals was developed in those years, placing Turks as a subgroup of the Caucasian race.6 This thesis was based on the book Turk Tarihinin Ana Hatları (The Mainlines of Turkish History), published by the Committee for the Study of Turkish

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History in 1930, becoming a ‘state dogma’ and later being included in school textbooks which served to integrate the creation of a national history into the framework of nation-building. Other new institutions based on similar principles and intended to provide mechanisms to create the image of a ‘pure’ nation and deny the atrocities in its past were established, notably The People’s Houses (Halkevleri), which were founded in 19327 as the semi-official cultural organs of the single party (CHP, Republican People’s Party), aiming to spread the ideals of the party and create modern and secular citizens for the Turkish Republic. Boarding schools were established in Anatolia to eradicate and assimilate the students into hegemonic Turkish culture in the sense of Turkification through education. All these institutions played a key role in the cultural assimilation of minorities and framed the tools and structures to assist the Turkish Republic in its denialist approach toward the Armenian Genocide. Various terms were coined to indicate the inferior status of Armenians, such as ‘local foreigners’ (yerli fileh), ‘citizens of foreign origin’ (gavur), ‘guest citizens’ (ecnebi), ‘unbeliever’ (fileh) or ‘whose father is an unbeliever’ (bavfileh).8 These terms appeared in court decisions and other official documents. In the long run, such denigrating terms have also resulted in the stigmatization of the term ‘minority’ in Turkish public discourse. After the launch of the ‘Citizen, speak Turkish!’ campaign of 1928, arrests were made throughout the country with the full support of the government, who encouraged provincial governors to incorporate non-Turkish speakers into the Turkish community by making Turkish their mother tongue. The campaign was used as a tool to harass and assault non-Muslims (and also Kurds) under the accusation of denigrating Turkishness. A further frequently mentioned discriminatory initiative of the Turkish Republic in which non-Turkish persons (particularly men) were considered as a potential ‘fifth column’ was known as the Yirmi Kura Ihtiyatlar, or Yirmi Kura Askerlik (Incident of the Twenty Classes). In 1939, the single-party government declared that the non-Muslim minorities (Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks and Jews) would perform their military service without receiving any education while in the military.9 This action could be seen as a result of the difficulties between the Ottoman state and its non-Muslim population during the First World War. All of the Twenty Classes were drawn from male minority populations and included the elderly and mentally ill.[4] They were given no weapons and quite often they did not even wear military uniforms. These non-Muslims without weapons were gathered in labor battalions in which there were no

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Turks and they were forced to work under very harsh conditions. One of the aims of this policy was to seize the assets of the minority population. Many of them were bankrupted, as they could not run their business during the Incident of Twenty Classes. However, shortly afterward, another decision gave a clear indication of the perception of non-Muslim minorities by the single-party government. The discharged adult male population (many of them elderly and unhealthy) of Turkey’s Greek, Jew and Armenian communities were drafted again, this time to be used for labor-­ intensive work in impoverished conditions. Property rights in Turkey have been violated numerous times using internal and external security threats as an excuse. Despite being granted the right of establishing, managing and controlling their own charitable, religious and social institutions by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, Armenians and non-Muslim minorities in general experienced legal restrictions with regard to the property of their foundations. For example, the communities’ rights to establish new foundations were denied by the Turkish Civil Code of 1926,10 and the Law on Foundations (1935) placed their foundations under the authority of the General Directorate of Foundations (Vakıflar Genel Müdürlügü). In 1936, relıgıous foundations (vakıf ) had to declare their assets and immovable property. A couple of decades later they practically lost by a legal order what they had gained during the post-1936 period. In 1941, minorities were taken into military camps to fulfill additional military service. Turkey imposed extraordinary taxes upon Greeks, Jews and Armenians. On 12 November 1942, an additional Wealth Tax (Varlık Vergisi Kanunu 1942–44) was levied exclusively on non-Muslims with high levels of income (minorities were commonly seen as rich and a privileged class) as a one-off payment. This taxation was introduced to “help turkify the economy” by Şükrü Saraçoğlu (1887–1953), the fifth prime minister of Turkey and Minister of Foreign Affairs during the early stages of the Second World War, as only 8000 of the 19,000 firms registered in Istanbul at the time belonged to Turkish Muslims, which was in violation of Articles 39 and 40 of the Lausanne Treaty. The discriminatory exactions economically ruined these small minority communities, which were already confined mostly to Istanbul by the 1940s. All Armenian villages and neighborhoods faded away in Anatolia. Only 200 families were living in Diyarbakir in the 1960s, whereas the population was 570,000  in 1914. The only remaining Armenian village in Turkey today is Vakıflı, with its 135 residents, on the far south-eastern coast of the country, by the border with Syria.11

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The Armenian press (i.e., Nor Or, Nor Lur, Marmara, Jamanak), although not all sharing the same political stance, suffered from existing legal issues, surveillance and prohibitions throughout the 1930s and 1940s (not necessarily associated with the Martial Law Order),12 and faced censorship because of the eradication of its legal administrative basis and representation. It became de facto responsible for issuing political statements.13 A group organized under the name of the Armenian National Council of America (ANCA) sent a memorandum in which it made territorial demands without specifying geographical boundaries (which also clashed with Soviet demands on Turkey regarding the region of Kars and Ardanan) to a United Nations conference in San Francisco in April 1945. This affected the socio-political lives of Armenians in Turkey severely, as it led to an upsurge of anti-Armenian campaigning mainly by the Turkish press. The socio-political conditions and the field of power created and reproduced by Turkish newspapers cannot be considered separately from the state policies of the time since many press editors were also members of parliament (Suciyan 2016, p. 151). The patriarchal election crisis in Istanbul between 1944 and 1950, seen as the result of decades of long policies of structural eradication (Suciyan 2016), provides extensive insights into the state’s Armenian politics after 1923, which was to undermine the legal basis for the presence of Armenians through the eradication of Nizamname and institutional bodies such as the Civil Assembly, its international dimension, and how this crisis affected the socio-political lives of the Armenians. Due to the state’s policies, the church was the only institution strong enough to regulate the entire Armenian community in Turkey. Center-right parties have dominated Turkey’s political scene since the country became a parliamentary democracy in 1950. In more violent episodes, such as the 6–7 September 1955 mobs and pogroms in Istanbul, the government encouraged the expulsion of the majority of Greeks remaining in Turkey. In the course of the violence, more than 4000 houses, 1000 workplaces, 73 churches, 1 synagogue, 26 schools and 5000 other premises were attacked. Most of these places belonged to non-­ Muslim citizens, the majority of them of the Greek Orthodox religion. Fifteen people died; hundreds of them were injured. Many Jews migrated to Israel after independence, and the Armenian population dwindled from an estimated 150,000 after the First World War to less than half that number by the 1990s. The destruction of the cultural and religious heritage has been effective in pushing out Armenians who remained in the Anatolian

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provinces. For instance, Armenian churches with their properties were either sold or demolished in the 1940s and 1950s in a manner reminiscent of the destruction and appropriation policies of the Young Turks, in order to dislocate Armenians within their home provinces (Üngör and Polatel 2011, p. 166). In 1933, the writer Franz Werfel, an Austrian Jew, published the epic novel Die vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh (The Forty Days of Musa Dagh) on the resistance of Armenian villages to the genocide. This became very popular, and MGM Studio announced plans to adapt the novel into a film. The Turkish government reacted angrily and put pressure on the US state department to stop the production. The term ‘genocide’ itself was invented by Raphael Lemkin during the Second World War to include the Armenian events alongside Nazi exterminations of European Jews. Interest in the genocide was triggered in the 1960s. The 50th anniversary of the Armenian deportations was commemorated in 1965 around the world, while Turkey made efforts to encourage another version of the story. Despite its heterogeneous structure, Armenian culture has characteristics which distinguish it from those of the majority population in Turkey. The markers of Armenian identity are Christianity (Armenians were converted around 314 AD), the significance of the Armenian language (created by Mesrop Mashtots in the early fifth century) and the history of genocide in 1915. After the genocide, antipathy toward the perpetrators of the atrocity and their descendants became one of the most prominent characteristics of what it meant to be Armenian for survivors and their descendants. Once this position was reversed, following a break between the USSR and Turkey after 1945, the Armenian Genocide became prominent yet again, resulting in public demonstrations in the 1960s in the streets of Yerevan (Herzig and Kurkchiyan 2005, p.  11). The myth of Armenia’s conversion to Christianity is one of the pillars of Armenian identity. The idea of being the first Christian nation, and a chosen people, was propagated throughout the centuries by Armenian historians (many of them priests) and the church itself (Panossian 2002, pp. 126–127). The Ottomans reinforced the religious nature of the Armenian community and accepted the head of the Armenian Church, the Patriarch of Constantinople/Istanbul, as the head of all Armenian subjects in both sacred and profane matters. The emergence of Armenian armed struggle took place with the creation of the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA), which functioned from 1975 to the early 1990s, and this led the Turkish

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state to increase the level of demonization of Armenians among the general public. Between 1973 and 1980, some Armenians, through assassinations of Turkish officials and leaving bombs in public places, attempted to attract attention to the debates on genocide, using them as a frame to legitimate Armenian terrorism. In the 1980s, denial was institutionalized and professionalized: a special agency called Istihbarat ve Araştırma Müdürlügü (Directorate General of Intelligence and Research) was established within the Foreign Ministry to coordinate all issues related to the Armenian Genocide and to formulate the state’s politics of the past. This directorate formulated the Armenian Question as a problem of contemporary terrorism, notably ASALA (Bayraktar 2016).14 As reactions against the ASALA attacks, several bomb attacks were carried out against Armenian religious and cultural institutions between 1977 and 1979. The Armenian Apostolic Patriarchate church was bombed in reaction to the assault on the Turkish ambassador’s son in The Hague on 19 October 1979. On the grounds of collaboration with ASALA or other foreign Armenian militant organizations, Turkish left-wing opposition groups were attacked by Turkish officials.15 The increase in requests for asylum by ‘Turkish Christians’ led European churches to focus their attention on the situation of the Christians in Turkey. At the end of 1979, the ‘Churches Committee on Migrant Workers in Europe’ (CCMWE), a panel of various European churches, produced a document in which they came to the following conclusion on the subject of the living conditions of remaining Christian minorities in Eastern and South-eastern Anatolia: “There has been an increase in cases of violence against Christians during the years 1975-1979, whereas at the same time, the Christian population is plainly declining. After the military coup of 1980, 14 Armenians including Archimandrite and preachers were arrested and imprisoned for alleged anti-Turkish propaganda.”16 The Minority Commission (Azınlıklar Tali Komisyonu), which has existed in secret since 1972 but became public only after 1999, includes representatives from the National Security Council (Milli Güvenlik Konseyi) and the National Intelligence Service (Milli Istihbarat Teşkilatı), together with the interior and foreign ministers, and has full powers over minority affairs. Its decisions cannot even be appealed by the minorities themselves or overturned by any order of the courts. Turkey tried to prohibit any mention of the genocide in a United Nations report and disrupts academic conferences and public discussions of the genocide. For instance, a group of Armenian scholars were supposed to attend a conference in Tel

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Aviv in 1982, the first international genocide conference that featured Armenian speakers, to describe the massacres, but the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem pressed the organizers to drop the Armenian issue from the agenda or cancel the conference due to Turkish threats of reprisals against Israel and Turkish Jews. Thereafter, both in Turkey and in the USA, the Turkish government supported the establishment of institutes which would contribute to the literature of denial of the genocide.17 In 1984, the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, an NGO founded in 1979, held a trial on 13–16 April in Paris to examine the Armenian massacres, using the accounts of scholars and the arguments of the Turkish government. The tribunal determined that “the extermination of the Armenian population groups through deportation and massacre constitutes a crime of genocide”. According to the system codified in 1961, the Armenian patriarch could be chosen by an electoral college of Armenians in Turkey. However, this was changed by Turgut Özal’s government in the 1980s so that only officially recognized Armenian foundations were allowed to take part, and candidature was restricted by the stipulation that candidates’ fathers must be Turkish nationals. Despite their minority status, there has always been pressure by the authorities to restrict the use of the Armenian language at schools. A factor behind the rise in anti-Armenian riots and media agitation against Armenians in the 1990s was the continuing hostility between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed territory of Nagorno-­ Karabakh.18 It is important to understand how different media have constructed the representations of a violent past and what these media have shown us about the way the official memory in Turkey is contested and contradicted. Turkish official and public opinion still strongly supports the Azeris, who they see as a fellow Turkic people. Turkey joined Azerbaijan’s embargo and blockade against the Republic of Armenia in 1993, which triggered an anti-Armenian campaign within the Turkish media and among politicians, thereby increasing hostility among the Turkish public against Armenians. Armenian cemeteries in Istanbul were vandalized and hate slogans were written on the walls of Armenian churches all over Istanbul between 1993 and 1994. An Armenian newspaper called Marmara reported on 9 March 1994 that hostility against minorities, especially Jews and Armenians, had increased and that members of trade associations had received letters telling them not to do business with Jews and Armenians. Again, there have been attempts to connect Armenians with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) to demonize them, and even the

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word ‘Armenian’ was used as an insult to Kurdish guerrillas. In Turkish ‘Ermeni dölü’ (offspring of Armenians) is a pejorative, usually suggesting disloyalty or treachery. Minister of the Interior Meral Akşener used the term in reference to PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan in 1997; since then it has been used for PKK guerrillas. The Republic of Armenia was also blamed for hosting training camps for the PKK.19 One indication that this denial of the violence against Armenians is, indeed, far from over is the fact that one century after the genocide, the Turkish government is still spending millions of dollars every year to plan and coordinate its denial both domestically and internationally to sustain and promote its official narrative. For instance, in 2001, the Turkish government established an agency called Committee to Coordinate the Struggle with the Baseless Genocide Claims (Asılsız Soykırım Iddialarıyla Mücadele Koordinasyon Kurulu, or ASIMKK). Co-headed by the Foreign Minister and the general heading the National Security Council, the main goal of the committee is to implement a centralized policy on the genocide denial by shaping public opinion on this matter.

3.1   Denialism in Turkish Academia and Literature To start with the institutionalized denial in the post-genocide period after 1923 by Armenian scholars such as Bilal, Ekmekçioğlu and Suciyan and the daily repercussions of denial, it is not easy to go beyond the official discourse and narratives. The conspiracy mentality has had widespread influence in society and has influenced intellectuals from both ends of the political spectrum, plus policymakers, ordinary citizens, the bureaucratic and political elite, the media and the judiciary (Karaosmanoğlu 2010, p.  194). Hence, alongside the hostile anti-Armenian media coverage, Turkish academia, public and higher education, and literature have also contributed to broadening anti-Armenian prejudice. The national historiography textbooks prepared by the Turkish Ministry of National Education to be taught in Turkish schools share the Turkish historians’ perspective, representing the state’s ideology with regard to minorities in general. In such circumstances, it is not easy for Turkish Armenians to produce ‘insider’ historians, given the continued discrimination their community faces in Turkey (Ekmekçioğlu 2016, p. xii). Minorities in Turkish public textbooks appear as disloyal and treacherous for collaboration with the enemy, seen as stabbing the Turkish state in the back. The republic began a long journey of building and disseminating a history of the Turks,

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incorporating its official denial of the genocide in official textbooks, historiography, nationalist canons and histories of cities.20 One such history book commissioned by the Kemalist regime was prepared by the regime propagandist Bedri Günkut. It was unimaginatively titled Diyarbekir Tarihi (The History of Diyarbekir) and was published by the Diyarbekir Halkevi (People’s House). In his book, Günkut identifies Turkishness with Diyarbekir and dismisses any non-Turkish elements from the city, constructing narratives of denial in line with the Turkish state’s official policy toward the genocide. In a region in which more than 100,000 Armenians were killed, the author initiated the denial of the genocide, stating that, “in the Great War, this region was saved from Russian invasions and Armenian massacres and arson” (Günkut 1937, pp. 144–5). The narrative then took a turn toward disinformation as Günkut argued that Armenians had “committed bloodcurdling atrocious acts in Lice and Silvan”, where they had purportedly “monstrously dismembered young Turkish patriots” (Ibid.). The growing recognition of Islamized Armenians in Turkey,21 the Turkish initiatives promoting the recognition of the genocide and reconciliation, the efforts to achieve recognition by the Armenian diaspora and the growing number of countries and international organizations recognizing the Armenian Genocide have forced Turkish universities and scholars to engage with the subject as a form of counteraction. The Turkish state has decreed that some universities should establish specialized departments focusing entirely on Turkish-Armenian relations in order to develop arguments against recognition of the Armenian Genocide.22 For example, Dr. Haluk Selvi, director of the Research Centre on Turkish-Armenian Relations at Sakarya University, a committee member on a broad project on the relations between Armenians and Turks at Marmara University (Istanbul), wrote an article for this project titled Ermeni Soykırımı Tarih Yazımı ve Propoganda (Armenian Genocide Historiography and Propaganda) and discusses the works of three Armenian historians, Prof. Dennis Papazian, Richard G.  Hovannisian and Vahakn N.  Dadrian, in order to counter their arguments on the issue, saying that “when we think that these academics are among the administrators of the Armenian Diaspora committees in the USA, it is discussable to what extent their approaches are scientific. Armenian researchers are not able to put forward any historical documents or proof when they are commenting on the issue”. In the article, Selvi accuses the Armenian diaspora of spreading the propaganda of genocide, particularly with the support of American

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missionaries.23 Similarly, a speech by Prof. Ahmet Özgiray at the Turkish-­ Armenian Relations Symposium at Istanbul University (24–25 May 2001) mainly targeted the arguments of Mark Mazower in his review published in The London Review of Books on 8 February 2001 in which he analyzed the book titled The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire (2000) edited by James Bryce and Arnold Toynbee. In this respect, some Turkish scholars and institutes seem to take counter-discourse to be their duty. There are other scholars and institutions which follow different strategies, approaching the issue in a more judicious way. Rather than using explicit language to express their claims, they apply a more moderate approach. For example, Gürsoy Şahin from Afyon Kocatepe University (Afyon), Mümtaz Sarıçiçek from Erciyes University (Kayseri) and Murat Yusuf Önem from Gaziosmanpaşa University (Tokat) use certain short stories and biographical material by Armenian writer Kirkor Ceyhan (1926–1999) to back up their claims that Turks and Armenians in Anatolia have always lived in peace and solidarity and justify the deportations of hundreds of thousands of Armenians as an administrative measure due to the wartime conditions.24 This approach is used in order to invalidate the claims of the Armenian diaspora. Two academic quarterlies devoted to Armenian history are now published regularly by the Centre for Eurasian Strategic Studies (ASAM) in Ankara: Ermeni Arastırmaları [Armenian Studies] in Turkish and Review of Armenian Studies in English.25 Disseminating the state discourse through state universities is an example of denialism becoming increasingly institutionalized and professionalized (Bayraktar 2016). The newspaper Agos also revealed that the Turkish Higher Education Association (YÖK) demanded that all Turkish universities share the contact details of the researchers working on the Armenian Genocide in order to trace them. Several universities also launched Armenian language and literature departments offering both BA and MA degrees, including Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University, a private university established in 2010, and Erciyes University (Kayseri), which established an Armenian Language and Literature department in 2010 under the initiative of Prof. Metin Hülagü, president of the Turkish Historical Association (Türk Tarih Kurumu).26 However, state universities are aligned with the state discourse of denial, and Armenian is taught at Erciyes University by an Azeri who came from Azerbaijan, although there are many qualified Armenian teachers with Armenian descendants who could teach it. Literature can effectively capture both historical facts and personal memories, playing an important role in recovering memories related to

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tragic events and wars—or twisting them. Turkish literature has been regarded by some politicized and nationalist Turkish authors and historians as a discursive space in which to strengthen Turkish official discourse, the voice of denial. Although there were relatively few literary texts referring to Armenians in Turkish literature until the 2000s, Armenians have been represented in Turkish literature differently depending on the socio-­ political context of the period.27 While literary texts briefly touch upon Armenians as minor characters, neighbors or lovers, no systematic hostility is evident in the pre-First World War literature, in novels such as Müşahedat (1891) and Karnaval (1881) by Ahmet Mithat, Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpinar’s Metres (Mistress, 1898) or Mehmet Celal’s Küçük Gelin (1893).28 Although one cannot see very distinctive hostility toward non-Muslims in these or other novels of this period, stereotyping is very common. For example, while portraying Muslims (Turks) and Armenians in Karnaval, non-Muslim women (i.e., Madam Hamparsun, Maryanko and Küpeliyan) are portrayed as carefree, loose and hussy. Armenians were believed to be heavily influenced by the degenerate lifestyle of the Western world and to be much better than Muslims at increasing their wealth. Armenian women characters appear as prostitutes, and Armenian men appear as swindlers, agents or money-minded people.29 In the novels published after the war and Milli Mücadele (1919–1922, Turkish War of Independence),30 especially with the establishment of the Turkish Republic, Armenians came to be represented as vicious characters, even by leading writers such as Halide Edip, Yakup Kadri and Tarık Buğra. For sure, there were also some writers, such as Orhan Kemal and Kemal Tahir, who took a critical look at the politics of the Committee of Union and Progress (Ittihat and Terakki Cemiyeti) against Armenians during the First World War. However, overall it can be said that a hostile nationalistic anti-Armenian rhetoric runs through the Turkish literary canon from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day and that it escalated especially after the Nagorno-Karabakh War, during the legal discussions about the Armenian Genocide in Europe and on the approach to the 100th commemoration of the genocide. The official voice of the state can be clearly discerned in those novels published in the period around 2015, due to the historical significance of the 100th anniversary of the genocide. The scholars operating in such departments as those mentioned above utilize a counter-narrative in order to attempt to invalidate the arguments in the works written by Armenian historians mainly from France and the USA, which these particular Turkish

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scholars describe as ‘the claims of the Armenian diaspora’. By 2015, such departments had organized a number of conferences and symposiums involving mainly Turkish speakers restating state denialism. Turkey’s official narratives have played a major role in shaping the scholarship and literature on the Armenian Genocide. The Turkish Republic’s wish to wipe the slate clean is accompanied by a number of legal measures aimed at covering up the footsteps of 1915, especially on the question of ‘abandoned properties’, which is corroborated by the embargo on the pre-1924 cadastral registers (Öztan and Turan 2016).31 The denial of the Armenian Genocide is Turkish government policy and part of the essential duties of its diplomatic missions. Denial occurs in a network of organized political attempts to rewrite or un-write the history across international borders. Even the limited number of sources on the most catastrophic events of Turkish history by Turkish researchers and writers when contrasted to those outside Turkey prove the functionality of Turkish state denialism. Writing or talking about the taboos can result in criminal charges for insulting the Turkish nation and government institutions under Article 301 of the Penal Code. Although the number of anti-­ Armenian nationalist literary narratives has considerably increased due to the 100th commemoration, it would be wrong to say that these narratives have solely relied on the Turkish official discourse of the last few years. The gradual development of nationalist literature occurred alongside the expansion of Turkism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and was strengthened with the formation of the republic in 1923. Nationalism has always been an important ingredient in Turkish political literature in the republic (Landau 2003, p. 204). The rise of the Islamically oriented Refah Partisi (Welfare Party), the dominance of the ultra-­ nationalist Millyetçi Haraket Partisi (MHP, Nationalist Movement Party) by the end of the 1990s, the influence of the Gülen Movement (also known as Hizmet [Service]) under the leadership of Turkish preacher Fethullah Gülen32 and finally AKP’s (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, Justice and Development Party) dominance of Turkish politics have all led to the creation of a new nationalist identity combined with an Islamic one, strengthening the voice of the Muslim intelligentsia and shaping the media and literature within a Turkish-Islamic synthesis. Hence, in terms of a republican ideology or an Islamic one, nationalism has become the common ground for denying the Armenian Genocide, as is clearly visible in Turkish literary texts. The perception of Turkish ethnicity and nationalism traced in the texts can be considered a combination of the Turkish

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nationalist rhetoric in official historiography such as Nutuk (Speech) delivered by Mustafa Kemal Pasha (later Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic) in 1927 or Zika Gokalp’s (1876–1924) discourses as a Turkish nationalist sociologist (i.e., his book Türkçülüğün Esasları [The Principles of Turkism] published in 1923) advocating returkification of the Ottoman Empire, Pan-Turkism and Turanism,33 relying on the Ottoman heritage and incorporating Islamic-rhetoric ideology into Turkish nationalism (Galip 2018). So the Turkish literary texts dealing with Armenian issues written after 2000 reflect the shift in the official state discourse, which “emphasize the Muslim identity as the key element in defining Turkish” (Aslan 2015, p. 9). However, there are also some exceptions—narratives in which the writers seek to engage in cultural resistance, aiming to voice their own political criticism as a mode of social critique.34

Notes 1. See also unpublished PhD thesis: Sheklian’s Theology and the Community: The Armenian Minority, Tradition, and Secularism in Turkey, University of Chicago. 2. Balancar, Ferda, ed. (2012a) Sessizliğin sesi I: Türkiyeli Ermeniler konuşuyor [The Voice of Silence I: Armenians from Turkey Are Speaking], Istanbul: Hrant Dink Foundation Publishing House; Balancar, Ferda (ed.) (2012b) Sessizliğin sesi II: Diyarbakırlı Ermeniler konuşuyor [The Voice of Silence II: Armenians from Diyarbakir Are Speaking], Istanbul: Hrant Dink Foundation Publishing House; Balancar, Ferda (ed.) (2013) Sessizliğin sesi III: Ankaralı Ermeniler konuşuyor [The Voice of Silence III: Armenians from Ankara Are Speaking], Istanbul: Hrant Dink Foundation Publishing ̇ House; Balancar, Ferda (ed.) (2015) Sessizliğin Sesi IV: Izmitli Ermeniler konuşuyor [The Voice of Silence IV: Armenians from Izmir Are Speaking], Istanbul: Hrant Dink Foundation Publishing House. 3. Hoffman (2002) in her report titled ‘Armenians in Turkey Today’ provides a full list of damages, intentional destruction and assimilation of the Armenian churches and historical monuments in Turkey, covering the period of the Ottoman Empire through to 2002. 4. For more see: http://minorityrights.org/minorities/armenians-3/; see also: P.  A. Andrews (1989) Ethnic Groups in the Republic of Turkey, Wiesbaden: Reichert; A.  Kaya (2013) Europeanization and Tolerance in Turkey: The Myth of Toleration, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. 5. The CUP replaced Turkish Hearths with the Turkish Homeland Society (Türk Yurdu Cemiyeti) in 1922 in order to counter the ideas of Ottomanism and Islamism and to promote Turkish nationalism. The activities of the

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Hearths included history, language and education, and they developed awareness of Turkish cultural heritage and language. 6. The Turkish Historical Thesis is connected with the Sun Language Theory published in 1935, which stipulates that all languages have their origin in the Turkish language. 7. The Democrat Party (Demokrat Parti, DP) after winning the elections in 1950 took over the administration and ownership of the People’s Houses; ̇ see B. Ince (2012) Citizenship and Identity in Turkey: From Atatürk’s Republic to the Present Day, London: I.B. Tauris, p. 67. 8. Bavfileh is a term for Islamized Christians. Bav means father in Kurdish; fileh is used for non-Muslim. So bavfileh literally means one whose father is non-­Muslim. It also means, ‘farm laborer’ in Arabic: the Arabic equivalent of fileh is gavur, which means ‘unbeliever’ and is an insult. In short, bavfileh or fileh are pejorative terms in Kurdish. 9. Rifat Bali (1998) ‘Yirmi Kur’a Ihtiyatlar Olayı’ [Incident of Twenty Classes], Tarih ve Toplum 179: 260–274. 10. Article 74 (2) of the code banned the establishment of religious foundations in support of a political conviction or a specific race or community. Article 101 (4) incorporated the same principle into the new civil code enacted in 2002. See D. Kurban and K. Hatemi (2009) Bir Yabancılastırma Hikayesi: Türkiye’de Gayrimüslim Cemaatlerin Taşınmaz ve Mülkiyet Sorunu [A Story of Estrangement: The Issue of Foundation and Property of Non-­Muslims in Turkey], Istanbul: TESEV. 11. In the 2000s, the Turkish authorities allowed the locals to restore and reopen the old village church. For diaspora Armenians with roots in the region, Vakıflı became something of a pilgrimage site. 12. Martial Law (Sıkı yönetim), which had been applied since 1940, was merged into a state of emergency following a 2017 amendment to the Turkish constitution. 13. One hundred forty-four publications were prohibited by cabinet decision in 1923–1945. Not just Armenian ones, various Greek newspapers were shut down. 14. Seyhan Bayraktar ‘The Grammar of Denial: State, Society, and Turkish-­ Armenian Relations’, Repair Future, https://repairfuture.net/index. php/en/armenian-genocide-recognition-and-reparations-standpoint-ofturkey/the-grammar-of-denial-state-society-and-turkish-armenianrelations 15. For instance, Turkish security forces raided the TIKKO (Worker and Peasant Liberation Army of Turkey) training camp in Izmit on 24 January 1988. Twenty-four-year-old Armenian Manvel Demir was first injured and later died in hospital.

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16. ‘Christian Minorities of Turkey’ by Church Committee on Migrant Workers in Europe (1979), https://archive.org/details/christianminorit0000chur/page/n5 17. The Institute of Turkish Studies, established in 1982 and located in Washington DC, was alleged to receive a grant of millions of dollars from the Republic of Turkey. 18. An ethnic conflict between the Republic of Armenia and the Republic of Azerbaijan lasted from the late 1980s to 1994, but the issue remains unresolved. 19. The PKK, an armed Kurdish guerrilla organization, was formally established in 1978 by Abdullah Öcalan; it began its guerrilla war with the Turkish armed forces in 1984. Up to 2013, constant conflict was interrupted only by a few short-term ceasefires. In March 2013, the Kurdish side proposed a ceasefire after the Turkish government started secret peace talks with Öcalan. However, the government has not responded positively, hindering the Kurdish peace initiative. The fact that the government has pursued action against the Islamic State in Kurdish regions of Syria and Iraq only reluctantly has exacerbated tensions between Turkish Kurds and the state. Resulting clashes between protesters and the police led to 31 deaths in October 2014. On 14 October, the Turkish air force attacked PKK positions in Hakkari province, further endangering the peace process, and now there is no peaceful engagement between the two sides. 20. For more on the Turkish efforts to deny the Armenian Genocide, Roger W. Smith (1991) ‘Denial of the Armenian Genocide’, in Israel W. Charny (ed.). Genocide: A Critical Bibliographical Review, Vol. 2 (New York, NY: Facts on File), pp. 63–85; Vahakn N. Dadrian (1992) ‘Ottoman Archives and Denial of the Armenian Genocide’, in Richard G. Hovannisian (ed.). The Armenian Genocide: History, Politics, Ethics, Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 280–310; Richard G. Hovannisian (1986) ‘The Armenian Genocide and Patterns of Denials’, in Richard G. Hovannisian (ed.) The Armenian Genocide in Perspective, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, pp.  111–133; Jennifer M.  Dixon (2010) ‘Defending the nation? Maintaining Turkey’s Narrative of the Armenian Genocide’, South European Society and Politics 15(3), 467–485; R. W. Smith, E. Markusen and R.  J. Lifton (1995) ‘Professional ethics and the denial of Armenian Genocide’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 9(1), 1–22; Rouben Adalian (1992) ‘The Armenian Genocide: revisionism and denial’, in Michael N.  Dobkowski and Isidor Wallimann (eds). Genocide in Our Time: An Annotated Bibliography with Analytical Introductions, Ann Arbor, MI: Pierian Press, pp. 85–105. 21. Certain scholars and institutions in Turkey have raised the issue of Islamized Armenians. The Hrant Dink Foundation held a conference on Islamized

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Armenians at Bosporus University on 3 November 2013. Ayse Gül Altınay, professor at Sabancı University, together with Fethiye Çetin, the lawyer in the Hrant Dink assassination case, edited a book titled The Grandchildren on the narratives of Turkish and Kurdish people describing their Armenian roots. 22. The first Armenian department was established in 2001 at Ankara University. Others include the departments of Armenian Language and Literature (Ermeni Dili ve Edebiyatı Bölümü) at Nevşehir University, Trakya University and Erciyes University. These departments have been established at Anatolian universities (e.g., Afyon, Kayseri, Kahramanmaraş, Nevşehir, Tokat) rather than the metropolitan ones. 23. See Ermeni Soykırımı Tarih Yazımı ve Propaganda [Armenian Genocide Historiography and Propaganda] by Haluk Selvi, full paper at: http:// turksandarmenians.marmara.edu.tr/tr/ermeni-soykirimi-tarih-yazimi-vepropaganda/ 24. These academicians particularly extract the parts of Ceyhan’s works in which he describes good relations between Armenians and Turks in Anatolia. They claim that the whole discussion of genocide is a product of the second or third generation of the Armenian diaspora rather than those who actually lived in Anatolia. According to them, the latter enjoyed positive neighborly relations with Turks. 25. ‘Ermeni Arastırmaları’ [Armenian Studies] (2005), Review of Armenian Studies 3:9 26. The association was established in 1931 on the initiative of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Its headquarters are in Ankara. 27. Vartan Pasha’s Akabi Hikayesi [Akabi’s Story] (1851) is considered to be the first Turkish novel written by an Armenian, in which all the characters are Armenians and the narrative reflects ordinary Armenian-Muslim relations. 28. In contrast to the portrayal in the novels, Ottoman Armenians’ relations with the Sultanate started to deteriorate significantly before the First World War. 29. Novels in which Armenian women appear as prostitutes or running brothels include Ahmet Mithat’s Henüz 17 Yaşında [She is Still 17 Years Old] (1881); Hüseyin Rahmi’s Can Pazarı [The Spirit Market] (1922) and Kokotlar Mektebi [The School of Kokots] (1928); Sermet Muhtar’s Onikiler (1935); Nezihe Muhiddin’s Avare Kadın [Tramp Woman] (1943); Ercüment Ekrem’s Çömlekoğlu ve Ailesi [Çömlekoğlu and His Family] (1945); Refi Cevad Ulunay’s Sayılı Fırtınalar [Numbered Storms] (1955) and Suat Dervis’s Fosforlu Cevriye (1955). Armenians appear as phoneys that try every trick to get rich. Novels include Ahmet Mithat’s ̇ ̇ Dünyaya Ikinci Geliş yahut Istanbul’da Neler Olmuş (1874) and Jön Türk

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(1910); Mizanci Murat’s Turfanda mı yoksa Turfa mı? (1892); Refik ̇ Halit’s Istanbul’un Bir Yüzü (1920); Halid Karay’s Nilgün (1950); Refi Cevad Ulunay’s Enkaz Arasında [Among Wrecks] (1945) and Reşat Enis’s Ekmek Kavgamız [Our Bread Struggle] (1945). 30. Milli Mücadele (also known as Kurtuluş Savaşı [War of Liberation] or ̇ Istiklal Harbi [Independence War] in Turkish) started after some parts of Turkey were occupied after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire. Turkish nationalists fought against opponents including Greece, Armenia, France, Italy and England until the Treaty of Lausanne was signed in 1923, resulting in the recognition of the sovereignty of the Turkish Republic. 31. Also see the same authors’ book Devlet Akli ve 1915 [State Mentality and 1915] (2018). 32. Formerly a strong ally of the ruling party, AKP, various conflicts between AKP and the Gülen movement led to the movement being classified as a terrorist organization (Fetullahçı Terör Örgütü, FETÖ) in Turkey. After the failed military coup attempt on 15 July 2016, which was alleged to have been planned by the movement, the Turkish government launched a series of oppressive strategies including the arrests of thousands of soldiers, judges and official staff. The Turkish government’s war against FETÖ is widely considered to have been misused to repress opponents. 33. For more on Turanism, see United and Independent Turania (1971), translated from Armenian into English by V. N. Dadrian, originally published in 1926. 34. In contrast to those mentioned above who mostly deny or justify the massacres by reference to revolt or being stabbed in the back by collaboration with occupying countries during the First World War, well-known writers Orhan Kemal, Yasar Kemal and Kemal Tahir approach the Armenians with more compassion in their novels. Considering the period and the official discourse in which even the results of forced deportation are denied, these narratives are outstanding.

Bibliography Aslan, S. (2015). Different faces of Turkish Islamic nationalism. https://www. washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/02/20/differentfaces-of-turkish-islamic-nationalism/ Bayraktar, S. (2016). The grammar of Denial: State, society, and Turkish-Armenian relations. Repair Future. https://repairfuture.net/index.php/en/armeniangenocide-recognition-and-reparations-standpoint-of-turkey/ the-grammar-of-denial-state-society-and-turkish-armenian-relations Dündar, F. (2011). Pouring a people into the desert: ‘The definitive solution’ of the unionists to the Armenian questions. In R. G. Suny et al. (Eds.), A question

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of genocide: Armenians and Turks at the end of the Ottoman Empire (pp. 276–286). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ekmekçioğlu, L. (2016). Recovering Armenia: The limits of belonging in post-­ genocide Turkey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Galip, Ö. B. (2018). The reaction to and representation of Armenian genocide and identity in modern Turkish novels. Turkish Studies, 20(1), 92–119. Göcek, F. M. (2014). Denial of violence: Ottoman past, Turkish present and collective violence against the Armenians, 1789–2009. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Günkut, B. (1937). Diyarbekir Tarihi [The history of Diyarbekir]. Diyarbakır: Diyarbakır Halkevi. Herzig, E., & Kurkchiyan, M. (2005). The Armenians: Past and present in te making of national identity. London: Routledge. Isyar, B. (2005). The origins of Turkish republican citizenship: The birth of race. Nations and Nationalism, 11(3), 343–360. Karaosmanoğlu, K. (2010). Reimagining minorities in Turkey: Before and after the AKP. Insight Turkey, 12(2), 193–212. Landau, J. M. (2003). Ultra-Nationalist Literature in the Turkish Republic: A Note on the Novels of Hüseyin Nihal Atsız. Middle Eastern Studies, 39(2), 204–210. Lewis, B. (1968). The emergence of modern Turkey. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maksudyan, N. (2005). The Turkish review of anthropology and the racist face of Turkish nationalism. Cultural Dynamics, 17(3), 291–322. Öztan, G. G., & Turan, Ö. (2016). The Armenian genocide: The Turkish society and state united in Denial. Repair Future. https://www.repairfuture.net/ index.php/en/armenian-genocide-recognition-and-reparations-standpointof-turkey/the-armenian-genocide-the-turkish-society-and-state-unitedin-denial Panossian, R. (2002). The past as nation: Three dimensions of Armenian identity. Geopolitics, 7(2), 121–146. Secor, A. (2004). “There is an Istanbul that belongs to me”: Citizenship, space, and identity in the city. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 94(2), 352–368. Suciyan, T. (2016). The Armenians in modern Turkey: Post-genocide society, politics, and history. New York: I. B. Tauris. Üngör, U. Ü., & Polatel, M. (2011). Confiscation and destruction: The young Turk seizure of Armenian property. London: Continuum. Zürcher, E. J. (2000). Young Turks, Ottoman Muslims and Turkish nationalists: Identity politics 1908–1938. In K. H. Karpat (Ed.), Ottoman past and today’s Turkey (pp. 150–179). Leiden: Brill.

CHAPTER 4

Hopes and Loss of Democratization Under AKP Government: From 2002 Onward

The Armenians can be described as suffering from a combination of intense prejudice with an impressive range of discriminatory legal and administrative measures (Hofmann 2002, p.  6). However, Turkey was forced to fulfill the Copenhagen political criteria after becoming an official candidate for EU membership in 1999, which imposed a dynamic process of political reform and democratization. When AKP won the national election due to the lack of an alternative and, on the basis of its portrayal of victimized moderate Islamic conservatives and its promises for the advancement of Turkey, the new government took steps to make state institutions more democratic and reinforce civil over military authority, giving priority to Turkey’s EU membership. This had a positive impact on Turkish citizens, including the Armenians, for the first few years of its rule. Many welcomed the signing of the Armenian-Turkish protocols on 10 October 2009 in Zurich, Switzerland. At that time, the prevailing opinion in the international and Turkish media and academic circles suggested that the rapprochement between the two countries should be read as a sign of the democratization process in Turkey. However, in its attempt to increase its international and domestic support against the state bureaucracy, AKP challenged long-standing foreign and domestic policies. As Turkey’s policy toward Armenia demonstrates, AKP’s reformist attitude opened up the public sphere for discussion rather than leading to substantial policy change. © The Author(s) 2020 Ö. B. Galip, New Social Movements and the Armenian Question in Turkey, Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59400-8_4

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This chapter examines the changing politics of the AKP government from its first electoral victory in 2002 to the present and how this has affected the public, media and democracy, along with a focus on Armenians and the Armenian Question. AKP has dominated the Turkish parliament since the 2002 elections, with its conservative political ideology developed from Islamism and led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. It was founded in 2001, and gained over two-thirds of the seats in parliament in 2002.1 It contributed a great deal during this new period of democratization, widely known as the ‘Kurdish and Alevi openings’, but including less prominent non-­ Muslim openings. Such democratic initiatives, as opposed to security-­ oriented policies, meant the opening of broader political and legal opportunities for non-Muslim communities.

4.1   After the First AKP Victory: A Relatively Liberal Environment AKP’s rule, along with both its reformist initiatives and authoritarian tendencies, can be divided into four phases. The first one is the period between 2002, when it first won its majority, and 2007. This can be considered the golden age of the AKP government, throughout which, under the influence of the EU accession process, it contributed positively to democratization, foreign policy, minority rights and economic progress. In this phase, AKP was weak as a governing force against hostile domestic secular forces run by the military, and it had to rely on EU democratization measures. The next phase is 2007–2011. In the 2007 and 2011 elections, AKP increased its vote, though the number of parliamentary seats it won decreased from 341 to 327. However, AKP managed to enhance its power and did not need EU’s democratic reforms to safeguard itself any longer. Hence, during this phase, not only did EU accession negotiations collapse, but the AKP government also consolidated its power, marginalizing such key actors of the old secularist order as the military and the judiciary, and the economic and political reforms slowed down (Öniş 2016). The changing approach toward the EU had to do with its changing needs with regard to political power, driven by its shifting organizational capacities (Elbasani and Saatçıoğlu 2014, p. 152). The third phase is 2011–2015, when the autonomy of the judiciary, media freedom, reforms on the Kurdish issue and minority rights were strictly restricted, especially after the anti-government Gezi Park protests in May and June 2013. The fourth

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phase is after the June 2015 election, at which AKP had its biggest setback, from a near 50 per cent majority to a 41 per cent plurality in parliament, which meant that it could not form a majority government, forcing it to negotiate a coalition. This created high hope for the future of Turkey, especially for the supporters of the pro-Kurdish Party People’s Democratic Party (HDP, Halkların Demokrasi Partisi,), which surpassed the 10 per cent electoral threshold defending the rights of ethnic minorities, women, and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, and standing on a platform of inclusivity ranging from Armenian, Yezidi and Alevi backgrounds.2 But efforts to form a coalition government were effectively prevented by the adamant behavior of key political actors, especially President Erdoğan himself, which led to a snap election in November 2015. Erdoğan and AKP saw their dominance restored, regaining all the ground they had lost. After November 2015, and the attempted military coup in July 2016, AKP accelerated its drive toward authoritarian rule and hegemony. So, since 2002, although under Erdoğan’s leadership AKP made positive steps toward democracy in the first few years of its reign (i.e., on human rights issues, civil-military issues, the Kurdish issue, the Cyprus dispute) despite some obvious shortcomings in relation to the implementation of reforms, it has become dramatically more authoritarian over the years, and, since the June elections in 2015, there has been complete chaos, with mass arrests of activists, job dismissals, jailed journalists, closure of media outlets, crackdown on social media, a regenerated war between the Turkish army and PKK guerrillas, and involvement in corruption. The Turkish Grand Assembly (TBMM) passed a package of reforms in August 2002 for EU accession, including two changes concerning Armenians and other non-Muslims. It was now permissible to broadcast TV or radio programs in the mother tongue, and minorities’ religious foundations could acquire property under a new Code of Foundations on February 2008 as part of the EU integration process. This would enable foundations to buy new property, use their property and register their already-owned property, although this right was considerably limited by the obligation to obtain permission from the Council of Ministers.3 AKP initiated a series of amendments to the Law of Foundations in 2003 and 2005 to enable non-Muslim foundations to purchase and manage their own properties under the control of Vakıflar Genel Müdürlüğü (VGM, General Directorate of Foundations), but these amendments did not resolve the foundations’ complaints as only 60 listed community non-­ Muslim foundations got the benefit.4 The VGM would decide whether

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the property was needed for charitable purposes, and the registration of the properties only covered those used by the foundations, not those under the control of the Treasury and the VGM, or the property would not be passed to the other parties. In 2008 a new law on foundations was passed granting them the right to acquire, dispose of or convert properties to let for their benefit. This new law also allowed the foundations to set up business or commercial bodies in order to generate income. However, it did not provide the right of compensation for the return of real estate confiscated by the Treasury or VGM. In addition, it did not include restrictions to the transfer of the properties to the government or VGM, which also had the power to take over the management of the foundation if the executive board was not elected or if the foundation lost its charitable functions. Despite all the restrictions and obstacles in the new law, which was also objected to by parliamentary opposition parties and nationalist groups on the grounds that it would diminish the fundamental principles of the republic, it still contributed to the minorities’ religious, social and cultural development. In 2006, the government attempted to reform the Law on Private Educational Institutions, proposing a draft addressing the educational rights of non-Muslim minorities by allowing them to own their own educational establishments, something that was already contained in the Treaty of Lausanne but had never been put into practice. Again, this evoked hostile reactions from CHP and MHP. As a result of the reforms, the number of Armenian nationals entering Turkey increased from fewer than 5500 in 2000 to more than 73,000 in 2013. At the beginning AKP, despite its Islamic roots, formed reliable bonds with the Christian minority on the basis of its promises of an accommodating socio-political climate. Consequently Armenians’ support for AKP increased at the 2007 election. It adopted a conservative democratic ideological orientation similar to that of Western Christian Democrats (Hale 2005). A process of dialogue was established with the Armenian religious leaders. Government ministers began commiserating publicly with the victims of the Armenian massacres. An ethnic Armenian named Etyen Mahçupyan (an interviewee for this book), who regularly refers to the genocide, was appointed in 2014 as an adviser to the prime minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu. However, Mahçupyan, who was considered to be Erdoğan’s top advisor, had to step down from his position after he described the mass killings of Armenians during the Ottoman period as genocide in 2015, just before the 100th anniversary was commemorated all over the world. The Turkish officials denied a link between the

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departure of Mahçupyan and his statements, stating that he had been retired on the grounds of age. The rise and fall of Mahçupyan reflects the changes that the AKP government has gone through over the years.5 The promises of reforming the state’s policies toward Armenian citizens went hand in hand with the promises of normalizing relations with Armenia. Both policies were designed to impress an international audience supporting liberal reforms and a domestic audience yearning for democracy, economic growth and stability. Soon thereafter, in 2008, the so-called Protocols, an attempt at diplomatic normalization and the opening of the Turkish-Armenian border, were being hashed out. While these ultimately failed, we can see that AKP, in the period of the first two elections at least, attempted to change, at least cosmetically, the situation of the Armenians in Turkey. Among my interviewees, from MPs to authors, from journalists to human rights activists, there is an absolute consensus that AKP was seen as a party promising real democracy and freedom for all ethnic and religious groups in Turkey when it was first elected. Pakrat Estukyan, Armenian editor at Agos newspaper,6 underlines the significance of AKP’s victory in 2002, saying it was the first time that a political movement with an oppositional stance had taken complete control of government and demonstrated resistance against the group (Kemalists) who believed themselves to be the owners of the state.7 Estukyan stresses that throughout his electoral campaigns and even in the first few years in government, AKP could claim to be despised victims of secular (Laiks) and elitist groups, and this led to the rise of other oppositional and despised voices, including Kurds and non-Muslims. When Erdoğan was Istanbul mayor (1994–1998), because he read pan-Turkic author Ziya Gökalp’s (1876–1924) poem in public, he was ousted and imprisoned for ten months due to its overtly violent message. The Turkish constitutional court declared Erdoğan’s Welfare Party unconstitutional because of its threats toward laicism. Turkish Islamists believed that they were marginalized by Kemalists, and AKP’s victory was seen as empowerment of the Islamists, a group oppressed by Kemalist ideology. Due to their liberal commitments and being “more moderate and less nationalistic in its dealings with minorities” (Soner 2010, p.  28), AKP even got the support of a considerable number of Armenians in its second run in 2007. Mesrob II, the Armenian Patriarch in Turkey, observed before the elections of 22 July 2007 that the Armenian community would vote AKP. Similarly, Armenian weekly newspaper Agos estimated that 60 per cent of the Armenian population would vote AKP.

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Although it was blocked twice by the Turkish government, on 24–25 September 2005, a conference titled ‘Ottoman Armenians During the Decline of the Empire: Issues of Scientific Responsibility and Democracy’, the first scholarly conference on the Armenian issue and the situation of Armenians at the end of the Ottoman Empire not organized by Turkish state authorities but by the collaboration of three Turkish universities (Sabancı, Boğaziçi and Bilgi), was held at Istanbul Bilgi University. My interviewees believed that this illustrated the liberal politics of AKP compared to previous governments and the Turkish military.8 Despite this being the reforming period of AKP, the conference was severely attacked, in what can be described as a “typical Turkish state reaction” (Aybars Görgülü 2016). While the groups within AKP affiliated to MHP were more strongly antagonistic to the conference, those from Milli Görüş (a religious-political movement inspired by Necmettin Erbakan) had milder reactions. But there were also protest against politicians who called the participants traitors, and they provoked a public backlash. However, to the former faculty member of Galatasaray (Turkey) and Sorbonne (France) ̇ universities, Professor Ahmet Insel, one of the initiators of the Apology Campaign, whose grandfather had close relations with the Committee of Union and Progress (Ittihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti),9 allowing such a conference was a tactical move by AKP which occurred through the efforts of Abdullah Gül, who was later president of Turkey (2007–2014). Gül is regarded as one of the few politicians affiliated to AKP who had a milder approach toward Armenians.10 However, Eren Keskin, a human rights lawyer who joined the Human Rights Association in 1989, worked as a director for years, and was awarded the Hrant Dink Award in 2017 by the Hrant Dink Foundation,11 is critical of the argument made in the 2005 conference organizers’ discourse. Keskin points out that in the conference Ottomans were blamed rather than the republic itself. She argues, “you cannot isolate the Republic from what had happened earlier than its establishment” (Keskin 2017). Despite reactions and protests, the conference was still considered to break one of Turkey’s taboos, and led to a debate ̇ on the 1915 events. In Insel’s view (2016), similar conferences which took place in Switzerland in 2002 and 2003, in which many researchers from Armenia and Turkey participated, inspired the organization of the conference in Istanbul in 2005. There were several closed-door meetings in Switzerland before 2005, and these meetings created the grounds on which to organize such a conference in Istanbul. Apart from this controversial conference taken place at Istanbul Bilgi University in 2005, some

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other incidents and campaigns indicate the soft approach of the AKP government to the genocide debates. For instance, in early 2000, Islamic-­ affiliated groups started to be involved in these debates, such as Mazlumder ̇ (Insan Hakları ve Mazlumlar için Dayanışma Derneği, the Association of Human Rights and Solidarity for Oppressed People), which was founded in 1991 and posited itself as a conservative and religious human rights organization, pushed Turkish officials for an official apology to the Armenians for what happened in 1915 through a number of conferences and press releases which in turn led the conservative Kurds to be more actively involved in debates on Armenians. The fact that Mazlumder could do this is an example of civil organizations’ ability to openly address the AKP government and blame Erdoğan for human rights violations, something which would no longer be possible following the Gezi Park protests, large-scale anti-government unrest in May and June 2013 and especially after AKP’s turn to authoritarianism after losing its majority in the June 2015 general election. Hence, in March 2017, along with hundreds of other civil organizations, 16 Mazlumder branches, mainly in Kurdish provinces, were closed down by court order. Ex-members of Mazlumder have recently established a new organization named Hak Instiyatifi (Right Initiative) and moved their headquarters from Şanlıurfa, Eastern province, to Istanbul, but due to the ongoing pressure exerted by Turkish authorities, like many other anti-government civil organizations, their activities are restricted. In the first years of its rule, AKP used the rhetoric of human rights in order to reach liberal elites, minorities and international actors, and finally to win the elections, strengthening its hold over military and state institutions. Erdoğan and his AKP government have been accused of utilizing democratization of Armenian-related issues to gain political advantage abroad. Accordingly, Vedat Yıldırım (2016), the founder of a very well-­ known music band called Kardeş Türküler, which performs in various Turkish minority languages, and who is one of the first musicians to perform Armenian songs to the public in Turkey, says that “AKP does not care about 60,000 Armenians or the potential votes from them as they mean nothing numerically. Etyen Mahçupyan as Erdoğan’s advisor or Markar Esayan as an AKP MP are all strategic moves for the outside world.” It can also be seen in the art world. The participation of Sarkis Zabunyan in the Venice Biennale, which was used to showcase a multinational image of Turkey, was controversial. This ambiguous approach involved willingness to make cosmetic policy changes or novel rhetorical

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statements without substantially changing the underlying legal situation for religious minorities in Turkey (Sheklian 2018, pp. 404–5). Like Yıldırım, many scholars also posited the reformist initiatives of Erdoğan in the first ten years of his rule as those of a rational political actor seeking electoral gains (Arikan-Akdag 2015; Somer 2010). Similarly, the co-director of Hakikat Adalet Hafıza Merkezi (Truth Justice Memory Center), Murat Çelikkan (2017),12 is skeptical about AKP’s reformist initiatives of that period, describing them as ‘ideological stumbling’. Undoubtedly the AKP government has utilized such tactics to lessen pressure from international powers. For instance, the Turkish Armenian Reconciliation Commission (TARC) initiative was established in 2001 in Geneva as the centerpiece of Clinton’s Track Two Program on Turkey and the Caucasus to bring Armenia and Turkey closer and address the mutual issues between the two countries. With this commission the Turkish government aimed to give the impression that they were in the process of negotiations with the Armenians, whereas in fact they had a hidden agenda, to prevent the French Parliament and the US Congress passing genocide bills. Despite the distrust of AKP motives, the first few years of its rule are still considered golden years for democratization and freedom of speech. In fact, the toleration of non-Muslim identities is also justified on an Islamic basis (Aktürk 2018). With his mild remarks and conciliatory approach to non-Muslims, Erdoğan and his government could be compared to Ottoman sultans, who were rulers not only for Muslims, but also for Christians and other subjects of the empire, but his symbolic inclusive approach has never been sustainable. The restoration of Armenian and Jewish ethno-religious identity can be explained by the AKP government’s ideology of Islamic multiculturalism. In 2003, existing churches and synagogues gained ‘places of worship’ status, and in 2004, the government abolished the Higher Council of Minorities (Azınlıklar Tali Komisyonu), whose function had been to monitor the activities of non-Muslim minorities, even the summer camps for minority youth, for decades. This can be viewed as expanding the implementation of minority policies and limiting interference by the authorities. A replacement Council on Minority Problems (Azınlık Sorunlarını Değerlendirme Kurulu) was founded to enable the government to deal with the problems of non-Muslim minorities in line with EU and European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) standards, without involving any military or civil security institutions. In July 2008, through an amendment passed by parliament, churches and synagogues (as places of worship) were allowed to use electricity and water free

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of charge, similar to mosques. However, there has always been resistance from the judiciary and the governorships of Turkey to granting permission to build churches or synagogues. A Protestant church was opened by obtaining legal recognition for the first time in Istanbul in August 2006 after seven years of struggle by Barcelona-born Carlos Madrigal, the founder pastor of Istanbul’s Evangelical church and author of European Union-inspired reforms. I agree with Raschke (1985, p. 413) that the basic characteristic of a social movement is constituted by the position of its main constituency in the social structure. Looking at the course of a given conflict over time, different strategies and forms of action may be used (Tarrow 2011). So the early 2000s provided a suitable social and political environment in Turkey. The extent to which these milieus develop a common political identity depends on the specific national conflict constellation and overall political climate or social mood which creates sensitivity for specific problems. As in this case, such mobilizations in Turkey have been crushed like many others. So factors such as restrictions, closures and arrests open the mobilization up to changing social and political contexts and provide or deprive social movements of essential public response. So the historical conditions, even the economic regime, the pattern of social stratification, state structures or basic values shape the overall strategy of social movements and form a kind of corridor that limits the range of specific strategies, the types of organization and the actions which can be chosen. In other words, the movement cannot go beyond the structurally defined limits (Rucht 2017). Only in the long run, and by the aggregate effects of many minor changes, can these ‘big structures’ be altered and transformed (Tilly 1984). So in this sense, it is true that whatever Hrant Dink, the assassinated Armenian journalist, said in public and media outlets between 2002 and 2007 regarding the Armenian Question and human rights violations, he would not have been able to say back in the 1990s (Estukyan 2016). Abdullah Keskin (2017), the founder of Kurdish publishing house Avesta, which published Armenian books translated into Kurdish, describes those years, saying “Hrant was on the TV all the time before he was murdered. That means there was still freedom of speech in the media.” Similarly, Rober Koptaş, chief editor at the Armenian publishing house Aras, refers to the high level of TV coverage of Dink, arguing that this helped to legitimize Armenians in the eyes of the Turkish public. This liberal environment under AKP rule affected publishing as well. Aras Publishing House, which was established in 1993, published only

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literary books until 2000 due to possible prosecution and bans; however, subsequently Aras started to publish history books discussing the issue of the genocide. Koptaş (2016) agrees on a moderation related to taboos with AKP after 2002 until which Armenians preferred to be seen as loyal citizens of the republic, afraid to protest or make a stand against the authorities. The influence of the Armenian Agos newspaper went far beyond the Armenian community and challenged the very foundations of Turkish nationalism (Birdal 2017). The liberation of media and publishing spectra encouraged Armenians to raise their voice on their own identity and in genocide debates. In doing so, Agos gained further visibility and publicity, with a shift from defining itself as a community paper to an influential weekly operating on a global scale, aiming to address and transform not only the non-Muslim minorities, but also the entire nation with a democratic mission. Agos, of which Hrant Dink was the main founder, represented activist Armenian intellectuals, who contributed to mobilizȧ tion. Insel (2017) underlines the significance of Agos in the mobilization, as it started the discussion of the Armenian Genocide in 1996. Marmara (an Armenian language newspaper published in Istanbul since 1940) and Jamanak (meaning ‘Time’, the longest continuously running Armenian language daily newspaper in the world, also published in Istanbul) started to publish in the Armenian language much earlier than Agos. However, according to Yetvart Tomasyan, “they are apolitical not like Agos. Agos has always been left wing. Agos exhibits a very successful advocacy of Dink’s values and principles.” Along with Agos, Aras has also been crucial in promoting Armenians and contributing to mobilization, not only of Armenians. Yetvart Tomasyan (2016) says “as we do not use Armenian in our daily life, Armenian publications have a great role in preserving the language.” The Armenian language is seen as a vehicle for perpetuating both Armenian identity and Armenian culture. The publication of Armenian literature and the community’s newspapers also plays an important role in keeping Armenian culture alive. The newspaper has had a missionary duty to express Armenians’ political interests when there is no other democratic mechanism, representing different segments of the Armenian community, and to transmit historical knowledge due to the ban on the teaching of Armenian history, to convey Armenian-related news in the Turkish press, provide information on the worldwide Armenian community, and follow events in Soviet Armenia, and is therefore used as a tool in the search for relatives lost after 1915 (Suciyan 2016, pp. 4–5).

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Tomasyan (2016) continues “when we established Aras publishing house in 1993, Armenian was used as a swear word. We used literature as self-defence. What else could we have done as captive Istanbulite Armenians? But we followed provocative publication principles. There has always been auto-censor.” Armenian activist and director of the Armenian youth movement Nor Zartonk (New Renaissance) Sayat Tekir (2016) says “the debate on the Armenian Genocide and related issues has been going on in the last 15 years, much earlier than Dink’s assassination, the efforts and publications of Aras and Agos has a big role in the encouragement of those Armenians who are not political at all.”13 Similarly, Professor Baskin Oran (2017) underlines the significance of Agos in disseminating his ideas and thoughts, saying that even before Dink was assassinated, he played a big role in mobilizing the Armenian community through the newspaper,14 which again benefited from the relatively democratic and free socio-­ political atmosphere. Karin Karakaşlı, author of Armenian descent and also a journalist with Agos, considers that measures granting freedom of speech and media introduced to enable EU accession had a positive impact on Armenian newspapers and media outlets. The amendment of the much-debated Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code15 in 2008 made freedom of speech more practicable. While it made it illegal to denigrate Turkishness, this is not in effective use in Turkish law, resulting in the use of the word ‘genocide’ in public and leading to more open debates on the Armenian Question. Thus, since 2010, countless television programs have been aired, newspaper articles and books have been published, and various Istanbul universities have hosted and organized conferences to discuss the genocide (Akçam 2014).16 The liberal environment passed into the fictional and nonfictional literature related to Armenians. By the 2000s, the memoirs and personal narratives recounting the 1915 Armenian Genocide had also considerably increased the number of hidden Armenians, especially with the autobiographical account by Fethiye Cetin, the lawyer in the Hrant Dink assassination case, titled Anneannem (My Grandmother: A Memoir in English) who learnt of her Armenian ancestry much later through the confessions of her grandmother. This book followed Torunlar (The Grandchildren: The Hidden Legacy of Lost Armenians in Turkey), which she had co-authored with Ayse Gül Altınay, a collection of narratives of Turkish and Kurdish people describing their Armenian roots, which contributed to revealing the facts about Islamized Armenians.17 This book itself followed a number of other published

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memoirs based on the accounts of Islamized Armenians.18 Bestseller Turkish writer Elif Şafak, in her book Baba ve Piç (The Bastard of Istanbul, 2006), focuses on the survivors of the genocide, intertwining the stories of two Armenian families in Istanbul and Los Angeles, making only cautious reference to the genocide itself. However, as it was the only text at the time of writing referring to the topic within the popular literary strand, it received mixed reactions and the author was even accused by the Turkish government of insulting Turkishness with this book, but the charges were dropped due to a lack of legal grounds. While much Armenian and Syriac oral history material has been studied by scholars outside Turkey, there has also been a limited amount of research on the oral history of the genocide, notably by Leyla Neyzi.19 Neyzi, a professor at Sabanci University, conducted a project titled ‘Speaking to One Another (2009–2013)’, which aimed to use oral history and youth activities as a means of contributing to reconciliation between the Republic of Armenia and Turkey.20 Project events included youth workshops in Armenia and Turkey where university students from both countries came together to learn about oral history, photography, video and performance, and to conduct research using these tools. A number of Armenian and non-Armenian historians from outside Turkey, such as Hilmer Kaiser (Yerevan State University), Hans-Lukas Kieser (University of Zurich), Ronald Suny (University of Michigan), Raymond Kevorkian (Armenian National Academy Sciences), Vahe Tachjian (Houshamdyan website), Taner Akçam (Clark University), Fatma Müge Göcek (University of Michigan) and Uğur Ümit Üngor (Utrect University), made contributions with the use of Armenian and Armeno-Turkish sources such as memoirs, records of the Armenian patriarchate, newspapers and literary texts to challenge Turkish official historiography and those replicating it on the Armenian Question and other critical issues in modern Turkish history.21 By 2005, two strands of Turkish literary works on Armenians can be observed. On the one hand, the semi-memoirs and biographical works on the experiences of Armenians during and after the genocide; on the other hand, tens of nationalist fictional works reflecting the ideology of official history and rhetoric. Ideology in these novels, as Culler observed (1994 [1975], p.  141), reflects the “range of cultural stereotypes or accepted knowledge.” Those acknowledging the genocide or having personal sympathy due to political affiliation or ancestral linkage tend to write biographies or ethnographic research, which can be interpreted as the wish to record traumatic events and their reflections. On the other hand,

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nationalists, whether republican or Islamic-Turkish, tend to write fiction in a form which institutionalizes literature as a tool for nationalist discourses. But it is worth mentioning that the authors of this group generally (in the prologue or back page of the novel) incorporate the claim that the events narrated in the novel constitute a true story or are based on archives, but none of them are explicitly referenced.22 The characters are fictionalized but the voice of the author is heard overtly. As Bakhtin mentions “the speaking person in the novel is always, to one degree or another, an ideologue, and his own words are always ideologemes” (Bakhtin 1981, p.  333) Again, with the emphasis on history throughout the texts, the authors attempt to strengthen the ideology in the narration in order to be convincing for the readers. All the initiatives leading to a more liberal environment and pluralism have increased the visibility of non-Muslim minorities and triggered debates on the genocide, hitherto one of Turkey’s biggest taboos regardless of the ruling government, whether of political Islamist or secularist persuasion. But to Aybars Görgülü (2016), research director at PODEM (Public Policy and Democracy Studies), a research and advocacy think tank based in Istanbul, even the state’s liberal approach toward the genocide would not resolve the Armenian Question. He asserts, Armenians have gone and their properties and lands left to the region’s people. This is how so many people became rich. However much the imposition of the state would be, if the region’s people would not agree with the state, genocide would not be recognized. The denial of Armenian Genocide is one of the few topics in which Turkish people mostly agree, which is like it did not happen. There is an absolute consensus about this.

̇ However, Ahmet Insel (2017) does not agree with Görgülü and considers that there had been a significant transformation of public opinion in Turkey concerning the Armenian Question, and he argues that even if the genocide was not recognized, it was accepted in the early 2000s that what happened to Armenians was a state crime. In contrast to other figures I ̇ interviewed, Insel argues that the grounds enabling debate about Armenians and the Armenian Question were formed much before AKP, claiming that by the end of the 1990s, IHD had a section on state crimes, tortures under arrest and detention and a hatred project referring to Armenian massacres

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behind closed doors. And then Taner Akçam’s [Professor at Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University] books were translated; Belge publishing house became very active much before Dink’s assassination. There was a gradual movement towards activation against socio-political taboos and controversial issues. People from left-wing fractions started to have a tendency towards the Armenian issue in the mid-­ 1990s, along with other state crimes committed throughout the Turkish Republic.

Still, neither secularists nor the military which were dominant in 1990s Turkey did not commit in any way to resolving either the Kurdish conflict or other minority problems apart from short-lived attempts to recognize Kurdish identity. For instance, although several pro-Kurdish political parties have been established since the 1990s and entered into parliamentary politics, obtaining voting bases in Kurdish populated areas, they have constantly been subject to closure or court trials because their activities have been claimed to be in violation of the Constitution and the laws on political parties. Many such parties have been closed down by Turkey’s constitutional court, and many of their activists arrested and imprisoned. Hence, it was the pro-Islamic AKP government which developed a new perspective for the economy, politics and foreign policy, collectively referred as ‘The New Turkey’ for the first time. Many scholars argue that Turkish Islamists have more ideological potential to successfully manage ethnic diversity than their secular counterparts (Somer 2010; Yavuz and Özcan 2006; Mitchell 2012; Aktürk 2012; White 2014). Ottoman-Islamic discourse, in justifying the acceptance and celebration of religious diversity represented by non-Muslims, was used by AKP in the first few years of its rule, differing from the assimilationist discourse of Kemalism that was previously dominant. In some way, the murder of Hrant Dink and the relatively high-level reaction to the assassination by the AKP government also demonstrate this, but the politics of AKP in the following years have proven the false promise of ‘The New Turkey’ model.

4.2   Dink’s Assassination Followed by ‘Democratic Opening’ Although Dink was assassinated by a 17-year-old Turkish ultranationalist at the Agos office in Istanbul on 19 January 2007, many viewed his assassination as a political attack, as Dink had received a number of death

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threats for his position on the Armenian Genocide and other political issues in Turkey, including the Kurdish one. In one of his columns in Agos, he compared himself to a ‘fearful pigeon’ in the streets, hoping that he could go on living in this country, fearful yet free.23 Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan used his closing speech at the AKP Kizilcahamam retreat to lambast the murder of Hrant Dink, saying “the kind of people who did this might be anything, but they can definitely not call themselves nationalists,” but he also raised his discontent about the genocide debates while referring to Dink’s assassination in his speech, saying “it is very meaningful that this murder happened when, especially in some countries, the so-­ called Armenian Genocide is at the top of the agenda.”24 Here Erdoğan is referring to France as, just before Dink was murdered, France’s National Assembly passed a bill to make it a crime to deny that the massacre was genocide, and this was strongly condemned by the Ankara government. Despite contradictory remarks by the Turkish government, the gathering of hundreds of thousands of people from different backgrounds to protest against Hrant Dink’s murder was unique in the country’s modern history, which can be said to have turned into a ‘solidarity movement’ called ‘Hrant in Arkadaslari’ (Hrant’s Friends), a form of collective action that set it apart from other movements as its members engaged in collective action for ‘others’ (Hrant’s family or Armenians in general) instead of ‘self’, invoking a discourse of justice. The ability of people to engage in collective action tied to their ability to define identity in the first place (Melucci 1989, 1996), in Dink’s case, the call for justice. The centrality of collective identity in social protest (Hunt et al. 1994; Johnston et al. 1994; Melucci 1996) connects and assigns some common meaning to experiences of collective action dislocated over time and space. At times this takes the form of linking together vents associated with specific struggles in order to show the continuity of the effort behind the current instances of collective action. In relation to collective behavior, according to Smelser (1962), there are two distinct kinds of action: institutional conventional and non-­ institutional collective behavior, the latter not being guided by existing social norms but formed to meet undefined or unstructured situations. Non-institutional collective behavior follows a ‘life cycle’, open to causal analysis, moving from spontaneous crowd action to the formation of publics and a social movement, which Dink’s funeral exemplifies, as the resulting strains, discontent, frustration and aggression engendered by the assassination encouraged individual participation in collective behavior.25

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Without doubt, it was not a spontaneous or uprooted occurrence and did not seem to reflect a sudden movement. Instead it was closely related to social and political circumstances and their profound impact on the society as a whole. The collective behavior theorists see the crowd as the simplest atom in the anatomy of collective behavior. During the following 4 days, a solidarity network prepared his funeral, which became both a public ritual and a demonstration. Islamist multiculturalist new thinking about ethnicity was evident at the funeral. Journalist Cafer Solgun (2017), who was former director of the Foundation for Research and Confrontation of Communal Events (Toplumsal Olayları Araştırma ve Yüzleşme Derneği),26 organizing a number of events and campaigns on the Armenian Question, states “there were thousands of people from AKP at the funeral. This wasn’t bothering them at that time.” Referring to the funeral, journalist Hayko Bağdat (2016) says, “after a whole century, it was in 2007 when for the first time I became hopeful about the future. Even after Dink, in the Eurovision Song Contest which took place in Helsinki, the Armenian participant with the song ‘Anytime you need’ was favoured by Turkey, which showed the solidarity of the Turkish people.” After Dink’s assassination, the AKP government developed a set of policies collectively referred to as the ‘democratic opening’, coordinated by the Interior Ministry. Exclusively ‘Alevi openings’ launched in 2007, and the ‘Kurdish opening’ was initiated in 2009. This was seen as an historic and unprecedented step in the history of the Turkish Republic, activating a reform process and contributing some improvement regarding the rights of non-Muslim minorities.27 Some non-Muslim pious foundations reclaimed immovable properties, and some of them were returned to their legal owners by court decisions implementing the new legislation. The first major event that signaled a possible change in policies toward religious minorities and their community properties was the restoration of the famed Cathedral of the Holy Cross on the island of Akdamar. Whatever the arguments about the intentions of AKP or the shockingly ironic decision not to place a cross on the dome (eventually, in October 2010, shortly after the first liturgy was celebrated in September, the cross was added). One detail that was lost in this acrimonious debate is that the Armenians of Turkey had no legal claims on the church. It was not a vakıf, and therefore there was no legal ground from which to contest the government’s decisions about the restoration. The reopening was therefore a beneficent gift of an altruistic government and not rooted in the question of right or

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legality (Sheklian 2018, pp.  411–412). However, at the symbolic level, mass was held in the Armenian Akdamar Church in Van. At the time when the holy mass was organized on Akdamar Island, local Kurds also initiated a campaign called ‘We are opening our houses to Armenians’ [Evlerimizi Ermenilere Aciyoruz]. This campaign proved to be a great success thanks to the locals’ hospitality. In 2009, Armenia and Turkey signed an historic agreement to resume normal diplomatic relations. However, despite AKP’s emphasis on pluralism, democracy and human rights in their statements, the genocide remained a taboo. To PODEM research director Aybars Görgülü (2016), “when it is the case of Armenians, you cannot differentiate the politics of government from the state one. They react in the same way.” Accordingly, for instance, by 2010, the AKP agreement had faltered, when Sweden passed resolutions recognizing the Turkish Ottoman mass killings of Armenians as ‘genocide’. Even when a nonbinding resolution on the Armenian Genocide was passed by a US Congress Committee in 2010 during Barack Obama’s administration but never reached the floor of the house for a vote, Turkish government ordered its ambassador to the USA to return to Ankara for consultations and warned the USA against the resolution.28 Amid the resulting tensions, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, prime minister at the time, told the BBC that of the 170,000 Armenians living in Turkey, “only 70,000 were Turkish citizens.” He threatened to deport the remaining 100,000 Armenian migrants “if it becomes necessary.”29 This contradictory and sudden harsh reaction resulted in widespread scepticism that AKP was following a hidden agenda in transforming Turkey’s social and political life in line with Islamic and nationalist principles. However, his threat did not come as much of a surprise, as by 2010, Erdoğan’s ideological shift toward authoritarianism had already become more evident. In addition, interestingly, Erdoğan’s government attempted to use liberal and democratic steps imposed by the EU candidacy criteria to increase its popularity within its borders while stopping other organizations or parties doing so. For instance, despite removing Abdullah Demirbaş, Sur District Mayor, from his post for providing multilingual services in the municipality, the Turkish government launched the first state Kurdish language TV channel, TRT 6 (now TRT Kurdi), in 2009, leading to divisions within the Kurdish community as well. Erdoğan’s contradictory actions and statements on Armenians resumed in the following years. For instance, in 2014  in a statement to mark the 99th anniversary of the Armenian

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Genocide, which was released in nine languages including Western and Eastern Armenian, he stressed the ‘shared pain’ endured during those events and expressed ‘condolences’ to Armenians around the world. While some considered this condolence statement as historic, to some it was hardly a step toward reconciliation. The speech resulted in differing views within both Turkish and Kurdish intelligentsia and the Armenian community. Two basic positions emerged. One position emphasized the possibility that this was a genuine opening on the part of the Turkish government, an important ‘peace offering’, as Armenian historian Ara Sarafian put it, that represented a genuine break in policy toward the Armenians by the then still-young Justice and Development Party. The other side emphasized exactly the upcoming elections, suggesting that the whole thing was a ploy, a tactical PR decision by a party that wasn’t genuinely interested in the desires or needs of the Armenian community. The politics of AKP toward Armenians: a willingness to make concrete, identifiable improvements in the lives of religious minorities, but an unwillingness or an inability to alter the legal conditions that keep the minorities dependent on the goodwill of the state and that limit the autonomy and material security of the communities. The reaction of my interviewees toward this statement is diverse. The scholar and one of the ‘I Apologize’ initiators, Baskın Oran (2017), mentions that the statement was written by the government’s Foreign Affairs Office and that Erdoğan simply read it in front of the cameras, not playing any role in writing it. Aybars Görgülü (2016) is more positive, arguing that even recognizing the death of 300,000 Armenians was a big step toward changing perceptions and observing that “AKP was reformist at that time [2014].” On the other hand, Bağdat (2016) stands against the given number of dead Armenians by saying “Even if 300,000 were killed like the state confirmed, where are their funerals? Where were they buried? They were not buried suitably so that’s why their souls do not leave us in comfort. There are only 50,000 Armenians left but the issue remains, so it has nothing to do with the number of remaining Armenians.”30 However, just in the following year, 2015, Turkey’s decision to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Gallipoli with world leaders on 24 April in order to jeopardize the Armenian Genocide commemoration in Yerevan showed that Turkey was still far from reaching the stage of apologizing. In 2005, Erdoğan had brought up the idea of forming a history commission to investigate the events during the period concerned, but he has never taken

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any steps toward establishing it. Turkey’s general elections featured three openly ethnic Armenian candidates to Turkey’s parliament for the first time in history in 2015, and Selina Doğan, who was a lawyer by trade and the leading candidate on the opposition party Republican People’s Party’s (CHP, Cumhuriyetçi Halk Partisi,) electoral list for the second of Istanbul’s three electoral districts, was one of them. She says: [F]or 99 years Anzac Day [marking the anniversary of the landing by Australian and New Zealand troops at Gallipoli in Turkey] had not been commemorated like that. In 2015, 24 April was announced as the official Anzac Day in order to jeopardize the commemoration in Yerevan. The government did such a thing, which shows his insincerity of his statements in that and the previous year.31

She summarizes the issue as “1915 is still one of the red lines of the Turkish government” (Doğan 2017). AKP’s sharp turn against debate on the Armenian Genocide is exemplified by the ban on a conference due to take place in 2015 titled ‘The Armenian Genocide: Concepts and Comparative Perspectives’, part of the events dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the genocide co-sponsored by Istanbul Bilgi University, the History Foundation in Turkey (Tarih Vakfı) and the Modern Armenian History Chair at the University of California, Los Angeles. The conference is part of the week-long series of activities in Istanbul commemorating the centenary of the genocide organized by DurDe (an antiracist platform based in Istanbul), a Turkish human rights organization, and Project 2015 (a US-based group comprising leading scholars, academics, activists and writers of Armenian and Turkish descent in the USA which helps to make arrangements for Armenians to visit Turkey for these and other commemorative events). Istanbul Bilgi University annulled its decision to hold the conference, giving unclear reasons. There is no doubt that it had been blocked by the state. In fact, Erdoğan’s rhetoric promising peace has completely failed to be borne out in reality, along with AKP’s long-anticipated reform package, which was laid out at the end of September 2013. Not only did the package not meet the demands of the Kurdish side for peace but also it was designed to consolidate the power of AKP. The Armenian and Assyrian (Neo-Aramaic) writing on the Sur municipality building in Diyarbakır, which had been added through the efforts of mayor Abdullah Demirbaş (despite the charges against him), was removed and replaced by a Turkish flag in 2016. Surp Giragos Church in Diyarbakir, which was

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reconstructed by HDP-run Sur municipality, and some other churches in the region have been severely damaged and had to close their doors after the occupation by Turkish military in the region along with their counterinsurgency campaign against PKK guerrillas and sympathizers, which started after the June 2015 general election. Sur is in ruins now, and Demirbaş points out that the AKP government “ruined our 10 years of hard work in order to continue the state’s century of Turkification with the addition of Sunni belief. They wanted to remove Diyarbakir’s real multicultural identity and turn it into a Turkish Sunni one.” (2017).32

4.3   Intolerance Toward Non-Muslims: Being Armenian in Turkey The political turmoil and hatred discourse perpetrated by state authorities have always reinforced those nationalists who do not hesitate at violence and destruction. Attacks against churches have become very common since the change of AKP’s rhetoric toward minorities and marginalized groups. In January 2011, the Saint Maria Catholic Church, whose serving priest Andrea Santoro was murdered in 2006, was threatened on the grounds that its cross had been illuminated; in one of the bottles thrown at the church, there was a note which read: ‘Either you take down the cross on top of the church or we will.’ After the 15 July 2016 coup attempt, a group of people protesting against it attacked the church. Chanting Allahu Akbar (God is Great), they broke the windows by throwing paving stones and attempted to break the door down. The same church was again attacked by an armed person on 6 March 2018. The number of Christians is considerably diminishing since the murder of their priest.33 While Armenians are now in theory equal citizens, they have continued to suffer from numerous instances of discrimination as a result of disputable legal orders and court decisions.34 For instance, when some members of the Istanbul Armenian community tried to elect a new Patriarch to replace the incapacitated Mesrob Patriarch, the Turkish government officially announced that as long as the existing Patriarch is alive, no new one can be elected. Mesrob Patriarch faced opposition from the Turkish government prior to his election in 1998. Eventually, he went to Ankara and ‘made a deal’ with Turkish officials behind closed doors, which allowed him to be elected Patriarch. Soon after, he started promoting various

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Turkish causes, including visiting Western Europe to advocate for Turkey’s membership of the European Union. He also made several visits to the USA to make public appearances at the Turkish government’s request. Still now, despite the changing face of Turkey and reshaping of the nation-­ state initiated by AKP, Armenians are seen as passive elements in nation-­ centric conspiracy theories (Karaosmanoğlu 2010, p. 193). However, the escalating demands in the quest for reconciliation have not changed the official state policy of denial, and the majority of the Turkish public tend to accept the discourse of the state’s official historians, usually referring to the issue as “sözde Ermeni Sorunu” (the so-called Armenian Question) and 1915 olayları (the events of 1915).35 Any discourse that fashions a specific definition of ‘reconciliation’ to celebrate a ‘domesticated’ memory and to stigmatize other modes of remembrance and emotions further silences the formative violence on which the nation-­ state was founded (Bilal 2018, p.  20). However, one cannot blame the public for being blind not only to the events of 1915 but also to any other state crimes of the Ottoman and Republic periods.36 State and civil society actors have created specific mechanisms and discursive fields to build counter-discourses on the Armenian Genocide and to silence opposing voices. Being an Armenian in the post-genocide Republic of Turkey has never been easy. Today none of the Anatolian or Thracian cities of Turkey has a sizeable Armenian population. After 1915, thousands of Armenian survivors throughout the republican era have migrated to Istanbul for various reasons. Firstly, it was considered safer than other provinces in Asia Minor and northern Mesopotamia. The prohibition on opening schools, being under pressure to express themselves in Armenian culture, was among the reasons for the flow to Istanbul. From the 1950s, the Armenian community particularly strived to gather Armenian children from the provinces to provide education to them at boarding schools in Istanbul and to resist assimilation. Kidnapping of Armenian girls was also a common phenomenon after the establishment of the republic, which was another reason for migration to Istanbul. Many Armenian girls could not go to school due to the fear of being kidnapped in the Anatolian provinces. Apart from state oppressive policies, personal accounts of Anatolian Armenians confirm the daily use of violence and racism in their daily life in the provinces as they were seen as infidels (see Arslanyan’s (2005) and Güzelyan’s (2015) oral accounts). Thousands from Yalova, Bandırma and Kütahya ve Eskişehir were deported to Thrace and Greece along with the expulsion of the Rum

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population of Asia Minor in 1923. According to press reports, the relief organization and the Surp Pırgiç Armenian Hospital (in Turkish, Yedikule Surp Pirgiç Ermeni Hastanesi) were not capable of meeting the needs of the people coming from the provinces, which in turn gave rise to serious issues between these provincial Armenians and the administrative bodies of the community in Istanbul (Suciyan 2016, p. 53). Criminal cases against non-Muslims were filed on grounds of ‘denigrating Turkishness’, mostly in association with the ‘Citizen, Speak Turkish’ campaign to prevent non-­ Turkish speakers speaking their mother tongue.37 Today nearly 95 per cent of Turkey’s Armenians live in Istanbul, and the majority of them were born in Istanbul.38 The majority of the Armenian population of Anatolia moved to Istanbul during the republican period as a consequence of social pressures, the lack of churches and schools serving their communities, the difficulties in arranging marriages within the community and the efforts of the Patriarchate to gather Turkish Armenians under its umbrella in Istanbul. Another factor drawing the community to Istanbul was the policy of forced migration from rural areas to Istanbul and other big cities, which was pursued by the Turkish state, especially in the first decades of the republic, in order to control non-Muslim minorities in the country. There are ongoing debates as to whether Istanbul is to be considered ‘diaspora’, although Armenians existed in an organized structure with hospitals, schools, foundations and churches along with the extensive publication of newspapers, periodicals and books until the nineteenth century. Historian Raymond Kevorkian claims that the presence of a Patriarchate in Constantinople was not enough for it to be considered home to Ottoman Armenians, as it has never been a part of the historical Armenian kingdom. Likewise, Khachig Tölölyan considers Armenians of Istanbul as diaspora even before 1915. Despite such categorizations, scholars from Turkey and Istanbul do not see Armenians in Istanbul as diaspora. Some Armenians who were born in Istanbul still identified themselves with the towns of their families’ origin, although most of them had very weak or only imagined bonds with the towns their families had left behind years ago (Komsuğlu and Örs 2009, p. 335). Zeynep Taşkın (2016), the spokesperson of the Hrant Dink Foundation, still underlines the difference between being an Armenian in Istanbul (although the Armenian population of Istanbul is concentrated in certain neighborhoods) and in other Turkish provinces, arguing “it is relatively easier to be an Armenian in Istanbul but it is especially harder in Anatolia. We would like to expand our activities [as Hrant Dink Foundation] in

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cooperation with the Anatolian universities as we do with some universities in Istanbul but we are not welcomed in Anatolia.”39 Even during the reformist period, hate crimes were committed against Armenians after the decades of demonization of non-Muslims. In April 2007, in the eastern city of Malatya, three Christians who were publishing and distributing copies of the New Testament were brutally murdered on the grounds that “missionaries are often seen as part of a Western conspiracy designed to inflame minorities and foment revolution” (Guida 2008, p.  40). Many ordinary Armenians were also affected by such hate crimes and intolerance. For instance, Sevag Balıkçı (1986–2011), a Turkish soldier of Armenian descent, was shot to death during his compulsory military service in Turkey on 24 April 2011 (Genocide Commemoration Day) by another Turkish soldier, and the murder was covered up as an accident.40 Again, 84-year-old Marissa Küçük was brutally murdered in her apartment in Istanbul in July 2013. There have been several other attacks against Armenians in public. According to human rights activists, the common thread that runs through all of these crimes is not just their being motivated by hate or being committed in an environment that breeds intolerance against Armenians, but also the efforts of the authorities to play them down and cover them up (Asbarez 2013).41 Christian minorities, especially Armenians, are in fear of such violent acts and of these acts being swept under the rug. Eren Keskin, lawyer and human rights activist (also the lawyer in the Küçük case), says that when the Istanbul Armenians are seeking justice, they get scared of the authorities. The fear pushes many Armenians away from Turkey, or they prefer to be non-existent in the media, especially those who are not politically active. “Some Armenians in Istanbul are not happy with the news, with the association with genocide, and they prefer to be known with socio-cultural news” (Kavala 2017). Likewise, to the head of Anadolu Kültür (Anatolian Culture) and Turkey’s most prominent businessman and civil society activist Osman Kavala,42 the attacks are related to the debates about the Armenian Question, and he affirms that these debates have also led to the racist attacks of what we can call the Kerinçsiz group (ultranationalist lawyer Kemal Kerinçsiz is famous for filing complaints against more than 40 Turkish journalists including Hrant Dink and authors, including Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, for denigrating Turkishness) who had actually been involved in judicial killings of Kurds in the Kurdish region which occurred in the 1990s but which became public with the debates on the Armenian Question. Both the state authorities and public have shown anti-Armenian feelings,

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dislikes and prejudices in various ways. In 2005, when Nobel Prize winner Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk said, “30,000 Kurds and one million Armenians were killed in these lands,” protests took place, and he was insulted and charged.43 Again, for instance, during the Turkey-PKK conflict in September 2015, when Turkish security forces destroyed the town of Cizre, a district of Şırnak province populated mainly by Kurds, a video was released which showed police in Cizre announcing on a loudspeaker to the local Kurdish population that they were “Armenian bastards.” A few days later, in another instance, the Cizre police made repeated loudspeaker announcements saying, “You are all Armenians.” The Human Rights Association of Turkey (IHD) also reported that the police announced to the Kurds of Cizre that they were “Armenian sperm.” Erdoğan himself, during an interview broadcast on Turkish TV in 2014, referred to Armenians as “ugly.” In 2016, Erdoğan held a rally at the airport in the northern Turkish city of Trabzon. During his speech, the crowd started chanting: “Armenian bastards cannot deter us.” Erdoğan did not warn or condemn the crowd, and this has been criticized by opposition groups, but he did not make any further statements. Like many others, Estukyan (2016) points out that Armenians are very concerned by the political turmoil in Turkey, saying that Armenians in diaspora were thinking of returning to their lands as some Assyrians had returned to Mardin, but they had changed their minds. In fact, the idea of return started with the Diyarbakır mayor from the pro-Kurdish HDP, Osman Baydemir, who invited Armenians and other non-Muslim people with roots in the area to return in 2012. Baydemir publicly said, An Armenian, an Assyrian and a Chaldean, whose grandfathers or great-­ grandfathers were born in Diyarbakır, have the same right to live in Diyarbakır as I have, [speaking] as a Kurdish person who was born in Diyarbakır. I would like to invite all the ethnic groups whose ancestors once lived in Diyarbakır back to Diyarbakır again. Come back to your city.44

The return to Diyarbakir of Yervant Bostancı, master of oud who had left Turkey in 1992 for the USA, received great media coverage, but others, if there were any, were not reflected in the news. The call by Baydemir was received variously by some among the Armenian diaspora. Armenian diaspora who are considered as the survivors of genocide play an important role, and 1915 is a turning point for modern Armenian history, contributing to the construction of post-genocide Armenian identity, which came

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to be associated with a ‘lost homeland’ and the need to regain it. This mentality of victimhood, which was an important part of Armenian identity for centuries (and which revolutionary parties had tried very hard to overcome from the late nineteenth century onward) once again was ingrained as the central element of Armenian collective consciousness at least until the 1970s, when a new wave of Armenian radicalism arose in the diaspora, and 1988, when the Gharabagh movement exploded in Soviet Armenia (Panossian 2002, p. 137). On the one hand, his call was declared by some Armenian diaspora actors as being “not enough” (Ara Sarafian, Director of the Gomidas Institute in London),45 “not a serious and sincere call” (Suzanne Khardalian 2012, Stockholm based film director)46; on the other hand, he was also awarded a gold medal by the Yerevan State University for his efforts as a human rights lawyer in raising awareness of the Armenian Genocide and of protecting the Armenian cultural heritage in Diyarbakir during his tenure as mayor. Since 2010, Istanbul has become an attractive location for Armenian Erasmus students, but their number has also dropped dramatically. In relation to the Armenian students coming to study mainly in Istanbul, Estukyan (2016) says, “many Erasmus students from Armenia came to Turkey to study after the rule of AKP began which would have never happened during the 1990s, but now we have got back to the old days. Armenian students are too scared to come now.”47

4.4   Erdoğan’s ‘New Turkey’: One-Man Rule Any lingering hopes that Erdoğan would return to the path of democracy have faded. Instead he has solidified his power to push his political agenda especially after the failed military coup in July 2016.48 Media censorship, arrests and bans on freedom of speech have increased dramatically; being a non-Muslim seems to be much scarier. To put it in numbers, in 2016–2017, 150 television, radio and daily newspapers have been closed, and hundreds of journalists have been imprisoned. According to the Reporters without Borders 2017 Press Freedom Index, Turkey is one of the countries where press freedom is most violated, ranking 155th out of 180 countries. The Belge Publishing House, founded by Ragıp Zarakolu (1948–) and his wife Ayşe Nur Zarakolu (1946–2002) in 1977, has published more than ten books in Armenian, including translated books on the Armenian Genocide such as Vahakn N. Dadrian’s Genocide, making it the first publishing house to publish on the genocide in the mid-1990s.49

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As Estukyan points out, even though Zarakolu was continuously being charged for the publications, Belge carried on publishing them regardless. Under the same government, in May 2017, Belge’s offices in Istanbul were raided by the police in response to alleged connections with the Marxist-Leninist Party DHKP/C (Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front) and more than 2000 books confiscated. Historian Namık Kemal Dinç (2016) also underlines the deteriorated situation in Turkey, “even I was released from prison thanks to some law changes, along with another 3–4,000 people in 2004, and pro-Kurdish daily newspaper Özgür Gündem (Free Agenda) had a headline using ‘Genocide’ in the same year. Many intellectuals wrote about the 1915 events criticising the hegemony in the same year.” Dinç goes on to state that “none of these can happen now. Even if a prophet is killed now, it is not possible to see many gatherings to protest like the one in 2007 during Dink’s funeral.” Similarly, Nor Zartonk founder and Armenian activist Sayat Tekir thinks Tahir Elçi, a Kurdish human rights lawyer assassinated in 2016, was also a symbol of peace and reconciliation, but thousands of people could not join his funeral due to the bans on political protests and riots.50 The current government discourages projects that promote cultural diversity, criticize prevailing norms in Turkish society or question Turkish taboos.51 This confirms the conventional wisdom that the intensity and extent of protest cannot be related directly to the ‘objective’ significance and effects of any problem. One can therefore conclude that there are local and regional factors, such as the social composition of the population around a given site, the established political constellation, the specific strategies of the proponents of the project, the attitude of preexisting organizations engaged in the conflicts and so on, which mainly account for the strategies and action repertoires of local and regional protest groups (Della Porta and Rucht 1991, p. 171). So the state structure and political conditions are determinants of the action repertoire here. The political turmoil and intimidation dictated by the AKP government particularly since July 2016 has determined the action repertoire of the civil society. For instance, 370 NGOs and civil society organizations working on children’s rights, women’s rights and poverty, as well as lawyers’ associations, were shut down by the Turkish authorities on 11 November 2016 under Article 11 of the State of Emergency (Olağanüstü Hal; OHAL), with claims of their linkage with terrorist organizations. Those not shut down have difficulties in sharing their news and activities in the media. Elif Al, from the Open Society Foundation, said many of their grantees could not continue their projects

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due to the arrests and closures, and those who continue have started to prefer closed venues for their fieldwork because of security concerns about the state authorities, especially after the Gezi Park protests and their harsh repression in 2013. Even when civil groups and NGOs implement their projects, the range of channels that they can use to disseminate their findings is getting narrower each day. Ongoing wholesale attack on an already ravaged civic space raises concerns for the human rights of civic society. After the bans on Turkish media outlets, in order to increase censorship and surveillance online, the Turkish government proposed changes to Law no. 5651, also known as the ‘Code of Publications on the Internet and Suppression of Crimes Committed by Means of Such Publications’, in January 2014. The amendments to the law may lead to penalties on authors and content providers, and even users of the content. The term ‘alternative media’ has been used to reference media content produced by noncommercial sources that challenges power structures and attempts to transform social roles (e.g., Armstrong 1981; Atton 2002; Downing 2003), such as the publications of societies or initiatives. Not all publications necessarily challenge the state denial; PODEM is not far from the state’s ideology. However, in general, social media, citizen journalism and independent media websites were the sphere in which government opponents exchanged views and shared information after the Gezi Park protests began in June 2013. On many occasions, prime minister Erdoğan has complained about social media provoking the public against him and his government. Auto-censorship has also been a common debate within those surviving organizations, and they have to overthink all the expressions they use in public speech or media releases because of the fear of punishment and reprisal. Sevan Değirmenciyan (2016) adds that the ongoing politics of AKP gives an idea about the politics during the genocide, “when naked bodies are displayed in the streets, if a child’s body could remain in the street for a week nowadays, we can easily visualize the atrocities which occurred a century ago.” Garo Paylan (2017), an Armenian member of the Turkish Parliament representing the opposition People’s Democratic Party (HDP), refers to the lack of security for Armenians and opponents of the government, saying, I undertake the MP position in the worst situation. I might be killed by any Turkish nationalist youth as Dink was killed. The politicians and media strive to trigger the nationalist and racist thoughts of youth. We are not represented in the media. We do not have any TV coverage. This makes our job

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harder to convince the public. We have to be on the streets. Whenever we are on the streets, we have to face hundreds of police officers.52

Paylan referred to the Armenian Genocide during deliberations on proposed changes to Turkey’s constitution on 13 January 2016 and was suspended from parliament for three sessions for using the term ‘genocide’. In April 2016, Paylan called for an investigation into the killing of Armenian members of the Ottoman Parliament in 1915, citing the names of the murdered parliamentarians and showing their pictures. Shortly before my interview with Paylan, he was physically attacked prior to the approval by the Turkish parliamentary committee of a bill stripping parliamentarians of their immunity in May 2016. The Turkish lawmakers then voted to ban Paylan from participating in the parliament for the next three sessions, and the section of his speech about the Armenian Genocide was removed from the parliamentary minutes. The hysteria over Paylan’s speech, however, did not remain in the confines of the parliament. As a result of the address, and of an interview Paylan gave to an Armenian publication in Canada, a former university rector filed a criminal complaint against him. The office of the chief prosecutor in Ankara accepted the complaint, and by the end of 2017, the Turkish Justice Ministry gave permission to open a formal investigation into him, in accordance with Article 301. Regarding the attack, Paylan (2017) states, “after my talks [on the killing of Armenian members of parliament in 1915] AKP MPs were called to Erdoğan’s palace and were asked to pull me down from the parliament. I was subjected to violence and swearing by tens of AKP MPs. They all acted in a way to indicate that they were ordered to do so.” Like Paylan, when asked how it feels to be an Armenian in the parliament, Selina Doğan (2017), CHP MP, says that this is the hardest period for parliamentary representation in the history of the republic, and being an opponent is being criminalized by the government. “Being an Armenian woman plays a role in increasing the level of criminalization. I have been subjected to threats, swearing, and campaigns against my name in social media throughout my period as an MP.” On 2 June 2016, the German parliament officially recognized the 1915 Armenian Genocide, one of the biggest crimes of the twentieth century.53 It was an MP of Turkish origin, Cem Özdemir, who initiated the resolution that would formally classify the 1915 massacres as genocide, and 11 MPs of Turkish descent in the Bundestag also supported the resolution.54 Without giving names, Erdoğan referred to Cem Özdemir and other Turkish MPs as spoiled, blooded or that their

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DNA must be checked, saying “what Turk? Their blood should be put through a laboratory test.”55 The AKP government, a considerable number of Turkish groups, the opposition party in the Turkish parliament, institutions and both pro-government and anti-government Turkish media waged a war against Özdemir and the German parliament expressing Islamic superiority, denial, hatred of Armenians and excusing the Armenian massacres by accusing Armenians of collaborating with Russia during the First World War. The reaction of the main opposition party, CHP (Republican People’s Party), was no different from that of the ruling party. The deputy chairperson Öztürk Yılmaz said, “Without a doubt, this decision is null and void to us. That this mentality, which seeks for a partner in its criminality in its dark history, can help fix the so-called Turkey-­ Armenia relations or could serve the rapport of Turkish and Armenian citizens in Germany is just a ridiculous argument.”56 CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu wrote letters to the German parties involved in the resolution. In this regard, Karin Karakaşlı (2017) says, “even the Turkish left-­ wing opposition groups do not get away from their nationalist ties and they gather together and cooperate when it comes to Kurds and Armenians. CHP and AKP can easily sign the same agreement for their common interests.”57 This view is shared by Hayko Bağdat when he says, “apart from HDP, all the parties went nuts after the law passed in Germany. Even CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu visited Erdoğan to discuss the German parliament’s approval of the Armenian Genocide bill issue as if this was a national issue.” Turkey recalled its ambassador from Berlin, and Erdoğan declared that the approval would “seriously affect” relations between the two countries. Then, a year later, Erdoğan called on Turkish migrants in Germany to boycott the 24 September 2017 election, “not to vote for the political parties which disrespect Turkey.” To the founder of Aras Publishing House, Tomasyan, the mentality of CUP (Ittihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti) has never disappeared in these lands [the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic]. Mehmet Ağar [former Turkish Interior and Justice Minister and Police Chief 1993–1995] and Tansu Çiller [former Prime Minister 1993–1996]58 came to the government 25 years ago and they claimed Abdullah Öcalan, the PKK leader, to be an Armenian, they montaged pictures of him with an Armenian priest and claimed that Kurdish guerrillas were uncircumcised to back up their accusation of being Armenian. And now the AKP politicians refer to FETO

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[Gülenist Terror Group] and PKK alongside ASALA even now. ASALA was finished a long time ago.59

Hayko Bağdat (2016) also associates the current situation with the events in 1915, saying that the government is trying to put CUP politics into practice even now in 2017. The state managed to create a mentality in the majority that if we kill some people then they must deserve it. Turkish people are convinced that Armenians were not killed without any logical reason. So the state forces the public to take the sides of murderers. This is a country where a murderer is respected. The intelligentsia and civil society organizations agree on the fact that AKP has waged a war against not just Armenians but all its opponents. In the videos of the fighting in the Kurdish regions, the announcements mostly refer to ‘Armenian bastards’, and the assassination of Dink demonstrates that the Kurdish issue is not seen as being separate from the Armenian one. In this sense, Kaos Gay and Lesbian Cultural Research and Solidarity Association (KaosGL) mentions that “AKP started a war against all opponents, not only Armenians. They stop opposition groups coming together and taking collective action. Social justice and peace is under our responsibility.”60 Erdoğan’s dictatorial governance impacts on the activities of such solidarity movements. To Bülent Bilmez (2017), historian at Istanbul Bilgi University, “the Turkish state can deal with its opponents separately in a much better way. When they saw that Alevis, Kurds and Armenians had united under one umbrella [HDP], they started to get scared. For sure, the rise of protests and left coalitions in Spain and Greece also scared the AKP government.”61 Karakaşlı describes the situation in Turkey today: “Turkey’s communities are divided more than ever. It is impossible for someone to be unpoliticized in these conditions. So Armenians are dramatically influenced by all of this.” In broad terms, AKP’s ‘democratic openings’ either failed to resolve the main issues or were not put into practice. The Islamic conceptualization of a new religious-national identity is both the main motivation and the main limitation of reformist initiatives (Aktürk 2018, p. 1). There is a need for policy measures, ranging from a revision of educational materials and press and broadcasting policies to the modification of policies in relation to public employment, which exclude non-Muslim minorities from particular state positions including the civil and military bureaucracy. More importantly, there should be a mechanism to put all these policies into practice. However, it appears that AKP does not have the Armenian

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Question on its agenda, and there is no sign of this changing in the near future. Massacres, assassinations, the non-resolution of the Kurdish issue, the military coup attempt in July 2016, the state of emergency, lack of freedom of speech and media and now constitutional change with one man rule in Turkey severely divided the society into many disparate groups. The parliamentary system has become non-functional. All these are big obstacles confronting the debate on the Armenian issue and normalization between Turkey and Armenia. It is almost impossible to talk about the Armenian issue when the politics is dominated by conservative, nationalist and authoritarian tendencies. It is widely considered that Turkey’s current state in terms of freedom of speech and human rights violations is worse than the 1990s, during which widespread and systematic human rights violations were carried out by the Turkish state.62 In a public statement by Amnesty International in 2016, the organization drew attention to Turkey’s escalating abuses, risking a return to the dark days of the 1990s. Referring to the Kurdish provinces, it states that things are getting much, much worse, with growing evidence of severe human rights violations, including torture and impunity for human rights abuses.63 Human rights lawyer Eren Keskin (2017) states: I have been involved in human rights issue for the last 25 years and I have never felt as helpless as now. We are in a worse situation than in the 1990s. We used to have the judiciary mechanism that we could apply in the 1990s but now we don’t have it. People are threatened with being dismissed from their jobs, so there is economic pressure as well as imprisonment. It wasn’t so easy to dismiss a person from his/her job in the past. Even the public not aligned with any civil organization is under the control of state authorities.64

Although he stepped down as prime minister and AKP leader in August 2014, Erdoğan continues to rule Turkey as president. In order to sweep up more powers, he proposed a new draft constitution, which would set the stage for transformation from parliamentary democracy to presidential republic. The referendum resulted in a 51.4 per cent ‘Yes’ vote, compared with 48.6 per cent ‘No’, thus splitting Turkey, which was already polarized, in two. The legitimacy of the referendum is still questionable, as even unstamped ballots were considered valid by YSK (Yüksek Seçim Kurulu/The Supreme Electoral Council). As president, Erdoğan would have the power to announce a state of emergency and dismiss parliament, appoint ministers and senior

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judges, prepare the budget and even enact certain laws by decree. He can even bring back the death penalty, which would be the end of Turkey’s EU negotiations. But he continues his contradictory behaviors. While Patriarch Mesorb was ill, he did not permit elections to select a new head of the church. Following the death of the Armenian Patriarch Mesrob Mutafyan in March 2019, who died after having early onset dementia for more than a decade, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan surprised Twitter users with a message in Armenian saying: “I was deeply saddened by the death of the Armenian patriarch of Turkey, the honorable Mesrob Mutafyan. I offer my condolences to his family, relatives and our Armenian citizens.” But some experts argued that, far from a move toward reconciliation or inclusivity, Erdoğan’s message was a political power play. With a single tweet, Turkey’s president was aiming to influence internal factors in his country, not alter the relationship between Ankara and Yerevan. In addition, the tweet was aimed at influencing the election for a new patriarch because Turkey’s Armenian community was split between those who supported the government’s role in choosing a new patriarch and those who didn’t. Journalist and producer Harout Ekmanian, who left Aleppo and moved to Yerevan, explained how the Christian attitude toward AKP has changed: “At the beginning, like other groups in the Middle East, the Christians were also delighted. But after the Arab Spring, the AKP government exposed its sectarian-religious colors and forgot about its aspiration for regional peace. With the AKP government’s overt and direct support of the Muslim Brotherhood and other fanatical Islamic movements, Christians were marginalized.”65 In sum, although there have been some positive steps in restoring properties of religious foundations, there are many issues that shake Armenian confidence, such as the claims that the forces that attacked Kassab were supported by Ankara, the targeting of the ancient church of Deir ez-Zor by the Islamic State said to be supported by Turkey and changing the date of the Gallipoli observances to overshadow the Armenian Genocide anniversary. In addition, in general, a large number of people in Turkey are very fearful that Erdoğan will entrench dictatorship and autocracy even further, and this is also a common concern of the European Union, Council of Europe, European Convention on Human Rights and many international civil and human rights organizations. Like many others, Bağdat (2016) believes that “the way we are talking about how Ittihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti (CUP) was responsible for the state crimes and atrocities a century ago, following generations will also talk about the Erdoğan government and his atrocities in the future just in the same way.”

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Notes 1. AKP emerged out of the ashes of the Refah Party, which temporarily held power under Necmettin Erbakan, the prime minister ousted by the generals in 1997 in the most recent military coup. 2. Despite the closure of many parties, the pro-Kurdish movement has maintained its existence. DTP (Demokrat Türkiye Partisi, Democratic Turkey Party) was established in 2005 as the successor of DEHAPS and won victories in the 2009 municipal elections. After the closure of DTP in December 2009 by the Constitutional Court of Turkey, BDP (Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi, Peace and Democracy Party), founded in May 2008, became its successor and won 36 seats in parliament in the 2011 elections by supporting independent candidates and thus exceeding the 10 per cent electoral threshold. HDP (Hakların Demokratik Partisi, the People’s Democracy Party) is considered to be the sister party of BDP, with which it joined in the local elections in March 2014 under the HDP banner in Western Turkey in order to unite the Kurdish and Turkish left and not be limited by Kurdish regional boundaries, and with emphasis on disadvantaged and oppressed groups, reflecting its leftist orientation. Both co-leaders and 12 HDP MPs were arrested in November 2016, and they have been imprisoned since then. 3. ECtHR has decided in two cases that Turkey violated the principle related to the protection of private property laid down in the European Convention on Human Rights. The ECtHR gave the government notice to return the confiscated properties or pay 910,000 and 2,300,000 euros compensation, respectively, to the Greek-Orthodox High and Yedikule Armenian Hospital foundations (Soner 2010, p. 31). 4. The most comprehensive discussion of the minority vakıf (foundation) occurs in the 2012 Declaration, published by the Hrant Dink Foundation. See also Zencirci, Gizem (2015) ‘From property to civil society: the historical transformation of Vakıfs in modern Turkey (1923–2013)’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 47(3): 533–554. 5. On 17 December 2013, police officers raided several homes, seized $17.5 million in cash and detained 52 people with ties to AKP.  Prosecutors charged 14 people with bribery, corruption, fraud and money laundering. Four ministers resigned. 6. The interview with Pakrat Estukyan took place in Istanbul at Agos newspaper on April 2016. Apart from his chief editorial position at Agos, Estukyan has also made socio-political programs, mostly on pro-Kurdish television channels (Medya TV, Arti TV), hosting mainly Armenian figures in his programs.

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7. The term ‘Kemalism’ covers the ideas and principles of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, and is the official ideology of the state. Laicism (secularism) is one of the main principles of Kemalism, which was enforced along with one-party rule for decades after the establishment of the republic, but which has been challenged especially since the 1980s on grounds of its political despotism. Even criticism of Atatürk and Kemalism results in prosecution and arrests. For more on Kemalism, see Ö. Cagaptay (2006) Islam, Secularism and Nationalism in Modern Turkey: Who is a Turk? London: Routledge; M.  Kaylan (2005) The Kemalists: Islamic Revival and the Fate of Secular Turkey, New York, NY: Prometheus Books; E. Özyürek (2006) Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey, Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press; T. Parla and A. Davison (2004) Corporatist Ideology in Kemalist Turkey: Progress or Order? Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. 8. The conference volume was published, in Turkish, in 2011, the same year as A Question of Genocide from the Workshop for Armenian-Turkish Studies (WATS) group. One should underline the significance of the Workshop for Armenian-Turkish Studies (WATS), which included a number of scholars committed to investigating the documentary evidence of the genocide and surrounding events, who met on 17 March 2000 for the first time and continued their series of workshops at the University of Michigan (2002), the University of Minnesota (2003), Salzburg, Austria (2004), New  York University (2005), the University of Geneva (2008) and the University of California (2010). ̇ 9. Interview via Skype on 12 May 2017. Prof. Insel is one of the initiators of the biggest campaign on the recognition of the genocide, which took place in 2009 amid both significant support and harsh criticism. 10. For instance, when Turkey and Armenia met in a World Cup in Yerevan in 2008, it was supported and termed ‘football diplomacy’ by Turkey’s president Abdullah Gül, who attended the match at the invitation of Serge Sarkisian, Armenian president. Gül’s attendance provoked objections by other Turkish parties, CHP (Republican People’s Party) and MHP (Nationalist Action Party). 11. The award is presented annually to people who work for a world free of discrimination, racism and violence, take personal risks for their ideals, use the language of peace and, by doing so, inspire and encourage others. The interview with Eren Keskin took place at the Human Rights Association based in Istanbul. 12. During the interview with Çelikkan in July 2017 at the Truth Justice Memory Centre based in Istanbul, I asked whether he was concerned about being arrested like many others who were involved in civil society organizations. Çelikkan said that this was possible, and soon after he was

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arrested and imprisoned on charges of being involved in terrorist propaganda under the Anti-Terror Law, on the basis of his participation in the ‘Editor-in-chief on Watch’ campaign launched on 3 May 2016 to protest a crackdown on the pro-Kurdish daily newspaper Özgür Gündem [Free Agenda]. He was released on probation having served just over two months of an 18-month sentence on 21 October 2017. 13. The interview with Sayat Tekir took place at Ermeni Kültürü ve Dayanışma Derneği (Armenian Cultural and Solidarity Centre) in Istanbul in 2016. 14. Political scientist Baskin Oran is a member of Ankara University. He is one of the initiators of the ‘I Apologize’ campaign along with three other intellectuals. He was also a candidate for the Turkish parliament in the 22 July 2007 general election and obtained considerable support, although he lost. His daughter, Sırma Oran, who has been living in France for a long time, had to withdraw her candidacy for the city council in Villeurbanne after she had been pressed by Mayor Jean-Paul Bret to visit an Armenian Genocide monument in Lyon and make a public statement backing the genocide charges. 15. This article led to a number of criminal investigations of well-known actors such as journalists Hrant Dink, Perihan Mağden and writers Orhan Pamuk and Elif Şafak, also including the chairman of the EU-Turkey Joint Parliamentary Committee, Joost Lagendijk. A new package of penal law reform came into effect on 1 June 2005, prior to the opening of negotiations for Turkish membership of the EU. Along with the standards imposed by the EU, Article 301 was revised again and come into force on 8 May 2008. 16. See Akçam’s full article on: http://www.e-ir.info/2014/06/04/approaching-2015-how-to-assess-Erdoğans-statement-on-the-armenian-genocide/ 17. One of the first books on the issue of conversion of non-Muslim women is called Tamama, published in 1993, on the life of a child of a Pontic family living in the Black Sea region. Also see Gulcicek Gunel Tekin (2011). Kara Kefen [Black Shroud]. 18. To name some of them: Baskin Oran (2014) M.K. Adlı Çocuğum Tehcir Anıları: 1915 ve Sonrası [Deportation Memoirs of a Boy Called M.K.: 1915 and Later]; Faruk Bildirici (2008) Serkis Bu Toprakları Sevmişti [Serkis Loved These Lands]; Esmahan Aykol (2006) Savrulanlar [Dispersed]; Filiz Özdem (2007) Korku Benim Sahibim [Fear is My Owner]; Metin Aktaş (2012) Harputtaki Hayalet [The Ghost in Harput];and Gülçicek Günel Tekin (2016) Kara Kefen [Black Shroud] 19. For oral history research on Armenians and other Christian communities, see Donald E. Miller and Lorne Touryan Miller (1993) Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide, Berkeley, CA: University of California

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Press; David Gaunt (2006) Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: MuslimChristian Relations in Eastern Anatolia during World War I, Piscataway, NJ; Gorgias Press, Ugur Umit Gungor (2004) ‘Lost in commemoration: the Armenian Genocide in memory and identity’, Patterns of Prejudice 48(2): 147–166. 20. See Leyla Neyzi and Darıcı, Haydar (2015) ‘Generation in debt: family, politics, and youth subjectivities in Diyarbakır’, New Perspectives on Turkey 52: 55–75. 21. Such as the 6–7 September 1955 pogroms, the Wealth Tax of 1942, the expulsion of Greek nationals in 1964, the mass murder and genocidal politics in Dersim 1938. 22. For more on studies on fictional books on Armenians see, Murat Belge ̇ (2013) Edebiyatta Ermeniler; Inci Enginün (1992) Romanlarımızda Ermeni Tipleri [Armenian Typologies in Our Novels]; Kâzım Yetiş Ahmet Mithat Efendi’nin Romanlarında Ermeni Kişiler [Armenian People in Ahmet Mithat Efendi’s Novels; Nuri Sağlam Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar’ın Romanlarında Ermeni Kişiler [Armenian People in Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar’s novels]; M. Fatih Andı Milli Mücadele Romanında Ermeniler [Armenians in Turkish War of Independence Novels]; Ozlem Belcim Galip (2018) ‘The Reaction to and Representation of Armenian Genocide and Identity in Modern Turkish Novels’, Turkish Studies: 154–179. 23. Dink’s article was titled ‘Ruh halimin güvercin tedirginliği’ [The pigeon anxiety of my mood] (2007). Agos. Retrieved from http://www.agos. com.tr/tr/yazi/14061/agos-un-arsivinden-ruh-halimin-guvercintedirginligi 24. ‘Turkey faces international pressure over Dink killing’ (2007). Radio Free Europe. Retrieved from https://www.rferl.org/a/1074173.html 25. For more on collective behavior, see Gary T.  Marx and James L.  Wood (1975) ‘Strands of theory and research in collective behavior’, Annual Review of Sociology: 368–428. 26. An NGO founded in Istanbul by a number of academics and journalists in 2007 aiming to investigate and discuss crimes and atrocities committed by the state. 27. In 2009, public broadcaster TRT instituted an exclusively Kurdish-­ language TV station, TRT 6, later renamed TRT Kurdi. In the 2012–2013 academic year, public middle schools and high schools in Turkey started offering elective language courses in Abkhaz, Adige, Georgian, Kurdish and Laz languages. 28. In 2007, during George Bush’s administration, a similar resolution was adopted by the US Foreign Affairs Committee, but it never made it to the next level.

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29. Migrants from Armenia have been continuously arriving since the Republic of Armenia became independent in 1991, driven by economic reasons. Many of them are undocumented. 30. From the interview with Bağdat (2016) in Istanbul. 31. From the interview with Doğan (2017) in Istanbul. 32. From the interview with Demirbaş (2017) in Istanbul. 33. Parliamentary Inquiry by HDP MP Paylan about Church Attack, Bianet, 13 March 2018: https://m.bianet.org/english/minorities/195116parliamentary-inquiry-by-hdp-mp-paylan-about-church-attack 34. For discriminative applications toward non-Muslims in general in Turkey, see Aktar (1998) and Güven (2005), Okutan (2004), and Bali (2000). 35. With the escalating use of the term ‘genocide’ by diaspora Armenians since the 1970s to refer to the massacres during the First World War, Turkish authorities have revised the official narratives on the events of 1915–1917, challenging the charges of ‘genocide’ and comparisons with the Holocaust made by actors outside Turkey. 36. The same silencing strategy is continuously adopted by state actors for other state crimes and violations such as the Dersim massacre, the deportations of Kurdish populations from their hometowns in the 1930s, the Wealth Tax on minorities, the Istanbul Pogrom of 6–7 September 1955, the Greek deportation in 1964, the Çorum, Sivas and Maraş massacres and so on. 37. The ‘Citizen, speak Turkish!’ (Turkish: Vatandaş Türkçe konuş!) campaign was an initiative by law students in 1928 but sponsored by the Turkish government which aimed to put pressure on non-Turkish speakers to speak Turkish in public. The campaign has been considered by some authors to have been a significant contribution to Turkey’s sociopolitical process of turkification. 38. The neighborhoods are Bakırköy, Ataköy, Yeşilköy, Bahçelievler, Şirinevler, Samatya, Kumkapı, Şişli, Beyoğlu, Kadoköy and Üsküdar. 39. From the interview with Taşkın (2016) in Istanbul. 40. Balıkçı’s family insisted that the shooting was not accidental but intentional and that the suspect should be charged with murder, but he was sentenced to four and a half years in prison for involuntary manslaughter. A Justice Initiative was launched in Turkey devoted to the case of Balıkçı. 41. See the article ‘Funeral of murdered Armenian woman in Istanbul evokes memories of earlier cover-ups’, Asbarez, http://asbarez.com/107493/ funeral-of-murdered-armenian-woman-in-istanbul-evokes-memories-ofearlier-cover-ups/ 42. Soon after my interview with Kavala, on 18 October 2017, he was detained at Istanbul airport. He was charged with trying to overthrow the Turkish

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government by “attempting to abolish the constitutional order” in line with the failed military coup on 15 July 2016. The arrest of Kavala has been met with many objections at both national and international level, leading to protests from the United Nations to the Council of Europe and European Parliament, and including prominent international civil society and human rights organizations. 43. Turkish author Orhan Pamuk made the remark in the same year as a groundbreaking conference titled ‘Ottoman Armenians During the Decline of the Empire’ was held at Istanbul Bilgi University on 24–25 September 2005, the first time the subject was discussed so openly in Turkey. There were protests against the conference by several hundred nationalists. Turkish Judicial Officials filed a complaint against 17 people for organizing the conference. 44. ‘Come back, Diyarbakir mayor tells Armenians’ (2012), Hurriyet Daily News, https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/come-back-diyarbakir-mayortells-armenians-31096 45. Hrant Gadarigan (2012) ‘True or false? Armenians really don’t want to return to Western Armenia’, Hetg, https://hetq.am/en/article/18968 46. Vercihan Ziflioglu (2012) ‘Armenians snub mayor’s call for return’, Daily News, http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/armenians-snub-mayors-callfor-return-31177 47. From interview with Estukyan (2016) in Istanbul. 48. Turkish President Erdoğan accused Islamic leader Fethullah (1941), living in self-imposed exile in the USA since 1999, of plotting the failed coup against the government. Gülen operates a civil movement called Hizmet (Service), which has millions of followers and sympathizers. Gülen is Erdoğan’s former chief ally, and members or sympathizers of the movement obtained positions, particularly in the judiciary, when AKP came to power in 2002. Even before the coup, after 2013, due to a dispute between the two leaders, Erdoğan strived to crush Hizmet and undertook a massive purge against its members, supporters, financial institutions, educational institutions and media, including the judiciary. Since the coup, Turkey has been formally requesting the extradition of cleric Fethullah Gülen from the USA. Gülen denies his role in the coup and even alleged that Erdoğan himself organized it in order to build dictatorship. The failed coup has resulted in thousands of arrests and hundreds killed. On 22 July 2016, the Turkish government declared a state of emergency. Gülenist judges who have been dismissed or arrested by the government after the coup attempt had been appointed by the AKP government in the mid-2000s for the series of Ergenekon trials which started in 2008 and which were based on a belief that the convicted people, including businessmen and army offi-

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cers, are a part of a network, deep state, aiming to overthrow the elected AKP government. 49. Zarakolu, recipient of Turkey’s Journalists’ Society’s Press Freedom Prize in 2007 and the International Publishers Association’s 2008 Freedom to Publish Prize, has been subjected to ongoing legal cases for years and jailed several times on charges including disseminating separatist propaganda, insulting Turkishness and criticizing the members of the Turkish military. The Friends of Belge Initiative was founded in 2009 to raise solidarity funds to support Belge Publishing House. Zarakolu moved to Sweden 3 years ago. 50. Tahir Elci (1966–2015), a Kurdish lawyer and chairman of Diyarbakir Bar Association, was assassinated in the crowd after the press statement in the Sur district of Diyarbakir on 28 November 2015. The murderer was not found, and the investigation stopped after the failed military coup on 15 July 2016. 51. For instance, as part of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government’s family values push, officials at Turkish state theatres are obliged to submit plot synopses for government approval. In late 2014, the Presidential Symphony Orchestra of Turkey dropped compositions by the classical pianist Fazıl Say after he had been charged with insulting Islam with a Twitter message that mocked an imam. Again in 2014 several jury members of the Antalya International Film Festival quit in protest after festival officials cancelled a film about the Gezi Park uprisings in Istanbul. CNN Turk, a private broadcaster, recently pixilated the private parts in Rubens’ seventeenth-century painting The Three Graces in a program about beauty to avoid fines for indecency. Moreover, public school teachers were investigated for using books by John Steinbeck, Amin Maalouf and José Mauro de Vasconcelos as educational materials. 52. From the interview with Paylan (2017) in Istanbul. 53. There are 29 states, mainly in Europe and Latin America, which recognize the events of 1915 as ‘genocide’, among them Belgium, Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, Vatican, Bulgaria, Poland, Latvia, Austria, Bolivia, Luxembourg, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Syria, Holland, Switzerland, France, Greece, Italy, Russia, Paraguay, South Cyprus and Sweden. Forty-­one US states, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, the Basque region of Spain and New South Wales in Australia, also recognize the genocide. 54. These 11 German MPs were granted police protection after they received death threats following the vote. 55. ‘Erdoğan, Cem Özdemir’in Türklüğü için kan testi istedi’ [Erdoğan demanded blood test from Cem Ozdemir for his Turkish race], 6 June 2016, Evrensel, https://www.evrensel.net/haber/281834/erdogan-cemozdemirin-turklugu-icin-kan-testi-istedi

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56. ‘CHP’li Yılmaz’dan sözde Ermeni Soykırımı Tasarısı’na eleştiri’ [Criticism from Yilmaz of CHP against so-called Armenian Genocide], 30 May 2016, Habertürk, https://www.haberturk.com/gundem/haber/1246706-chpliozturk-yilmazdan-sozde-ermeni-soykirimi-tasarisina-elestiri 57. From the interview with Karakaşlı (2017) in Istanbul. 58. Both politicians were from Doğru Yol Partisi (DYP, True Path Party). They were accused of corruption and trading drugs, state-mafia connections and state-sponsored assassinations. Ağar, who was charged with ‘establishing an armed organization to commit crime’ as part of the Susurluk deep state case, was sentenced to five years, stayed in jail for a year and was released in 2013. Ciller was cleared of the charges. 59. From the interview with Tomasyan (2016) in Istanbul. 60. From the interview with KaosGL spokesperson (2017) in Ankara. 61. From the interview with Bilmez (2017) in Istanbul. 62. In the 1990s, Turkish government military and security forces compelled hundreds of thousands of people to abandon their villages and carried out enforced disappearances and killings of thousands of civilians. Those affected were mainly Kurds in Turkey’s southeastern and eastern provinces (Human Rights Watch 2012). For more on the report, see https://www. hrw.org/report/2012/09/03/time-justice/ending-impunity-killings-anddisappearances-1990s-turkey 63. See ‘Turkey’s escalating abuses risk return to dark days of 1990s’, 5 July 2016, Amnesty International, https://humanrightsturkey.org/2016/07/05/ amnesty-turkeys-escalating-abuses-risk-return-to-dark-days-of-1990s/ 64. From the interview with Eren Keskin (2017) in Istanbul. 65. Taştekin, Fehim (2015) ‘AKP’s stance on Armenians worries Christians’, Armeniaca Haygagank, https://armeniaca-haygagank.blogspot.com/2015/ 04/akps-stance-on-armenians-worries.html

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Aktürk, Ş. (2018). One nation under Allah? Islamic multiculturalism, Muslim nationalism and Turkey’s reforms for Kurds, Alevis, and non-Muslims. Turkish Studies, 19(4), 523–551. Arikan-Akdag, G. (2015). Rational political parties and electoral games: The AKP’s strategic move for the Kurdish vote in Turkey. Turkish Studies, 1(1), 1–29. Armstrong, D. (1981). A trumpet to arms: Alternative media in America. Boston: South End Press. Arslanyan, A. (2005). Adım Adım Memleketin Tokat [Step by step my hometown Tokat]. Istanbul: Aras. Atton, C. (2002). Alternative media. London: Sage Publications. Bağdat, H. (2016, April 12). Personal ınterview [Personal interview]. Bakhtin, M. ([1935] 1981). Discourse in the novels. In M. Holquist (Ed.), The dialogic imagination: Four essays by M.M.  Bakhtin (pp.  259–422). Austin: University of Texas Press. Bali, R. (2000). Cumhuriyet Yıllarında Türkiye Yahudileri: Bir Türkleştirme Serüveni 1923–1945 (Turkey’s Jew in the Republican Years: A Journey of Turkification 1923–1945. Istanbul: İletişim. Bilal, M. (2018). Lullabies and the memory of pain: Armenian Women’s remembrance of the past in Turkey. Dialectical Anthropology, 1–22. https://doi. org/10.1007/s10624-018-9515-8. Bilmez, B. (2017, February 7). Personal interview [Personal interview]. Birdal, S. (2017). Tek Adamlaşma: Rejim, Devlet, Jeopolitik (Towards a one-man rule: Regime, State and Geopolitics). In G. Özcan, E. Balta, & B. Beşgül (Eds.), Kuşku ile Komşuluk: Türkiye ve Rusya İlişkilerinde Değişen Dinamikler (Suspicion and Neighbourhood: The Changing Dynamics between Russia and Turkey (pp. 300–321). Istanbul: İletişim. Çelikkan, M. (2017, July 11). Personal interview [Personal interview]. Culler, J. (1994). Literary theory: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Değirmenciyan, S. (2016, March 5). Personal ınterview [Personal interview]. Della Porta, D., & Rucht, D. (1991). Left-libertarian movements in context: A comparison of Italy and West Germany 1965–1990. Discussion paper FSIII91–102. Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin. Dinç, N. K. (2016, June 20). Personal interview [Personal interview]. Doğan, S. (2017, February 1). Personal ınterview [Personal interview]. Downing, J. (2003). Audiences and readers of alternative media: The absent lure of the virtually unknown. Media, Culture & Society, 25, 625–645. Elbasani, A., & Saatçıoğlu, B. (2014). Muslim Democracy in the Making! Of Pragmatism and Values of AKP’s Selective Democratization Project. APSA 2014 Annual Meeting Paper, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/ abstract=2453779

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Estukyan, P. (2016, April 7). Personal interview [Personal interview]. Funeral of murdered Armenian woman in Istanbul evokes memories of earlier cover-ups’. (2013). Asbarez, January 8. Available at: http://asbarez. com/107493/funeral-of-murdered-armenian-woman-in-istanbul-evokesmemories-of-earlier-cover-ups/ Görgülü, A. (2016, June 25). Personal interview [Personal interview]. Guida, M. (2008). The Sevres syndrome and “komplo” theories in the Islamist and secular press. Turkish Studies, 9(1), 37–52. Güven, E. D. (2005). Repeated criticism on education, alternative suggestions. PIVOLKA, 4(17), 6–8. Güzelyan, H. (2015). The youth home of Istanbul: A story of the remnants’ homecoming. Paramus: Armenian Missionary Association of America. Hale, W. (2005). Christian democracy and the AKP: Parallels and contrasts. Turkish Studies, 6(2), 293–310. Hofmann, T. (2002). Armenians in Turkey today. EU Office of Armenian Associations of Europe. http://www.armenian.ch/asa/Docs/faae02.pdf Human Rights Watch. (2012). Time for justice: Ending impunity for killings and disappearances in 1990s Turkey. https://www.hrw.org/report/2012/09/03/ time-justice/ending-impunity-killings-and-disappearances-1990s-turkey Hunt, S. A., et al. (1994). Identity fields: Framing processes and the social construction of movement identities. In E. Laraña et al. (Eds.), New social movements: From ideology to identity (pp.  185–208). Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Johnston, H., Larana, E., & Gusfield, J. R. (1994). Identities, grievances, and new social movements. In E. Larana et al. (Eds.), New social movements: From ideology to identity. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Karakaşlı, K. (2017, January 12). Personal ınterview [Personal interview]. Karaosmanoğlu, K. (2010). Reimagining minorities in Turkey: Before and after the AKP. Insight Turkey, 12(2), 193–212. Kavala, O. (2017, August 20). Personal interview [Personal interview]. Keskin, A. (2017, February 21). Personal interview [Personal interview]. Keskin, E. (2017, October 10). Personal interview [Personal interview]. Komsuğlu, A., & Örs, B. (2009). Armenian women of Istanbul: Some notes on their role in the survival of the Armenian community. Gender, Place and Culture – A Journal of Feminist Geography, 16(3), 329–349. Koptaş, R. (2016, June 18). Personal interview [Personal interview]. Melucci, A. (1989). Nomads of the present: Social movements: Individual needs in contemporary society. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Melucci, A. (1996). Youth, time and social movements. Young, 4(2), 3–14. Mitchell, G. (2012). Islam as peacemaker: The AKP’s attempt at a Kurdish resolution. The Washington Review of Turkish and Eurasian Affairs. http://www. thewashingtonreview.org/articles/islam-as-peacemaker-the-akps-vision-of-akurdish-resolution.html

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Okutan, Ç. M. (2004). Tek Parti Döneminde Azınlık Politikaları (Minority Politics in Single Party Era). Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi University. Öniş, Z. (2016). Turkey’s Twin Elections and the AKP’s Comeback. Journal of Democracy, 27(2), 141–154. Oran, B. (2017, January 6). Personal interview [Personal interview]. Panossian, R. (2002). The past as nation: Three dimensions of Armenian identity. Geopolitics, 7(2), 121–146. Paylan, G. (2017, February 5). Personal interview [Personal interview]. Raschke, J. (1985). Soziale Bewegungen [Social movements]. New York: Campus. Rucht, D. (2017). Studying social movements: Some conceptual challenges. In S. Berger & H. Nehring (Eds.), The history of social movements in global perspective: A survey (pp. 39–62). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Sheklian, C. (2018). Promises of property: Religious foundations and the Justice and Development Party’s ambiguous attitudes towards religious minorities. Turkish Studies, 20(3), 403–420. Smelser, N. (1962). Theory of collective behavior. New York: Free Press. Solgun, C. (2017, February 15). Personal ınterview [Personal interview]. Somer, M. (2010). Media values and democratization: What unites and what divides religious-conservative and pro-secular elites. Turkish Studies, 11(4), 555–577. Soner, B. A. (2010). The Justice and Development Party’s policies towards non-­ Muslim minorities in Turkey. Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, 12(1), 23–40. Suciyan, T. (2016). The Armenians in modern Turkey: Post-genocide society, politics, and history. New York: I. B. Tauris. Tarrow, S. (2011). Power in movement: Social movements and contentious politics. New York: Cambridge University Press. Taşkın, Z. (2016, May 17). Personal interview [Personal interview]. Tekir, S. (2016, June 12). Personal ınterview [Personal interview]. Tilly, C. (1984). Big structures, large processes, huge comparison. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Tomasyan, Y. (2016, June 2). Personal ınterview [Personal interview]. Yavuz, H., & Özcan, N. A. (2006). The Kurdish question and Turkey’s Justice and Development Party. Middle East Policy, 13(1), 102–119. Yıldırım, V. (2016, July 4). Personal interview [Personal interview]. White, J. (2014). Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Ziflioglu, V. (2012). Armenians snub mayor’s call for return. Daily News. Available at: http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/armenians-snub-mayors-callforreturn-31177

CHAPTER 5

Challenging the Turkish State’s Denial of the Armenian Genocide

As mentioned earlier, many Armenian, Kurdish and Turkish political organizations, LGBT groups, political figures and directors have played a role in the social movement which arose from Dink’s assassination in 2007 and still continues in different forms despite all the political turmoil, particularly since July 2016. The production of new identities after Dink’s assassination corresponds to the emergence of new networks of relationships of trust among actors operating within complex social movements. So the movement around the Armenian Question, operating through information communication networks, public initiatives, demonstrations and interactions among various mobilized actors, has evolved over the years, particularly in terms of the actions taken. New social movements theory can be applied to the collective actions on the Armenian Question, which can be seen as dynamic. Some of the collective or individual actions might be detached from each other. As Melucci (1996) observes, the organizational features of many contemporary forms of collective behavior are constituted by loosely articulated, decentralized, egalitarian pluralistic networks, which reflect the structural changes characteristic of postmodern society.1 In other words, the adherents of new social movements are not integrated into a group-defined social network that can be easily mobilized to support the group’s efforts (Dalton et al. 1990, p. 14). But all these networks support or contribute to one another as we see in the

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case of those related to the Armenian Question, and they construct a multiplex performance of coordinated resistance. Della Porta and Rucht (1991) call the new social movements ‘left-­ libertarian movements’, which are directed against traditional authoritarian structures, and emancipatory, oriented toward the implementation of an egalitarian society. Accordingly, the academics, historians and activists involved with the movement concerned with the Turkish state’s past and ongoing policies related to minorities and oppressed groups are libertarian, as Della Porta and Rucht (1991) underline, because they reject the authority of state bureaucracies to shape or regulate individual and collective memory, by creating an extensive network of social groups. This chapter, through ethnographic research methods, aims to examine the activities and discourses of these liberal intelligentsia, the NGO community, activists and leading figures which were triggered by the assassination of Hrant Dink, through the theoretical framework of social movement and resource mobilization and its core theory to demonstrate that the struggle for the Armenians goes beyond the ethnic non-Muslim minority rights movement but plays an integral part in the struggle for democratization in Turkey overall.

5.1   The Rise of Civil Society: “We Are All Hrant, We Are All Armenians” In line with Giddens’s (1979) concept of the ‘duality of structure’, structures (state or private) can both restrict social action and provide a constitutive basis for collective action (Rucht 1994, p. 166). Hence, in the case of Turkey, AKP governing structures provided the basis for ‘collective action’ in the first few years of its rule, but then constrained action, particularly after 2015. Which actions are chosen by a collective movement in a given structural context also depends on accidental factors. Drawing on social movement and collective memory theories of the importance of external conditions and actual pasts, my explanation stresses the importance of ‘mnemonic opportunity structure’ (Amenta et al. 2005; Andrews and Gaby 2015; Ghoshal 2013) on the scope that memory movements attain. Three key dimensions of mnemonic opportunity structures which also emphasize constraints on memory projects can be applied here to help us understand Dink’s commemorative initiatives: (1) an environment’s present-day commemorative capacity, (2) a past incident’s ascribed

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significance and (3) the moral valence of its characters at the time it occurred.2 For sure, Dink’s death was an accidental factor, but it has shown that a single event may have a considerable impact on the mobilization. His assassination in January 2007 caused a tremendous reaction within different communities which not only led to the widening of political space for dialogue and public debate about the Armenian Genocide, as leftist and democratic groups took up the Armenian issue within their cause, but also stimulated activists, intellectuals and politicians to demand the democratization of Turkey and reach for broader goals of equality, freedom and democracy. In this section, I attempt to understand how the dynamics of memory mobilization can impinge on commemoration of Dink’s assassination and the Armenian Genocide, which are interlinked in many protests and discourses. Selina Doğan (2017), a CHP member of parliament of Armenian descent, agrees that Dink’s assassination was a turning point for Turkish Armenians and the way the Armenian Question was regarded. However, she adds that those having planned the assassination had not thought that his death would lead to protest by millions of people. “His assassination made democratic publicity and Armenians get closer.” Accordingly, all the interviewees in this book pointed to the fact that Dink’s funeral was a turning point at which thousands of people gathered, leading to a ‘collective movement’, which started with protests and demonstrations and led to the construction of ‘collective identity’ of those who demand democracy and freedom. The examination of Dink’s funeral and successive commemorations are useful in understanding the memory-movement nexus producing ‘collective identity’. Alberto Melucci (1996) defines ‘collective identity’ as an interactive, shared process that links individuals or groups to a social movement through sustained interaction. In other words, it illuminates how individuals come to decide that they share certain orientations and grievances, and organize collectively. A concentration on ‘collective identity’ therefore helps to bridge the gap between the structural foundations for action and the ‘collective action’ itself. In this regard, those who were present at Dink’s funeral and the protests related to his assassination in the form of ‘collective action’ have a lot in common, with their objections to state injustices and their demands for justice, and this, in a way, constitutes their collective identity. Holding placards at the funeral reading ‘We are All Armenians’ and ‘We are All Hrant Dink’ in Turkish, Kurdish and Armenian, signaling resistance to state-imposed identities, has been replicated and become a regular gesture during his

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commemorations. ‘Collective action’ cannot occur in the absence of a ‘we’ characterized by common traits and specific solidarity. Equally indispensable is the identification of the ‘other’ defined as responsible for the actor’s condition and against which the mobilization is called (Gamson and Croteau 1992; Della Porta and Diani 2007). In Dink’s case, the state apparatus and the system protecting the assassins constitute the ‘other’. Within the theoretical perspective of NSMs, protests are important expressions of the views and demands of the mobilizing structures. Protests serve to strengthen solidarity within the movement, to raise awareness among the general public about the issues targeted by the movement and also to help recruit new members. Protest has been defined as non-­ routinized action in which indirect channels of influence are opened through the activity of a series of collective actors. The activities of new social movements display a change in the nature of protest as political form. In other words, protest has simply become another political resource for influencing public opinion and policymakers. As mentioned above, protest behavior has become a planned and organized activity in contemporary democracies, and NSMs are the vanguard of this development (Nelkin and Pollak 1981). However, there are some objections to considering the protest a core feature of social movements. Social movements are not merely the sum of protest events on certain issues, or even of specific campaigns. On the contrary, a social movement process takes place only when collective identities develop, which go beyond specific events and initiatives. Hence public protests (such as Dink’s annual commemoration, Genocide commemorations every year) play a marginal role in mobilization and lead to new disruptive forms of action challenging the state and its authority. For instance, Dink’s annual commemoration on 19 January has always, from the start, constituted a form of protest, raised awareness among the general public and strengthened the solidarity within the movement, and this is a form of direct collective action or, in other words, direct democracy. Although smaller than it was during its first few years, the annual commemoration of Dink’s murder remains one of the biggest annual protest gatherings in modern Turkey. Mobilization on the Armenian Question cannot be limited to the protests and demonstrations at Dink’s commemoration; however, they do play a crucial role. Dink’s assassination has a ‘radicalization tendency’, as conceptualized by Rucht, in which the early stages of conflict are usually moderate and conventional. But if they fail, the action repertoire is enlarged. The fact that Dink’s killers were not arrested and that the murder was thought to be Turkish

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state-related has strengthened the protestors’ claims and expanded the reach of the movement right up to the present day. So a local group’s choice of strategies not only depends on their allies, as Dink’s case shows, but it also depends on their opponents, whose conflictual and sometime accommodative behavior has a great impact on strengthening, weakening or overruling the further tendency for actions and strategies. Ogün Samast, who was aged 17 at the time of the shooting, was jailed for 23 years in 2011 for the killing, but speculation about the involvement of other groups inside and outside the state apparatus has persisted, and a number of slow-moving investigations are still ongoing. In this regard, the failure of the state apparatus in handling the case in a fair and just way has strengthened the movement, not necessarily in the form of large crowds but in active civil society, involving a number of local groups and initiatives. As Staggenborg (1998, p. 181) states it is useful to analyze “how movements emerge within cycles of protest and how some movements maintain themselves beyond the decline of a protest cycle.” In this case, despite the decline in the number of protestors gathering for the annual commemoration of Dink’s assassination, even after a decade, the movement is still expanding within civil society, with new recruitment through formal and informal mobilizing tactics, promoting the discourse of human rights and international law, which can be referred to as a ‘repertoire of collective action’ or ‘contentious practices’ in social theory terms. The ‘collective action’ fuelled by Hrant Dink’s assassination requires an understanding of who he was, how he was murdered and what he meant to those who had never met him but were present at his funeral and subsequent commemorations every year. Hrant Dink was one of the few leading Armenian public and intellectual figures in Turkey, well known for explicitly expressing thoughts and ideas about the current situation and the future prospects for Turkey in the twentieth century.3 “Since his murder, Dink has become a legend and a symbol for the Turkish liberal intelligentsia” (Cheterian 2015, p. 24). He was shot dead on 19 January 2007 by a young Turkish ultranationalist outside the office of the Turkish-­ Armenian weekly Agos newspaper,4 where he was editor-in-chief. Dink was born in the Eastern Anatolian province of Malatya in 1954 and migrated to Istanbul when he was young. After his parents got divorced, he was left homeless and ended up in an orphanage. He was politically active in the 1970s and detained and tortured after the 1980 coup. He was involved in the establishment of Agos, which he aimed to be “a window and a door,” opening the Armenian community to society at large. Agos challenged the

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Armenian religious establishment and the Patriarchate in Istanbul, with which Dink himself had a long-running dispute. Dink had also called on diaspora Armenians to rid themselves of their rage against the Turks. Through Agos, he questioned the order of things and made suggestions abhorrent to those who put religion at the center of the inward-looking community. He had been prosecuted several times for writing about the mass killings of Armenians, for criticizing lines in the Turkish national anthem, even for commenting publicly on the court cases against him in his articles published in Agos. In 2002, he was sued for a speech he made on identity and citizenship at a conference in Urfa. According to Hayko Bağdat, “Dink was the only journalist telling the truth about Sabiha Gökçen [Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s adopted daughter], he even got a warning from the army due to his news. He managed to make them uncomfortable.” Dink’s article on Sabiha Gökçen (1913–2001) titled ‘The Secret of Sabiha Hatun’ containing an interview with Hrispime Sebilciyan, who claimed to be Gökçen’s niece, meaning that Gökçen herself was of Armenian ancestry and was certainly one of his most controversial articles. It became a subject of investigation by the Turkish Justice Ministry.5 According to the article, Atatürk took her from an orphanage shortly after the genocide and had her adopted.6 The idea that Atatürk’s adopted daughter could be of Armenian descent caused uproar, the article was reprinted by almost all Turkish newspapers, and it remained in the spotlight of Turkish media, leading Dink to be labeled a traitor and being subjected to court charges. Before he was murdered, Dink had received numerous death threats from nationalist Turks who viewed his iconoclastic journalism, particularly on the mass killings of Armenians in the early twentieth century, as an act of treachery (Committee to Protect Journalists).7 On 26 February 2004, far-right group Istanbul Ülkü Ocakları sympathizers gathered in front of Agos and chanted well-known ultra-nationalist slogans ‘Either love the country or leave it’, ‘To hell with ASALA’. A similar demonstration was held by a group called ‘Federation to Fight the Armenians’, so-called Claims, in front of the newspaper office a few days later. In July 2006, Turkey’s High Court of Appeals upheld a six-month suspended prison sentence against Dink for violating Article 301 of the penal code in a case sparked by complaints from nationalist activists. Even in the same month he was murdered, he passed a threatening letter he had received to Istanbul’s Şişli district prosecutor, but no action was taken. A day after the assassination, the alleged triggerman, 17-year-old Ogün Samast, was

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arrested, confessed to the crime and was sentenced to 23 years in jail in 2011. It is claimed that government officials, police, military personnel and members of the National Intelligence Agency (MIT) played a role in his murder by neglecting their duty to protect the journalist.8 The trial over Dink’s murder case has not yet provided tangible results in terms of discovering and punishing the real perpetrators although the murderer is known according to Reporters Without Borders (RFS), Hrant’s Friends (Hrant’ın Arkadaşları, an initiative which follows the Dink case closely and actively plays a role in the organization of his commemorations) and Dink’s family. In 2008, the Dink family filed a lawsuit against the Ministry of Interior Affairs at the Istanbul 6th Administrative Tribunal. In September 2010, the European Court of Human Rights delivered a tough verdict against Turkey for failure to protect Dink’s life, failure to investigate his murder and failure to uphold his right to freedom of expression. In the case that ended in 2012 the court ordered the ministry to pay 105,000 euros compensation. All the major political parties and media in Turkey contributed to the chauvinist campaign against Hrant Dink, by labeling him an enemy of the Turks and marking him out as a target. Indeed, in general, despite striving to keep a low profile and avoid attention, the three main non-Muslim communities (Greeks, Armenians and Jews) have been at the center of public debates and have been targeted by Turkish mainstream media.9 Turkish print media became a mouthpiece of the state, and those who wanted to attain official posts or receive promotions did so by writing newspaper articles promoting the official narrative (Göcek 2015, p. 315). However, after Dink’s assassination, not only Agos but many other Turkish mainstream newspapers surprisingly denounced the murder, expressing deep shock and anger, which is ironic as they had pointed him out as the prime target for Turkish nationalists in their headlines and reports in the months before he was murdered.10 Both Çelikkan (2017) and Tekir (2016) agreed that the wide coverage of Dink’s assassination in mainstream media outlets, their condemnation of his murder and heartfelt praise for him, reflected pangs of conscience and a hidden sense of guilt on their part for having attacked Dink before he was shot. There are various opinions about why Dink’s assassination attracted that much attention in civil society. When existing systems do not deal sufficiently with an unjust action or, worse, try to justify that action (Turner and Killian 1987, p. 259), as in Dink’s case, citizens will respond by calling for justice. According to Estukyan (2016), society immediately

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realized that Dink had been murdered by the state and that, while the real criminals have still not been detained, society knows who they are. Çelikkan (2017) added that part of the reason thousands of people participated in Dink’s funeral and collectively protested against the assassination in the following years was because it was so obvious that it was a political crime and could not be considered purely in individual terms. Indeed, Dink’s assassination grew into a wider scandal after it emerged that security forces had been aware of a plot to kill him but had failed to act, which was also reminiscent of other assassinations in modern Turkey, further fuelling the anger of those pursuing Dink’s case. Assassinations have become routine during the most intense periods of the long conflict between the Turkish state and Kurdish guerrillas since 1984. Thousands of people were assassinated, mostly in the Kurdish region, throughout the 1990s. Most of the perpetrators went undiscovered and unpunished, and Dink’s assassination has also led to debates about these cases. Elif Al (2017), the director of the Open Society Foundation (Açık Toplum Vakfı), emphasizes that there was always a demand from certain groups for the state to confront its own crimes, but after Dink’s murder, other initiatives and groups have joined together to raise the same demand for justice. Identity is not an immutable characteristic, preexisting action. On the contrary, it is through action that certain feelings of belonging come to be either reinforced or weakened. Identity construction is an essential component of collective action. It enables actors engaged in conflict to see themselves as people linked by interests, values and common histories. In other words, the evolution of collective action produces and encourages continuous redefinitions of identity (Fantasia 1988; Hirsch 1990; Melucci 1995; Bernstein 2005; Goodwin et al. 2001). In this regard, social networks are not only facilitators but also products of collective action; while people often become involved in a specific movement or campaign through their previous links, their very participation also forges new links, which in turn affect subsequent developments in their activism (Della Porta and Diani 2007, p. 115). Thus, the ‘collective identity’ which occurred during the days of Dink’s assassination, funeral and in the following years of the commemoration can be a perception of a shared status or relationship, which may be ‘imagined’ rather than ‘experienced directly’ (Polletta and Jasper 2001) as the participants of the protests do not necessarily have any linkage with Dink or even Armenians in general. For instance, when I asked Cafer Solgun the reason for his solidarity with Dink’s case, he exclaimed “Shall we not ask for justice?” adding, “This is our issue

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collectively not just Armenians,” underlying the moral and ethical responsibility of the individual toward the collective action. John Tomlinson (1999) describes new social movements as those based on ‘distantiated identity’, whereby individuals embrace a sense of what unites us as human beings: common risks and possibilities, and mutual responsibility and shared morality. Similarly, regarding the reason for his focus on Armenians, the historian Dinç (2016) says, “working on Armenians is related to the political ethics. If you possess an equal and liberating ideal, then working on Armenians is a requirement.” When I asked if this has any connection with him being an Alevi Kurd, he confirmed that it did, adding that one needs to be politicized and take a critical stance against official ideology and history. In fact, on the top of morality, there is also a personal side to his individual effort on the debates on the Armenian Question and the recognition of genocide as Dinç says his great uncle was known to have killed many Armenians in the Erzincan area. All my interviewees who knew Hrant Dink in person agreed that he had also very appealing public speaking skills and gave the impression that he was just one Anatolian on the street. But this does not mean that everybody was so aware of Dink’s personality or appealing character. In general terms, for those who were present at the funeral and active participants at the commemorations, he was only telling the truth, striving to bring peace and a solution to the Armenian Question and other key issues for Turkey. Dink aimed to provide a voice for the Armenian community in Turkey and to encourage further dialogue between Turkey and Armenia. Apart from Armenian-related issues, he took a courageous and liberal stance on other issues related to democracy and freedom in Turkey. As Karakaşlı (2017) affirms, Dink was not only constructing a dialogue between Turks and Armenians but also between Armenia, Turkey and the Armenian diaspora. So his assassination was not just a turning point just for Armenians but for all Turkey. Dink wanted to “defend Armenians against majority fanaticism in Turkey and to defend Turks/Turkey against the fanaticism and hypocrisy of foreigners and diaspora Armenians” (Dink 2007).11 Dink was an active participant in the vital civil society in Turkey, key members of which have taken up the investigation of the blank spots in Turkey’s past (Suny 2017).12 Similarly, HDP’s former co-chair Demirtaş (2016) states that Hrant Dink represented democratic values, defending them all his life, and his cruel assassination was an open attack on these values, which is why this crime was protested by so many.13 Similarly, the human rights lawyer Eren

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Keskin (2017) describes Dink as the soft face of the Armenians, which is why non-Armenian socialists came to his funeral but Turkish conservatives too, because Dink’s personality and approach, representing multiple identities, was appealing to all levels of Turkish society. In other words, it is believed that Dink was not only representing Armenians but, more broadly, human rights and the freedom of speech of those who were repressed and silenced. Dink himself came to the conclusion that the resolution of the problems of the Armenian community in Turkey was intimately related to the progress of tolerance, democracy and freedom there. In this regard, KaosGL (Kaos Gay and Lesbian Cultural Research and Solidarity Association) is one of these organizations which initiated the mobilization of the movement, and its spokesperson Seçin Tuncel (2017) affirms that what Dink was fighting for is what he and his organization was also fighting for: communal peace. KaosGL, through Dink’s assassination and their reaction to it, have challenged a dominant culture of ‘heterosexism’ (Kitchin 2002), as LGBT people in Turkey have historically been characterized by invisibility in public discourses and spaces, but as part of their campaigning they also argue that public space should not be the sole domain of nationalism and that the political and legal infrastructure should begin to confront the culture of sectarianism which has resulted in discrimination, political violence and homophobic harassment. Dink was certainly the most controversial and prominent public intellectual within the Armenian community in Turkey and had a complex relationship to the Armenian Apostolic Church. Christianity as religion is merged with the national identity and culture. The churches have a crucial place in the lives of Armenians for two reasons. Firstly, they are social and cultural, rather than religious, places where the Armenian people go to socialize, to exchange news about marriages, births, deaths and baptisms in the community. The second reason is related to the role religion has played in the formation of Armenian identity. However, Dink did not hesitate to explicitly express his opposition to the Patriarchate. Sayat Tekir (2016) observes, to non-Armenians, Hrant was a peace passivist but to Istanbul Armenians he was a radical because he was making Armenian identity very visible, and cemaat was not happy with Armenians being that visible. He was not supporting any political party either. So that’s why Armenia or diaspora was quiet about his assassination, as they were not representing their ideologies.

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He did indeed criticize the anti-Turkish stance of some circles of the Armenian diaspora, while believing that Turks should also be informed about the Armenian side of the story. Almost all my interviewees also confirmed the great impact on political mobilization among Istanbul Armenians of Dink’s assassination. Armenians in Istanbul have always preferred to remain a closed community, and even regarded Dink’s newspaper Agos as too controversial and way too courageous. They feared such exposure, but Dink argued that reconciliation might be achieved if Armenians explained themselves to the Turkish community. The Armenian community experienced shame, humiliation, harassment and intimidation across the long decades from the 1950s to the 1990s without being able to speak up in its defense and was characterized by its reclusive existence and collective silence (Tchilingirian 2007).14 However, even those who were never politically active attended Dink’s funeral, which became a mass demonstration. Sayat Tekir (2016), Nor Zartonk founder and Armenian activist, who played a big role in mobilizing Armenian youth after the assassination, says, “I saw my childhood friends at the funeral that I hadn’t seen for many years. It became an occasion when we started to bond again.” This can be explained by the fact that appealing to identity, collective actions through a movement motivate participants through intrinsic, nonstrategic rewards such as self-realization, personal satisfaction and a sense of group belonging (Gamson and Croteau 1992). However, despite turning it into a magnificent protest, the support of some human rights activists, intellectuals and civil society at Dink’s funeral for ‘solidarity’ should be debated. ‘Solidarity’ refers to a form of participation rather than a distinct locus of activity or a specific social cause. Who or what forms part of this movement is entirely open to interpretation and it can be invested with different meanings according to social and political circumstances. In other words, ‘solidarity’ denotes a diffuse and heterogeneous array of associations, actions and initiatives where no single overarching cause or dominant struggle emerges. It also includes a relationship with these who find themselves in a neutral position. It is with reference to “protagonists, antagonists, and audiences” (Hunt et al. 1994) like those who were present at the funeral but do not participate in all the ideological discourses, particularly the arguments around genocide. Daily Turkish newspaper Hürriyet launched an online poll to which more than 450,000 people replied. To the question, “Is it rightful to say ‘We are all Armenians’ to protest the Dink murder?” nearly half the respondents said ‘yes’.

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However, these placards have also been attacked by the ultranationalist MHP (Nationalist Movement Party) and secularist CHP (Republican People’s Party) for denigrating Turkishness. In addition, in the case of the funeral, it does not mean that they all acknowledged the Armenian Genocide. Human rights lawyer Eren Keskin says the crowd at the funeral surprised them as much as anybody, but the number of participants who were not happy with the slogan ‘We are all Armenians’ was not few, and she adds “I wonder how many of them would have remained if we had asked to talk about the Armenian Genocide.” Human Rights lawyer Eren Keskin (2017) says Kurdish journalist Musa Anter15 and human rights lawyer Tahir Elçi were assassinated in the same way, even maybe by the same mentality and ideology, but their funeral did not get much attention or solidarity. To Keskin, this is because they touched upon risky topics, but Dink was not a risky person, so she did not find such crowds very sincere. Yetvart Tomasyan, the chief editor of Aras Publishing House, agrees with Keskin, referring to certain Turkish intellectuals addressing Armenian-­ related issues who he does not consider sincere. Almost all the interviewees think that the majority of the crowds were not politicized and that they would mostly have opposed genocide debates. For instance, HAK-IŞ̇ confederation (Hak Iş̇ çi Sendikaları Konfederasyonu, Confederation of Turkish Real Trade Unions) changed their mind about attending the funeral after finding out that the slogan ‘We are all Armenians’ would be shouted. PODEM director Aybars Görgülü (2016) mentions that for much of the crowd “it was simply a dastardly murder, a journalist was shot from behind. Not everybody went with the consciousness of genocide.” Accordingly, it is also important to note that one should not generalize about the approach taken or the notions that support the collective protest of civil groups, initiatives and actors against the state’s discourse on the Armenian issue. For instance, while some activists addressing the Armenian Question acknowledge the Armenian Genocide, some, despite advocating a democratic solution to the Armenian issue, do not. In addition, one should differentiate between the approaches to the genocide, along with their socio-political conjunctures, of the Kurdish and the Turkish intelligentsia, NGOs, activists and politicians, but this has not been the case in relevant research. For instance, PODEM has published a report titled 1915 ve Ötesi: Türkiye’de Toplumsal Algı (1915 and Beyond: The Collective Perception in Turkey) which does not differentiate between the participants’ perspectives on the reconciliation process in terms of their Turkish and Kurdish ethnic background. This raises issues over the reliability of

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the research, as the approach by Kurdish intellectuals and members of the public regarding the genocide is radically different to that of their Turkish counterparts. Despite the ideological differences, Dink’s annual commemorations not only revitalize social memory but also political activism for many scholars, journalists and commentators. However, the former chief advisor Etyen Mahçupyan (2016) defines the activists seeking justice for Dink’s case as ‘marginal’ to the Armenian cemaat (community, the word derived from Arabic for a group of believers), and they are defined as Armenian bourgeois by Estukyan (2016). It is a fact that Dink’s assassination divided the Armenian community in Turkey into two categories. Some Armenians got scared of being identified after his assassination and are still not happy with the social movement that the assassination has created. According to Hratch Tchilingirian (2016), on the one hand, there are integrationists leaning toward left ideology basing their argument on the concept of citizenship and equality of rights. Dink himself was one of the leading representatives of this group. On the other hand, there are isolationists, as outlined by the VADIP Cooperation and Consultation Platform for Foundations. The newspapers titled Marmara and Jamanak are proponents of isolationism who apply self-censorship, for instance, and tend to refer to “the incidents of 1915” rather than genocide, while Agos, considered to be integrationist, uses the term ‘genocide’. There is a controversy about the Acting Patriarch Ateshian, who has been considered a tool of Turkish government propaganda (Bedrosyan 2018).16 In 2016 Acting Archbishop Aram Ateshian, General Vicar of the Armenian Patriarch of Turkey at that time, sent a highly controversial letter to President Erdoğan, criticizing the German Parliament’s decision to recognize the Armenian Genocide. The Patriarch’s letter caused much debate and anger among Armenians worldwide, including those in Turkey. Ateshian wrote in his letter, which was shared on his Facebook page: It is unacceptable that a parliament, which was formed by the votes of German citizens and has the duty of establishing laws for the peace, prosperity, and security of their nation, expressed its opinion, though it has no right to do so. It is unacceptable that this parliament legalized its decision on behalf of the entire German nation and considers itself a judge …

Ateshian’s letter made no reference to the Armenian Genocide as such. Agos commented on the letter, reminding him of the heterogeneous

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structure of the Armenian community, observing that he was not talking on behalf of all Armenians, and adding “a specific statement of denialism against your own people. We will shortly see who will ‘enthusiastically welcome’ your words…. We pray that God bestows upon you good sense, sound judgment and thoughtfulness.” In 2014, Ateşhian welcomed Erdoğan’s statement of condolence to the victims of the 1915 events, although many found the statement insincere and inadequate. Again, on 26 March 2010, Surp Pırgiç Armenian Hospital Foundation president Bedros Şirinoğlu published a statement and thanked Erdoğan on behalf of the Armenian community for the return of eight estates confiscated by the state years ago, and Şirinoğlu was presented as the leader of the Armenian community in the daily agenda issued by the Press Office of the Prime Minister.17 A group of Armenian intellectuals circulated a signed statement arguing that the issue of confiscated Armenian community foundation estates had not been completely resolved and stating that the signatories rejected Şirinoğlu’s statement as representing the Armenian community overall.18 Many Armenians’ disapproval of the Acting Patriarchate and Bedros Şirinoğlu illustrates the division within the community. Aybars Gorgülü, like Etyen Mahçupyan, is very critical about Armenians such as Dink who brought the genocide debates into the open. They argue that only marginal Armenians in Turkey (referring to certain people linked to Nor Zartonk, Agos and some human right organizations) and those in diaspora such as supporters of the Dashnak Party (Armenian Revolutionary Federation) seek recognition of the genocide. Görgülü (2016) clarifies his point as “neither cemaat nor the Republic of Armenia has demanded the acknowledgement of genocide by Turkey. Armenia only wants the borders to be opened again. And those more marginal want the hatred language to be abolished and, for instance, they do not want their prime minister to say, ‘Excuse me Armenian,’” referring to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s remark which was broadcast live on a private TV channel in 2014: “Some called me a Georgian. Others called me even excuse me, an Armenian in a shameful way. I am a Turk!” meaning that it was ugly to be called an Armenian.19 Erdoğan’s remark drew anger on social media, and in the same year, a group of well-known Turkish-Armenian intellectuals and business people cynically calling themselves ‘Excuse us, Armenians’ issued a statement which says, “[F]or years we were forced to shout out that we are Turkish. But we never found it ugly. We found it wrong. We were upset being persistently told who we are. … Did we have

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any enemies of Turks, any racists among us? Of course we did, as much as any other nation. But we didn’t crown these racists […] as a people whose ancestry has been pulverized; we continue to live quietly as a diaspora on our own land.“20 The critics blamed Erdoğan for playing the sectarian and ethnic card in the run-up to the presidential elections. Eventually, his party won the elections once more, and he became president of Turkey in 2014. In subsequent years, his denialist discourse has become harsher, as he has adopted a more aggressive and threatening tone aiming to divide the ‘good’ Armenians (who he also refers to as “our Armenians”) who do not talk about the genocide from the ‘bad’ Armenians (referring to diaspora Armenians) who are accused of bringing up the accusations of genocide against Turks.

5.2   Resource Mobilization: The Apology Campaign, Electoral Advocacy, Gezi Park Protests In terms of tactics, new social movement theorists emphasize the decentralized nature of power and resistance, and they assert that participants in contemporary social movements concentrate on everyday life and culture and on symbolic forms of resistance in a wide variety of ways. The repertoire of contention includes strikes, demonstrations and social movements, with petitions also considered a form of protest (Tilly 1978, 2004). Similarly, the activists and organic intellectuals through new social movements in Turkey have sought “to pluralize society with expressive forms of understanding and diverse communities rather than the perceived limitations of competitive, monolithic and divisive nationalisms” (Nagle 2008, p. 305). The issue of continuity over time is also important, with alternation between ‘visible’ and ‘latent’ phases (Melucci 1996). The reactions which resulted from Dink’s assassination have been manifested in large-­ scale mobilizations (strikes, rallies, demonstrations) including protests organized by IHD and the annual commemoration, and there are also less visible or latent forms of organization and communication among groups that constitute the everyday life and continuity of actor participation, including the Apology Campaign. Following his assassination, in 2008, the Apology Campaign (Özür Diliyoruz) was set up by a group of Turkish ̇ elite (notably Ahmet Insel, Baskın Oran and Cengiz Aktar), and has attracted great attention as these signatories are in a position to use media in other languages, enabling them to lead the dissemination of the issue

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within the international community.21 On 12 December 2008 a ‘We Apologize’ (Özür Diliyoruz) online campaign launched by a number of Turkish intellectuals gathered over 30,000 Turkish and Kurdish signȧ tures.22 Insel (2017) says that the reason why they only got 32,000 signatories was because the petition required lots of personal information to be included in order to demonstrate the full commitment of the signatories. Many potential participants hesitated and were scared to share their information online. Indeed, the content of the petition and the surrounding campaign have been the subject of much controversy. The petition states: “I cannot in good conscience accept the indifference to the Great Disaster that Ottoman Armenians suffered in 1915, and its denial. I reject this injustice and, acting of my own will, I share the feelings and pain of my Armenian brothers and sisters, and I apologize to them.” There have been mixed reactions. For instance, while Gürsel pointed out that this type of apology is historic because it is a first, this is not because the intellectual brings herself to the service of the topic, but because the topic serves to rejuvenate the intellectual’s prominence and controversial value in the public sphere.23 Laurent Leylekian, executive director of the European Armenian Federation, in a May 2009 speech published in the Armenian Reporter critiquing both Turkish intellectuals and Kemalism as a social phenomenon, notes a wide range of anti-Kemalist intellectuals in Turkey, some of whom “oppose the Turkish state system” while others “simply want to improve its image.”24 One of the four people who launched the campaign, Baskın Oran (2017), says he was blamed for denigrating Turkishness with this petition, and, due to his active involvement in the campaign, he was asked if he was Armenian or if he was bribed by Armenians. Since then, in any international discussions, elite-led solidarity networks have played an integral role in launching the public debate on the Armenian issue, a pioneering step toward marginalized communities and the creation of awareness within the elite groups, but one which did not mobilize the rest of society. So the Apology Campaign was a groundbreaking step toward resolution of the Armenian Question, starting with the public apology for the 1915 events with the aim of inspiring a state apology, but it was just one of many other steps mobilizing the society and initiators. In the first general election after Dink’s murder (July 2007), there were some independent parliamentary candidates with left-wing affiliation. Baskin Oran was one of them, and he can be regarded as a ‘rational actor’ in the framework of resource mobilization theory. Resource mobilization

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theory is relevant and useful in the current research as it underlines the importance of ‘resources’ as a ‘required link’ between a desire for change and the ability of mobilize around that desire (Zald and McCarthy 2002). The ‘rational actor’ (individual and group), employing strategic and instrumental reasoning, replaces the crowd as the central referent for the analysis of collective action (Cohen 1985, p. 674). During six months of political campaigning for Oran in the elections, people from different political affiliations worked together with apolitical people in the name of their shared moral and universal principles. He took the genocide debates into the political arena rather than letting them be hidden behind closed ̇ doors. One of the initiators of the Apology Campaign, Ahmet Insel (2017), comments on Baskın’s campaign and its contribution to the social mobilization: Dink and genocide debates were one of the main campaign topics, including the campaign of politician and economist Ufuk Uras who became the first socialist independent candidate. Oran was not elected, but Uras was elected to the Turkish parliament. These political campaigns of such politicians contributed a lot to the mobilization of youth, and I have seen the same movement in Gezi Park. Those who contributed during the election campaign were active participants in the Gezi Park protest.25

People like Oran have conferred a new acceptability on ‘unconventional’ forms of political participation. First, they try to change political priorities. Second, they question the prevailing definition of what politics are, penetrating the institutional line between the private and public sector in new arenas of conflict like the waves of Gezi Park protest. The political relevance of what seemed to be unpolitical becomes a public theme. In other words, the personal becomes political; one can find connections between personal experiences and larger social and political structures.26 Professor Soli Özel (2014) argues that the protests were about educated urban middle-­class youth’s desire to be left alone. For instance, the Gezi Parks protests became a political task and private and social matters were opened to political analysis and discussion. The Gezi Park protests erupted in Istanbul in May 2013, originating from an environmental protest protecting trees which were to be cut down and replaced by a shopping center in the park located in Taksim.27 On the morning of 28 May 2013, around 50 protestors were camping out in Gezi Park in order to prevent its demolition and were attacked by the police with water, plastic bullets and tear

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gas, with the intention of ending the protests. In the early days of the protest, Sirri Sureyya Önder, former MP for the Turkish-Kurdish left, Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), laid his body, with others, in front of bulldozers to stop them from destroying the park’s 70-year-old trees and was hospitalized. In the next few days, they left eight dead and thousands of seriously injured people. The protests, subsequently named the Gezi Resistance (Gezi Direnişi), included protestors from different ethnic background and ideology but with the common stance of opposing the antidemocratic politics of the government. Researchers have highlighted several forms of social organization, besides formal organizations, that serve as the mobilizing structures for social movements, including infrastructures, social ties and networks, affinity groups and coalitions (McAdam et  al. 1996). Accordingly, Gezi Direnisi was shortly transformed into a movement, which incorporated a neighborhood forum, solidarity organization and resistance. The participants in the Gezi Park protests had also been very active protesting Dink’s assassination and reaching broader neṫ works, as Insel underlines. The Armenian issue had rarely been discussed or brought to the attention of non-Armenians until the assassination. Hence, it is possible to see a certain continuity between the protests against Hrant Dink’s assassination and the wider Gezi Movement that was primarily a non-violent uprising against authoritarianism and police violence. The Gezi Movement (Gezi Haraketi), like Dink’s commemorations, has revealed new transformative effects of social movements in Turkey. While some of these initiatives have limited resources based around informal networks, others have a more formal organized form, with access to more extensive resources. Formed into a platform called Taksim Solidarity (Taksim Dayanışması), they always referred to Hrant Dink’s assassination at their public demonstrations and in other strategic frameworks such as social media, street and performance art and sit-ins. The Armenian Question was firmly implanted in their agenda. The Armenian filmmaker Dikran Hızmalyan says that at the Gezi occupation he saw “the same faces, the same protesters that have carried Hrant’s portrait as the symbol of freedom for many years,” adding that Gezi Park was constructed from marble stolen from the former Armenian cemetery.28 Politicians such as Sırrı Süreyya Önder who played an active role in the Gezi Park protests were also among those bringing up the Armenian Question in both the public sphere and the Turkish Parliament, and can be seen as examples of actors viewing social and political movements as goal-oriented extensions of everyday political processes which are engaged

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in by various constituencies pursuing desired social change as the resource mobilization theory proposes. Apart from his solidarity with the Gezi Park protests and genocide and Dink commemorations, and his active participation in any relevant collective action, Önder often raised the genocide debates and court rulings regarding Dink’s assassination to the Turkish parliament. Carrying public resistance and protest into the parliament is a way of attracting attention to the links between the shared goals of social change among often marginalized constituencies and their ability to access the resources needed to engage in collective action.

5.3   Mobilization Among Armenians in Istanbul Armenian cultural, ethnic and national identities do share common characteristics, as described by previously mentioned scholars. Razmik Panossian eloquently describes the relationship between Armenian ethnic and national identity, how the distinguishing features of Armenian identity—the building blocks—were laid in ancient times: religion, language, territorial basis, myths and symbols. These objective historical characteristics of ‘Armenianness’ enabled the group to survive into the modern period when the subjective dimension was introduced on the road to nationhood, transforming the collective from an ethnic group into a nation (2006, p.  23). Armenian identity includes changing conceptions and symbolizations over time in different contexts which include the multi-cultural states that the Armenians live in. The genocide and its denial are of course central to the formation of a different dimension of Armenian identity. The basic argument is that there are two Armenian entities, the homeland (the Republic of Armenia) and the diaspora, which differ from one another in their collective identity and politics despite being united subjectively as one nation (Panossian 2002). However, if Istanbul is considered to be diaspora, this distinction is multiplied. Even if Istanbul is considered the ‘largest and most historic Armenian diaspora community’ (Tölölyan 2014), there are distinctive differences between Armenians in Istanbul and other diasporic lands, as Armenians still live with the daily practices of the denialist state and its policies. So diaspora is a difficult concept to apply to the Armenians of Istanbul. There is a special burden upon those who stayed, and they are sometimes described as ‘internal diaspora’ (Sheklian 2014, p.  154). There are many Armenians who migrated from such places as Malatya or Sivas. During the Republican era (usually called ‘Anadolulu’ [from Anatolia]), there were also Armenians

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living in Istanbul for centuries (called ‘Istanbullu’ [from Istanbul]). Assessments of the exact number of Armenians living and working in Istanbul vary, but 60,000–70,000 seems to be the common estimate, not including those who migrated from the Republic of Armenia.29 There are criticisms directed at state policies or some sections of the intelligentsia’s efforts to remember Armenians of Istanbul, as “the experiences of non-­ Muslim groups started to be spoken about in Turkey in a period when they have been already expelled from the Anatolian geography and their cultural heritage was nearly lost” (Bilal 2006, p. 6). Armenians are seen as “vanishing colours of Anatolia” or a part of “the Anatolian mosaic” by state institutions, a continuation of the hegemonic nationalist cultural politics (Ibid.) which attempts to cover up the long history of displacement and loss that people in Anatolia have experienced, and the ‘colors’ discourse tries to present living cultures as frozen museum pieces detached from their meanings, contexts, histories, social relations and specific geographies (Bilal 2006, p. 6). The Turkish state attempted to coerce Armenians here to endorse official policies and isolate them from other Armenians in diaspora. The Armenians of Turkey were politically and socially marginalized, since they were not allowed to unite their voices with those of relatives living in other countries (Suciyan 2016, p.  201). Accordingly, Papazian’s ethnographic research (2017) proposed that the different groups of Armenians in Turkey (the Christian Armenian Community, Muslim Armenian Citizens of Turkey [Islamized Armenians] and Armenian migrants from the Republic of Armenia) are seen as closest to each other when looked at from a fourth and foreign perspective: that of Turkish nationalism.30 According to Melissa Bilal, although many Armenians in Istanbul think that they have never left their homelands, not only the memory of the violent annihilation of the Armenian presence in Anatolia and the displacement of Armenians from their homelands, but also the current nationalist identity politics in Turkey which disrupts Armenians’ ties with their cultural heritage and silences their memories make them feel displaced in their home today (2016). Tomasyan (2016) also underlines the increased significance of the Armenians of Istanbul for the Armenian diaspora. They have become more valued by Armenian diaspora since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, “now they see us as the guardian of the roots in the land of origin. Before, it wasn’t like that. Before Armenians in Beirut were valuable but the war broke them down. Then we became the survivors of the culture.” However, Hayko Bağdat (2016) still complains about

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the perception of Istanbulite Armenians (or Bolcetzi) among Armenian diaspora, saying that “for Armenian diaspora I am a Turk as I still live in Turkey and speak in Turkish, but funnily enough I am an Armenian in Turkey for Turks, regardless of what I think,” referring to Turkish nationalists. Armenians who remained or returned to their homes in Turkey after the genocide and deportations received little scholarly attention until a decade ago, although today’s Istanbul is the richest city in the world in terms of the Armenian heritage of the nineteenth century, the golden age of modern Armenian culture (Zekiyan 1997, p. 1). Armenian writer and columnist Karakaşlı also points out that Armenians are starting to be identified and represented much better, “the movements have led to improvement in the relationship between Turkish Armenians and diaspora. Diaspora was angry with Turkish Armenians just because they speak Turkish. They were seen as ransom by diaspora Armenians but this perception of Turkish Armenians in the diaspora has changed dramatically in recent years.” It is true that research on Turkish Armenians has increased and Armenian funding bodies tend to support these projects. For instance, Calouste Gulbenkian launched its Five-Year Programme in 2013 emphasizing revitalization of Western Armenian and Armenian-­ Turkish dialogue, and this has contributed to the recent studies on Turkish Armenians.31 However, although there is a strong connection between community ties and the definition of identity, being Armenian in Turkey is diverse and definitely not static (Komsuoğlu and Örs 2007). Armenians in Istanbul overall can be categorized as local (Istanbul Armenians), migrant (those who migrated from the Republic of Armenia) and Muslim Armenians (also referred to as Islamized Armenians), and they are not necessarily at ease with each other or approve of each other in every sense. For the local Christian Armenians, Armenian identity is mostly an ethno-religious identity. It is very much tied with being a member of the Armenian Church, which is related to the Turkish state’s categorization of Armenians as a religious minority and its oppression or censorship of trans-religious understandings of Armenianness, and for them Church is an important spectrum within which to learn Armenianness.32 They might not necessarily see Armenia as their homeland as there is difference between being a local Armenian and a migrant from Armenia because the Armenian community in Turkey has accentuated its ethnic, religious and cultural difference to draw the lines of its communal boundaries, and create a conceptual space of communal belonging.33 These religious, ethnic and cultural spaces

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of belonging have provided the only devices for Turkey’s Armenians to continue their existence within the hegemony of the Turkish nation and to shape their communal identity. However, looking at the nature and content of the protests and media releases, it can be said that Dink’s assassination activated those who advocate integration based on the concept of the citizenship and equality of rights and aspirations of all citizens without assimilation, not those who can be considered ‘isolationist’, such as the ̇ VADIP (Vakıflar Arası Dayanışma ve Iletiş im Platformu) trusts, the leadership in the Patriarchate, the community church and charitable trusts, and Armenian language newspapers such as Marmara and Jamanak, as described by Tchilingirian (2016). Those ‘isolationists’ not only argue that integration would corrode the identity of the community, but they also prefer to remain silent when there are any state violations or crimes or any public debates on the genocide or Dink’s assassination. Similarly, to Aras Publishing House chief editor Rober Koptaş (2016), some groups in the Armenıan cemaat who can be considered isolationists do not want to be noticed as Armenians in public or media, so they are not happy with ongoing activities and protests by or about Armenians.34 Sevan Değirmenciyan, Armenian philologist, thinks that, after the announcement of the establishment of the Armenian Republic, Dink’s assassination was the second incident leading to mobilization among Armenian youth, and adds, “it has contributed to the development of Armenian NGOs and civil organizations, we used to have a school graduates organization which was bringing us together before Dink but now there are other civil initiatives” (2016).35 Armenians have a historic Christian faith that promotes community. Although Armenians are largely seen as secular people, Church tradition, which acquired symbolic authority, linked with ethnic revival, is often considered the main pillar of Armenian identity. Besides, during the Ottoman period, the social organization of the society, which was based on religious categories, contributed to the growing importance of religion within the Armenian community. Religion and especially the Church provided a common ground for the Armenians to feel a sense of belongingness to their community. Many Armenian civil organizations were shut down by the 1980 military coup, so churches become the centers where Armenians get socialized and mobilized for any upcoming event. Dink’s assassination and the protests and street activities led by other groups have activated some Armenians in Turkey too. However, one can distinguish between young Armenians and

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their parents in terms of advocacy and activism. When asked about the reasons for Armenian youth activation after Dink, Paylan (2017) says, Actually, the activation increased in the years following Dink’s murder. You can say Dink was killed because he was an activist, but what about Sevag Şahin Balıkçı [killed in 2011]? He was an ordinary Armenian and killed during his military service as well, so we realized that whether we talk or not, we can be killed because of our Armenian identity. In 1915 very few Armenians were resisting, 90 per cent of them were silent, but still they were slaughtered. We should not remain silent, because we are right.

Paylan comments on the atmosphere before Dink showed up as a public speaker, saying: We grew up with the silencing attitudes of our parents as they were scared. Dink has a big role in my politicization like many others. We used to watch with excitement when he was on TV. He was the visible one and he always reminded us of our Armenian identity. I was always a leftist person and pro-­ human rights, but after Dink’s assassination I became an Armenian again. I knew what my grandmother went through in the genocide. I listened to her memories, but it was just listening. I witnessed Hrant’s death, so it was different. Genocide was our grandparents’ trauma but Hrant became ours.36

Nor Zartonk founder Sayat Tekir (2016) makes a comparison between active and mobilized Armenian youth and the older generation, who do not like their Armenian identity to be visible, “we, as youth, grew up without the negative effects of ASALA. We are brave because we have not experienced past atrocities as they did. We have only experienced verbal assaults rather than physical. But we experienced the assassination of Dink, so death, which was a huge thing for Armenian youth.”37 Similarly, Hayko Bağdat (2016) states, “Armenians know that there is a high chance that the state commits any crimes. The state has done the genocide, all these taxation laws in the past, and then killed Dink, so they think the state can do everything.”38 The interviewees of Armenian descendants agree that Armenians have become more outspoken and brave in speaking up on the issues that Turkish-Armenians have been going through, and even other human rights violations. Aras Publishing House editor-in-chief Koptaş says, [W]e were still even quite cautious until Dink was murdered. But seeing that even a very peaceful innocent person was killed, and then we stopped

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being cautious. It is true that Dink’s assassination scared some groups of Cemaat [community] but it has definitely led to a mobilization in my generation. Armenian youth are very active now. Before Dink was assassinated, he was the only visible Armenian, but after him there are many Dinks who are outspoken and courageous.

Kanayan Yara (bleeding wound), referring to the Armenian Question, was repeatedly used by several of my interviewees when asked about the reason for their activism. They say Turkey’s refusal to acknowledge the Armenian massacre as a genocide deepens the wound. The sense of moral outrage in part stems from absolute absence of acknowledgment, reparations, repair and social justice, keeping the wound deep and keeping the sense of moral anger alive. The reaction to Dink’s assassination and the open debates on Armenian issues made people more courageous as commonly declared during interviews. For instance, as Yetvart Tomasyan (2016) says, “we used to meet some people in book fairs who would lean forward and secretly say they were Armenians to us. They were secretly looking for books to chase their ancestors but this is not the case any longer. They are brave now.” Similarly, Rober Koptaş (2016) also refers to the increasing number of outspoken Armenians as he says “the discussions on the Armenian Genocide were always made by non-Armenians until 2000. There were Ragıp Zarakolu and Taner Akçam, ethnically Turkish and writing on Armenians in a brave way. But now there are Armenians too after Dink’s assassination.”39 Karakaşlı agrees with Koptaş, Paylan and Bağdat in terms of the increasing activation of Armenians since Dink, but she also rightly underlines the presence of other Armenians who do not see the 1915 events as genocide mainly because of fear, whereas there are also other Armenians who think and act differently and are actively involved with the debates and resistance groups, notably the Nor Zartonk movement, who are mostly of the younger generation. Nor Zartonk contributed to the politicization of others, especially Armenian youth, but its director Tekir says, Dink’s death triggered even non-politicized Armenian youth. Of course there were those who panicked after the rise of slogans such as ‘We are All Turks, We are All Mehmet’ following the controversial slogan ‘We are All Armenians’, who wished for an earthquake to change the agenda as they were not happy with being in the spotlight. It was the same feeling they had after the recognition of the genocide by the French parliament. Even the

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Ararat film has resulted in the rise of Turkish nationalist attitudes against Armenians. I can understand the fear of their mothers and fathers. They witnessed fascism throughout Republican history. But there were also those who thought nothing would be the same after Dink’s assassination and they have nothing to lose after Dink.40

Bearing in mind that the interviews took place during 2016 and 2017, the observations on the outspokenness of Armenians in the public sphere might not necessarily be applicable today. Along with changing political conjunctures since 2016, Armenians have seen restored churches wrecked in military operations and the government block their efforts to elect a new spiritual leader. Two political activists of Hemshin Armenian origin, Cemil Aksu and his wife Nurcan Vayic Aksu, were arrested by Turkish police due to social media posts that were critical of the Turkish government in 2017.41 As long-time political activists and writers, the Aksus have written and spoken out not only about local history and identity in the Hemshin region, but also on environmental matters, women’s rights and Turkish politics, among other matters. Again, a prominent Turkish-­ Armenian activist, Alexis Kalk, was taken into custody in April 2019 for making controversial anti-Turkish narratives and using the term ‘genocide’ during a requiem service on Armenian Genocide commemoration day. Other Nor Zartonk members state that the use of the word ‘genocide’ has been increasingly suppressed by the ruling AKP government and their ultra-nationalist coalition partner MHP, as President Erdoğan takes reinvigorates his denialism on the 104th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. The political turmoil has splashed onto the streets as well. For instance, in September 2017, unidentified assailants threw stones and shouted “Death to Armenians” at churchgoers celebrating a baptism in Istanbul. MP Garo Paylan does not believe that Erdoğan’s party deliberately targets non-Muslims but worries that rival political forces can play the card any time, knowing there is bias against the Armenian identity, and organize provocations against minorities, and Armenians know that, and that is why they are silent again. In this environment, many are reminded of the fate of Hrant Dink. However, Erdoğan has in the past suggested kicking out undocumented Armenian nationals in response to moves by other nations to recognize the genocide. Armenians from the Republic of Armenia who reside and work in Istanbul often face greater scrutiny when foreign governments pressure Turkey to formally recognize the genocide.

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Mustafa Destici, the Chair of the Great Unity Party (BBP), which is a part of the Alliance for the Public with The Justice and Development Party (AKP) and Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), has commented on the declaration of April 24 as the Commemoration Day for the Armenian Genocide in France. Destici repeatedly suggested deporting 100,000 Armenians from Turkey in 2016 and 2017, and again made similar remarks in 2019.

5.4   Cultural and Symbolic Tactics: Networked Activism and Initiatives by Civil Society Despite the ideological differences, Dink’s assassination has triggered the establishment of many civil groups and initiatives to fight against the inequality, censorship and oppression in Turkey using the assassination as the starting point. The emergence of these initiatives, civic groups, NGOs and intelligentsia triggered by the assassination represent a form of political contestation complying with the definition of processes of mobilization which include the struggles of political parties, ethnic groups, civilian groups and lobbies from peaceful social movements to revolutions as actors of mobilization. Movements for the defense of human rights, freedom of expression and cultural differences reached their climax during the mobilizations around Dink’s death, which also crystallized social memory issues (Demirhisar 2016) through collective identity which is strongly associated with the recognition and the creation of connectedness (Pizzorno 1978) as it brings a sense of common purpose and shared commitment to a cause, which enables single activists or organizations to regard themselves as inextricably linked to other actors, not necessarily identical but surely compatible, a broader collective mobilization (Touraine 1981). The mechanisms of ‘collective action’ are involved in conflictual relations with clearly identified opponents, are linked by dense informal networks and share a distinct collective identity (Della Porta and Diani 2007, p.  20). Along with conflictual collective action, social movement actors are engaged in political and or cultural conflicts meant to promote or oppose social change, which requires the identification of targets for collective efforts articulated in social or political terms. Many of the actors’ endeavors after Dink can be interpreted as attempts to reshape a democratic political culture and to reintroduce the normative dimension of social action into political life.

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The Hrant Dink Foundation was founded after Dink’s assassination, its aim being to promote democratic values, cultural and historical dialogue and cross-border cooperation between Turkey and Armenia through various research projects, workshops and conferences such as Hrant Dink Memorial workshops, offering human rights awards to brave figures like Dink rather than victimized ones and organizing Armenian language and cultural courses. These activities particularly aimed to retrieve collective memory with an exhibition (Armenian Architects of Istanbul in the Era of Westernization), conferences (e.g., Adana 1909: History, Memory, Identity from a 100 Year Perspective, Cultural Interactions in the Ottoman Empire) and workshops about the social and economic history of the Diyarbakır and Mardin regions. In 2011, with financial support from the Swedish NGO Olof Palme International Centre, The Hrant Dink Foundation initiated an oral history project which aimed to trace the vanished cultural life of the Armenians in a number of Turkish cities.42 This project, together with these publications, was of vital importance for Turkish society to be able to understand the suppressed lives of the Anatolian Armenians since the genocide. The foundation has also been providing fellowship programs such as the Turkey-Armenia Fellowship Scheme and the Turkey-Armenia Travel Grant within the framework of the Support to the Armenia-Turkey Normalization Process financed by the European Union. Normalization between Armenia and Turkey was Dink’s dream, says Zeynep Taşkın (2016). Apart from the reconstructing collective memory and normalizing the relations between Turkey and Armenia, the foundation especially values the research on hatred discourse, as Taşkın says: “We believe Hrant was the victim of hatred discourse.” So, the foundation founded ASULIS (Discourse, Dialogue, Democracy Laboratory), which is the first social sciences laboratory in Turkey that works on discrimination and hate speech in media and daily discourse. They aim to turn the foundation into the Armenian Research Centre. There is one in Kayseri, which promotes research on the hatred element of official discourse. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, research concerning new social movements has turned to the metaphor of the network (e.g., Arquilla and Ronfeldt 2001; Pickard 2006a, b) to illustrate the role of narratives circulated within and between diffused activist organizations in the establishment of communities of resistance. Such research has demonstrated how activists pass information framed within nebulous narratives characterized by themes such as “be the media” (Pickard 2006a) or “democracy” (Atkinson and Dougherty 2006) through the use of media

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produced exclusively within their networks. The civil society, initiatives and groups have developed their networking with the use of social media. They have got to the point that they will sound stronger if they are cooperating. For instance, apart from various scholarly and public activities taking place in Istanbul, the Hrant Dink Foundation has tried to reach eastern provinces in Turkey through cooperation with the municipalities and local institutes. For instance, in 2012, a scientific meeting on the social and economic history of Diyarbakır and region was organized by the foundation with the collaboration of Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality Culture Department, Diyarbakır Chamber of Trade and Industry (DTSO) ̇ and Diyarbakır Political and Social Research Institute (DISA). In the conference, presentations drew attention to the fate of the non-Muslim properties. Theorists have also long noted that social networks, relational ties and friendships serve as important channels for recruiting people to a cause, especially for high-risk protest movement actions (Snow et  al. 1986; McAdam 1982). Many activists, particularly youth, receive information about mobilizations and contentious (as well as electoral) politics that they may not receive otherwise through digital channels from someone they trust, which Marco Giugni (1998) finds increases the likelihood of their participation. What Bruce Bimber (2003) calls “accelerated pluralism.” New technology allows organizers to reach a critical mass quickly and cheaply. One of the new civil and solidarity groups arising from Dink’s assassination exemplifying this ‘accelerated pluralism’ is Nor Zartonk (New Resistance), an Armenian NGO which grew very quickly from a mailing list in 2004 into a very active political network after the assassination of Dink. As used to complement resource mobilization theory, the new media theories indicate the importance of the peer-to-peer sharing of information which takes place within Nor Zartonk and across broader spectrums of society without heavy reliance on the mainstream media. It has shown that weak ties forged in cyberspace can develop into strong ties with on-the-ground mobilization efforts and protest activity, and nuanced forms of organizational flexibility that allow for more grassroots forms of participation and a broader spectrum for conversation and discussion. Individuals can become involved in action through their personal connections to people already involved as Nor Zartonk members have influenced many nonpolitical Armenian youth with whom they are connected from their childhood, by education or neighborhood. Nor Zartonk’s mobilization endeavors represent the growing symbiotic relationship between

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e-activism and local organizing. The same group established Nor Radio in 2009 and then established Ermeni Dayanışma Derneği (Armenian Solidarity Foundation) in 2010, which is involved in many socio-cultural activities such as exhibitions, workshops, film screenings and conferences. Networks with strong narrative capacity are able to effectively circulate narratives about social justice and resistance to most, if not all, activists within the network. Melucci’s conception of ‘public space’ (1980) is similar to Habermas’s (1981) as well as Touraine’s idea of the expansion of ‘civil society’ (2007) whereby contemporary movements contest the control of an increasing range of social activities (Cohen and Arato 1992). Nor Zartonk is defined as a ‘public movement’ by its director Sayat Tekir (2016), who adds, “[I]t is not easy to start a movement in the borders where genocide took place.” Nor Zartonk struggled for the return of Kamp Armen with the slogan ‘Let Kamp Armen be returned to the Armenian people’, the orphanage originally belonging to Gedikpaşa Armenian Protestant Church. This got the support of other leftist and democratic groups. Nor Zartonk showed that connectivity in cyberspace through mailing lists can provide a basis for local forms of participation in political and social issues. It has shown that weak ties forged in cyberspace can develop into strong ties with on-the-ground mobilization efforts and protest activity, and nuanced forms of organizational flexibility that allow for more grassroots forms of participation and a broader spectrum for conversation and discussion. Some scholars view the digital revolution as having a positive effect on mobilizing endeavors. Castells (2001) argues that new information and communication technologies (ICTs) invigorate an explosive type of informational politics, “resulting in a new kind of civil society based on the electronic grassrooting of democracy” (Carty 2019, p. 29). The return of the property, and its rescue from demolition by the government, was the result of a grassroots campaign that reached far beyond the ethnic Armenian community. ‘New social movements’, in a general sense, refers to a diverse array of collective actors who are raising new issues, are the carriers of new values, operate in new terrains, employ new modes of action and have presumably displaced the old social movements that focused more on specific issues such as class, race or gender. Accordingly, although leaning toward the left as a political ideology, Sunni Turks, Kurds, Alevis, LGBTs and those who were originally conservatives (under the influence of the agitational politics of Erdoğan against Kemalist ideology, e.g., the headscarf debate) all participated in the solidarity movements in order to enable conflict

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resolution and participate in the democratization process. Irkçılığa ve Milliytçiliğe Dur de Platformu (Say No to Racism and Nationalism Initiative) was established just after the assassination of Hrant Dink as a protest against hate crimes against Armenians, and has taken a very active role in mobilizing civil society through social media, calling for the protests and commemorations for the Armenians on the streets. They have expanded its circle and gone on to support the rights of other non-­Muslims and vulnerable groups living in Turkey. For instance, in 2014, Irkçılığa ve Milliytçiliğe Dur de Platformu organized a public event to commemorate the mass killings of Romany people during the Second World War, a group who are underrepresented at Holocaust commemorations. The strong networking between these groups encouraged non-organized ordinary people to participate in many public demonstrations and protests. Estukyan (2016) describes such social movements after Dink’s assassination as a collective demand for reconciliation for the Armenian Genocide which has also been associated with the demand for democracy. People start to think that if we don’t speak about 1915, we can’t speak of the Madımak or Maraş massacre [in 1978].43 The Turkish state has not given an account of the 1915 events, so that’s why they could lead to other massacres happening throughout this century.44

Accordingly, during the debates and struggle regarding the Armenian Genocide, Dink’s assassination or Armenian socio-political issues, other human rights concerns, especially the Kurdish issue, have also been included, to create ‘social memory’. As Fentress and Wickham (1992, p. 25) argue, “[S]ocial memory is an expression of collective experience: social memory identifies a group, giving it a sense of its past and defining its aspirations for the future. In doing so, social memory often makes factual claims about past events.” Through mobilization on the Armenian Question and Dink’s case, Turkey’s other past or ongoing atrocities have always been emphasized. To the journalist Cafer Solgun (2017), thanks to the debates on Armenian issues, the public have also felt the urge to discuss Turkey’s other unresolved and ongoing issues. Similarly, answering the question ‘Why do non-Armenian activists advocate for Armenians?’ Armenian author and poet Karakaşlı sees the Armenian Question as an issue of confrontation and remorse as, if the genocide is not seen and acknowledged, massacres of other groups will continue. In fact, along with her activism on the Armenian Question, Karakaşlı is also very active

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in relation to the Kurdish issue and has played an active role in the pro-­ Kurdish party HDP. In her new bilingual chapbook, History-Geography, she explores her anguish for Turkey’s silent histories, from the 1915 Armenian Genocide to the denial of Kurdish identity today. She writes about the rights of Kurds, LGBT people and women in her column in Agos, and she explains it is her “duty to do something on the Kurdish issue. It is the same issue with the rights of LGBT people and women,” and she thinks they need advocacy even more than Armenians. New social movements are indicative of an increased consciousness that embraces a global, compassionate perspective and involves grassroots activities across dispersed geographical locations and identity politics on a global scale. The focus is more on resisting power in the social or cultural spheres, democratizing new and existing public arenas and politicizing issues previously viewed as private to escape new and traditional forms of domination. Therefore, civil society becomes the domain of struggle in that it combines political and public spaces. Like Karakaşlı, many other Armenians have added inequalities and human rights violations related to other oppressed groups to their own cause, especially after 2007. So it is hard to differentiate specific claims or demands in the discourse of the groups, initiatives and individuals mentioned in this book; some have personal reasons for contributing to the mobilization and recognition of the genocide. For instance, Hasan Cemal, who is the grandson of Cemal Pasha, one of the architects of the genocide, is among those exceptional Turkish journalists who recognize the Armenian Genocide. Cemal visited the Armenian capital city Yerevan’s Genocide Memorial in 2008 and apologized to the Armenians for the genocide. In 2012, Hasan Cemal published his book titled 1915: Armenian Genocide, which he dedicated to the memory of Hrant Dink. In his book, which became a bestseller, he not only presents the factual data on the tragedy, but he also speaks about how his personal views have changed and how he turned from a genocide denier to a recognizer.45 To Papazian (2017, p. 68), “Nor Zartonk activists’ Armenian identity and the related activism serve as factors making their non-Armenian leftist-­ democratic struggle more encompassing and productive.” Nor Zartonk also took an active role in the Gezi Park protests, in which they voiced the slogan ‘You captured our graveyard, but you cannot capture our park’, referring to Surp Hagop graveyard next to the park, which had been confiscated at the time of the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923. As Parla and Özgül (2016) point out, the rhetorical deployment of the

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two ‘ours’ signals Nor Zartonk’s aim of rendering the Armenian minority part of the larger unity gathered to defend the park. Similarly, CHP MP Selina Doğan also says that she, as a politician in parliament, tries to represent all oppressed and isolated groups, not only Armenians. Hence it can be said that the Armenian issue and Dink’s case have been utilized as tools to seek the democratization of Turkey and advocacy of equality and freedom. ‘Action repertoire’ covers the action of any social movements such as protest events, petitions, campaigns, mass meetings, rallies, acts of civil obedience. These activities are outwardly directed in the sense that they are addressed to an opponent or to a third party. Usually in the shadow of these visible activities we can detect not only those activities embedded in our everyday life, but also inward-directed activities such as making films, collecting data or photographs regarding the conflict, or doing research on the specific problem, because in the long run every movement has a visible and a latent reality (Melucci 1984). The recent projects and initiatives, despite the restrictive environment imposed by the Turkish state, still aim to reflect the agony of the past in order for there to be a possible resolution for future generations, and this is the latent reality of the movement. In either case, their main objectives can be summarized as being to start a public debate on the Armenian Question, encouraging government to confront its past atrocities against Armenians (and Assyrians) during the First World War and, moving on from this, to challenge the ongoing repressive politics against other ethnic/religious or marginalized groups (e.g., women, LGBT individuals)—thereby creating collective action against the repressive policies of the Turkish government, despite the high risks involved. For instance, in 2015, a new project was initiated in Turkey and Armenia: ‘Acting Together’—designed as a dialogue project in the form of a road trip through Turkey and Armenia. A century after the genocide, the project aims to build bridges between the peoples of Turkey and Armenia through adult education, journalism, oral history and art. Twenty young people and two writers from Armenia and Turkey took part in a joint road trip, retracing the routes of survivors to Eastern Armenia in 1915. The students formed two groups, which concentrated either on conducting oral history interviews or on working on a road magazine. The project was funded by the German Foreign Ministry and implemented by DVV International (the Institute for International Cooperation of the Deutscher Volkshochschulen Verband) and its partner organizations, Hazarashen, the Centre for Ethnological Studies in Armenia, and in 2015

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Tarih Vakfı (History Foundation) in Turkey. They published a 200-page magazine based on the oral history of descendants of the surviving families on the escape route of Armenian refugees fleeing the genocide. Due to the political and security situation in Turkey, which changed dramatically in the second half of 2015, the project could not be conducted as planned. Because of that, only the Armenian part of the road trip has taken place. Alongside the boost in Armenian literary and cultural output, the Armenian Question has been very evident within the political arena created by non-Armenians. For instance, Saturday Mothers of Turkey (Cumartesi Anneleri),46 a mainly Kurdish civilian group that has been gathering since 1995 to seek information on their children who have disappeared while in police detention and to make the specter of disappearance visible in Turkey, has regularly commemorated the arrest of hundreds of Armenian intellectuals on 24 April 1915 (the first step in what became the Armenian Genocide), most of whom were subsequently deported and executed. Referring to the main reason for the commemoration, one of the participant mothers explained how thousands of sons had disappeared due to society’s failure to face the truth behind the ‘Union and Progress’ (İttihat ve Terakki) mentality that had led to the disappearance of ̇ Armenians in 1915. Insan Hakları Dernegi (IHD, The Human Rights Association), a very influential organization with 29 branches and over 10,000 members and activists, despite official hindrances, tries to organize a commemoration on 24 April in front of Haydarpaşa train station where hundreds of Armenian intellectuals were exiled on the same date in 1915. In 2013, IHD organized a full-scale commemoration in different parts of the city. Demonstrators commemorated the 236 Armenians by carrying pictures of them in front of the Turkish Islamic Art Museum, the former main prison (Merkez Cezaevi). It is significant that, although the commemoration of the Armenian Genocide was a regular feature on the IHD agenda, it passed peacefully until 2018, when the police force intervened and three protestors were arrested. The IHD also brought the official decision to demolish the Armenian orphanage, Kamp Armen in Istanbul (built in 1962 by the Gedikpaşa Armenian Protestant Church), in 2015 to the agenda of the Council of Europe and the European Parliament, claiming that Turkey was violating the Treaty of Lausanne in which the rights of its minorities were outlined. The Treaty of Lausanne, which is the foundation of the Turkish Republic, guarantees religious rights, and the Turkish state tried to emphasize the religious aspects so that claims could not be made for ethnic and national minorities. According to Melucci

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(1980), new social movements try to oppose the intrusion of the state and the market into social life, reclaiming individuals’ right to define their identities and to determine their private and affective lives against omnipresent and comprehensive manipulation of the system. In this sense, IHD actively supported the resistance, which was established to save the orphanage through struggles against demolition and for the land title and related property rights to be transferred to the Gedikpaşa Armenian Protestant Foundation. Efforts to save the orphanage received widespread attention, as it was also where Hrant Dink and his wife Rakel grew up. The council member from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), Hüseyin Sağ, observed that Kamp Armen was significant for that reason.47 Thanks to widespread resistance, which included activists and leading figures from the Armenian community, the demolition work stopped and the landowner was ordered to donate it to the foundation. In 2017, Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality Council accepted the construction plan, which meant that the orphanage was to be rebuilt taking the original building into account. Individuals create new connections through their previous connections by the very fact that they are involved in multiple forms of activism. From this perspective, individual activists operate as bridges between different organizational milieus, linking, social movement organizations to established political actors or institutions or to organizations mobilized for different causes (Della Porta and Diani 2007, p. 134). It is important to address KaosGL (Kaos Gey ve Lezbiyen Kültürel Araştırmalar ve Dayanışma Derneği, Kaos Gay and Lesbian Cultural Research and Solidarity Association) founded in 1994, which is one of the oldest and largest LGBT rights organizations in Turkey and the first Turkish organization to be legally registered as an association. They have also included the Armenian Genocide alongside Armenian LGBT rights in their agenda.48 They have made efforts to enhance their visibility within the public sphere on the Armenian Question and extended grassroots activity through their network of other organizations. They organized joint activities and protests with Agos on the Armenian Question while celebrating their twentieth anniversary in 2014. The organization’s spokesperson (2017) explains that although they fight against homophobic actions, one cannot leave other hatred issues aside, so they started to network with LGBT organizations based in Armenia and looked for ways to cooperate. In relation to dense informal networks, both individual and organized actors, while keeping their

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autonomy and independence, engage in sustained exchanges of resources in pursuit of common goals. Although these initiatives and the groups referred to in this book adopt their own methods and activities to commemorate the genocide and to call for state engagement with the issue and assurances of justice and democracy, they cooperate and come together on certain dates such as the commemoration of Dink and the genocide. Michael Mann (2000, p. 57) describes these networks as “interstitial locations that consist of the nooks and crannies in and around the dominant institutions,” where diverse groups of citizens can operate outside the formal political system and dominant institutions to raise new issues and promote new sets of values. He argues that groups that are marginal and blocked by the prevailing institutions can link together and cooperate in ways that transcend these institutions.49 KaosGL was also granted the international Hrant Dink award in 2015 for its persistent and efficient struggle for LGBT rights in Turkey, and the spokesperson adds, “[T]here is a parallel between homophobic tendencies and ethnic racism. They both start to get institutionalized by the state ideology. Instutionalized homophobes attempt to extend their demonized circle by including minorities.”50 The spokesperson of KaosGL continues by asserting, “[W]hat Armenians go through is not different from what homosexuals go through. The solidarity between us is a must, including with other organizations fighting for vulnerable groups and oppressed ones.” Hayko Bağdat (2016) agrees that transsexuals are killed for the same reasons Armenians were killed. Kurds are killed for the same reasons. Workers are killed at work due to lack of safety requirements. The state thinks they do not have to give an account of it. Look at the street names of Kurtuluş [meaning ‘Salvation’ in Turkish but used to refer to the Turkish War of Independence 1919–1923], Ergenekon, Talat Pasha, which show they [the official authorities] somehow reward the criminals.51

5.5   Retrieving ‘Silenced Memories’ Through the Movements The collective activists shape the future and the wider social forces that give rise to and share the struggles those players are involved in through various ways including tactical repertoires, criticizing official versions of history, demanding recovery of areas of history previously repressed. The

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collective remembrance and consciousness takes a different form through the individual efforts to reach out to the whole society demanding signs of a past that have been confiscated or suppressed. Pierre Nora (2002) classifies this kind of memory as ‘duty toward history’ rather than the ‘duty to remember’ which has been utilized by many organizations and initiatives regarding the Armenian Question as the ‘repertoire’, consisting of ‘memories of past struggles’, leading to the empowerment of the activists.52 The idea of ‘repertoire’, including the claims-making routines that shape how people think and act in the present (Tarrow 2012), uncovers a process of remembering and is already a widely used term in social movement studies. Apart from the role of journalism in the production and sustenance of collective memory (Carlson and Berkowitz 2014; Zelizer and Tenenboim-­ Weinblatt 2014; Kitch 2005), in the cultural sphere, debates and exhibitions about the memory of the Armenian Genocide started to take place after Dink’s assassination. In fact, new social movement theory, resource mobilization theory and cultural and political process theory are all very useful in aiding our understanding of these new hybrid types of organizations which, although differing in their tactics and political campaigns, aim to construct or retrieve collective memories. Those actively involved in collective memories are called ‘reputational entrepreneurs’, ‘memory entrepreneurs’ and ‘memory activists’, attempting to shape how people remember (Kubal and Becerra 2014). Each in some way informs us about how these groups operate in both the realm of institutional politics (running for parliament like Baskin Oran, i.e., resource mobilization) and extrainstitutional politics (rallies, marches, concerts, exhibitions; strands of new social movement theories). Following Dink’s assassination case, ‘memory’ of genocide and massacres as a means of mobilization has been utilized as a sort of defining element of the relationship between personal identity and history, even if transmitted informally or implicitly. Memory discourses emerged in the West from the 1960s as a result of decolonization, new social movements and the search for revisionist histories (Huyssen 2000, p. 22). Accordingly, movement scholars who have focused on narrative, discourse, framing and performance show how activists actively construct and mobilize collective memory. Comparative historians and sociologists have revealed the contentious and contested construction of ‘collective memory’ at the level of the nation state (Olick and Levy 1997; Steinberg 1999; Tilly 2003; Straughn 2009) and social movements’ powerful symbolic role in revealing silenced stories of violent exclusion (Zolberg 1995, p.  65; Olick et  al. 2011,

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p.  430). In understanding memory as narrative “stored in stories,” Francesca Polletta (2006) argues that stories contingently connect present social movements with past ones. Silenced memories become conflicting memories, that is, memories that predict future conflict (Assmann 2005), and the concept of silenced stories in social movement studies involves focusing on memories condensed in stories, images and/or discourses that did not get passed on officially to the outside public because their very existence involved a conflict within the group itself (Schudson 1992; Olick and Levy 1997; Polletta 2002, 2005). In this regard, Hakikat Adalet Hafıza Merkezi (Truth Justice Memory Centre), a human rights organization, also established after Dink by a group of lawyers, activists and journalists in 2011 to unearth past violations of human rights and large-scale atrocities, particularly those which happened in the last 30 years, and to strengthen collective memory of state violence, has become one of the leading non-profit organizations. The Centre, cooperating with other international human rights organizations, gives particular significance to the issue of the Armenian Genocide, as the Centre’s executive director, states, “Armenian intellectuals who disappeared in 1915 were the first disappearances which occurred by the hand of the state. More strikingly, the law preventing the generals from being judged was passed in 1913, so they were preparing for the genocide.” Murat Çelikkan, who was named Civil Rights Defender of the Year 2018 by Civil Rights Defenders and awarded the 2018 Hrant Dink Award has worked on the prevention of widespread and systematic torture, freedom of expression and press and assembly, on refugee rights, and on democracy and freedoms both as a journalist and an activist. He has written several articles and given presentations about the officially denied Armenian Genocide in the context of facing the past and historical dialogue and explains that the common factor in all the past atrocities is that “the Turkish Republic was established on a series of violations and atrocities,” and he interrelates the more recent human rights violations with those which occurred during 1915 and afterward, stating that “the common point of all state violations is the denial.”53 In collaboration with the World Policy Institute in New York and the Fetzer Institute in Michigan, the Truth Justice Memory Centre created a website project titled www.memorializeturkey.com in 2011. The website lists a number of Turkish memorialization projects, such as the restoration of the Surp Khach Church in Van, the renovation of the Surp Giragos church in Diyarbakır and the Dersim massacre memorial. Jeffrey Olick and Daniel Levy, in focusing on official practices of silencing, have shown that

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collective memory determines what can be said and what remains silent in mainstream arenas of national political deliberation (Olick and Levy 1997). However, activists who publicize ‘silenced’ stories on the internet and in transnational protest summits risk being punished severely (Assmann and Conrad 2010, p. 2; see also Olick et al. 2011, p. 430). On 16 May 2017, Murat Çelikkan was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment under the Anti-Terror Law on the basis of alleged involvement in terrorist propaganda for his participation to the Özgür Gündem editor-in-chief on Watch Campaign. He was released 5 months later on probation, a clear example of the Turkish government targeting human rights defenders, alongside media workers and academics. Those civilian groups and NGOs which were already established before Dink’s assassination increased their attention and focus on the Armenian Question afterward through retrieving ‘silenced memories’ acting as mobilizing agents. One of them is Tarih Vakfı (History Foundation), established as an NGO in 1991 by dismissed and arrested (i.e., victimized) academics during the 1980 military coup. It aims to extend the historical consciousness of civil society in Turkey through various types of event such as publication of books and periodicals, production of documentaries, organization of workshops and conferences, radio and TV programs and exhibitions regarding the period when atrocities against Armenians took place, not just the 1915 events. They published alternative history writing. Nora asserts that the disintegration of the distinction between history and memory has contributed to the emergence of a new kind of historian far from alone in manufacturing the past. It is a role he shared with the judge, the witness, the media and the legislator.54 He believes that “his role and place in society were once simple and clearly defined: to be the spokesman of the past and the herald of the future” (Nora 1989, p. 18).55 Thus, scholarly transparency, objectivity and acting as an interlocutor between the raw material and knowledge were once the sole characteristics of an historian. However, the newly emerged historian is more likely to develop a relation to his subject by demonstrating and deepening this tendency. This brings to mind the increasing popularity of testimonies within the discipline of history. Melucci believes that the new social movements reveal the dynamics of power in complex systems by “exposing that which is hidden or excluded by the decision-making process” (1992, p. 68). This complies with the activities of a new social movement; to Claus Offe (1985) such movements develop fundamental, meta-political critique of the social

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order and of representative democracy, challenging institutional assumptions regarding conventional ways of ‘doing politics’ in the name of radical democracy. They are decentralized and participatory organizational structures, defending interpersonal solidarity against the great bureaucracies, and the reclamation of autonomous spaces rather than material advantages. After 2007, the Armenian Genocide, one of the biggest state taboos, was prioritized by many civil research societies and initiatives such as Tarih Vakfı (History Foundation). One of the executive members of the foundation and its former president, Bülent Bilmez (2017), assistant professor in the History department of Istanbul Bilgi University, says the issue of genocide was a big taboo in the 1990s. No one would dare speak of it. After Dink, the rupture on the speaking of the genocide taboo has become more salient. We were still super-cautious while speaking of it, but we did not hesitate to form our own group to go through the archives on the genocide and disseminate the results for the public.56

Bilmez particularly underlines the significance of dissemination of knowledge among the general public, carrying it beyond the intelligentsia through exhibitions and documentary films accessible to all. With the broadening of the discipline and the fragmentation between history and memory, the historian himself has become a site of memory. A group was formed, undertaking an alternative reading of history and working particularly on the Armenians. Along with the non-profit organizations and foundations, interest in doing scholarly research on Armenians also dramatically increased after Dink’s assassination. In recent decades, the relation between culture, memory, commemoration and history has been at the center of a series of academic debates in a burgeoning field that goes by the name of ‘memory studies’. Thus, researching on ‘memory’ has been a common theme and research topic of many projects. Halbwachs (1992) believes that an individual memory cannot form or sustain itself without social frames of reference. Thus, while the group does not have a memory, social frames determine the memory of its group members. He believes that individuals recall, recognize or localize their memories within a society and that this socialization generates memories for them. Since societies oblige their members to reproduce, retrieve or reconstruct memories, the mind of an individual executes these tasks under the pressure of society. In addition to

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the role of social processes in memory formation, Halbwachs also takes the authoritarian role of nation states into consideration. He portrays governments in modern societies as responsible agents of memory making. Hence the pressure and authority exercised by governments impose many constraints on their citizens and subject the individual to certain ways of thinking. Therefore, for Halbwachs, what we remember depends on the contexts in which we find ourselves and the groups to which we happen to relate. Applying Halbwachs’ idea to the Turkish situation, it is evident that the Turkish government seeks to impose a certain official history on its citizens. As long as the Turkish citizens perform their duties by adhering to this officially sanctioned memory, they do not stand out in the society. However, social processes are never that smooth, and a society’s collective memory is never monolithic. In addition, Bellek and Kültür Sosyolojisi Çalışmaları Derneği (the Foundation of Memory and Cultural Sociology) was founded by a group of academics and postgraduate students at Mimar Sinan University in 2014 to research memory of the 12 September military coup and OHAL (Special State of Emergency regime in Turkey during the 1990s), memory of the assassination of Hrant Dink, and of the Turkey-Armenia normalization process, together with art projects about the Armenian heritage in Anatolia, and the memories of fourth-generation Armenian youth in Armenia, Turkey and diaspora. The events organized by the foundation to mobilize history and memory through certain topics aim to construct and transmit the complex sociocultural and political structure of Turkey. As Geoffrey Cubitt (2007) observes elsewhere, “memory” may shape the “production of the past” when particular memories, historical incidents, hidden stories, images or frames are mobilized for particular purposes in the form of ‘civil society versus state’. Civil society is conceived here as the realm of organized social or political life that is voluntary, self-generating, self-supporting, autonomous from the state and acts collectively in a public sphere to achieve mutual goals and make demands on the state. Here, ‘civil society versus state’ means the democratization of social institutions and not dedifferentiation in the name of one total community (Cohen 1985, p. 669), the traces of which can be seen in private institutes acting against or challenging state taboos. For instance, the Centre for Migration Research at Istanbul Bilgi University has started to host Armenian researchers from Yerevan along with an Armenian-Turkey Normalization Process program implemented by a consortium of eight civil society organizations from Armenia and Turkey, with the financial assistance of the

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European Union.57 The Migration Research Centre at Koç University has also supported research by Irena Grigoryan on Armenian labor migrants in Istanbul who have been the subject of heated emphasis in the official discourse of many government and right-wing politicians. Past communication and media research has explored the content of alternative media, such as Atkinson’s (2005) examination of constructions of power in alternative media texts. This research also provides an alternative to existing literature. Yet they show how cultural texts are not simply representations of Turkish history, but that they should be understood as active forces that participate in a political battle over memory. They highlight the tension between two aspects of cultural memory as outlined by Halbwachs (1992). The first aspect is generated through the social frameworks and governments that put pressure on the members of society by imposing an official version of history which covers up the reality of the past. In this sense, one of the most striking of Anadolu Kültür’s projects is an exhibition organized in collaboration with the Open Society Foundation titled ‘Never Again: Apology and Coming to Terms with the Past’, which explored experiences of coming to terms with the past and the act of apologizing by looking closely at eight cases from around the world, particularly concentrating on the Armenian Genocide. It aimed to explore the strategies of coming to terms with the past and the act of apologizing as the first step toward reconciliation. The exhibition was first displayed in Istanbul in 2013, where it was visited by 22,413 people in three months, and then displayed in Izmir and Diyarbakir in 2014. Again, DEPO, a space for critical debate and cultural exchange located in Tophane in the heart of Istanbul, has held innumerable exhibitions and eye-opening debates since 2009. ‘Burning Eyes: Memories of the Armenians’, Antoine Agoudjian’s exhibition, was also organized at DEPO in 2011. It displayed the photographs that Agoudjian had taken since 1988 while travelling to countries such as Armenia, Georgia, Lebanon and Turkey, to document the conditions of the Armenian communities. In April 2014 an exhibition by Silvina Der-Meguerditchian (‘Memory without a Place’) opened at DEPO.  By taking inspiration from her ancestors who migrated from Anatolia to Argentina, Der-Meguerditchian highlighted the cultural heritage of the diasporic Armenian communities. As mentioned before, the resistance to state discourse has mostly come from civil organizations, and Dink’s assassination proved to be a pivotal point in bringing Armenia and Turkey closer and creating reconciliation. However, in some cases, state and private universities based in Istanbul

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also attempted to play a role in reconciliation through promoting the Armenian language and culture. Armenian linguist and tutor Sevan Değirmenciyan (2016) recalled that universities such as Istanbul Bilgi and Boğaziçi University contacted him about teaching Armenian after the assassination. Kadir Has University, a private university in Istanbul established in 1997 and named after its founder, a Turkish automotive entrepreneur, established an Armenian language course for six hours a week along with Russian, Arabic and Greek language courses in 2011 with the help of a grant from the German Marshall Fund’s Black Sea Trust for Regional Cooperation (BST).58 With this grant, the ‘Language for Peace’ program was established. Indeed, the university went beyond the teaching of Armenian, establishing a scholarship in Armenian, which involves enhancing cooperation and cultural exchange between Turkey and Armenia. In the job description of the Armenian fellowship for 2017–2018, it is stated that the fellow is “expected to develop projects that can be carried out between Turkey and Armenia and shall research on identification of project donors and preparing project proposals.” Açık Toplum Vakfi (Open Society Foundation) which has been active since 2001 contributing to increasing democratization and responsiveness to human rights has been one of the most crucial organizations supporting research and projects on Turkey’s past in its role as a mobilizing agent. It has financially supported many socio-cultural activities and projects on Armenians, particularly since 2009. It also underlines its role as a key supporter of efforts to increase political mobilization among minority groups. Elif Al (2017), the foundation’s project coordinator, confirms the increased attention to Armenians and the genocide after Dink’s assassination.59 She also confirms that civil society organizations started to concentrate more on confrontation and reconciliation projects, and this organization especially supported the Hrant Dink Foundation financially. For instance, in 2011, the foundation financed the Hrant Dink Foundation’s project to map confiscated Armenian properties. It also financially supported the project of transforming the Agos building based in Osmanbey into a Memory Centre. Similarly, Anadolu Kültür (Arts and Cultural Dialogue in Anatolia), founded in 2002 to support civil society, has contributed to long-term collaborative projects on Armenian-related topics through exhibitions, film screenings, public lectures and workshops. In 2009 it initiated an oral history project called ‘Speaking to One Another’. The main aim of this was to use oral history projects as a bridge between Turkish and Armenian society. Led by Leyla Neyzi and Hranush

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Kharatyan-Araqelyan, the outcome of the research was published in Turkish, Armenian and English. Oral history projects were carried out in Istanbul, Yerevan, Tbilisi, Nicosia, Berlin, Paris, Antakya and Batumi for the book Speaking to One Another: Personal Memories of the Past in Armenia and Turkey (2010). This research shed light on the perceptions of the two communities about each other and presented the challenges on the way to reconciliation. Along with great attention to the past and memory, after Dink’s assassination, interest in learning the Armenian language has also increased, particularly in Istanbul. The Hrant Dink Foundation has also offered Armenian language courses at different levels each term since 2016 with the financial support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Tens of participants, mostly non-Armenians, apply for the courses, which is also unusual and unexpected as the majority of applicants do not have professional reasons to learn the language; instead, they have the urge to learn the language of a nation with whom they and their forebears have lived side by side for centuries. Istanbul-based human rights watchdog Helsinki Yurttaşlar Derneği, the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly, which changed its name to Yurttaşlar Derneği (Citizens’ Assembly), also organized two summer schools in 2014 (in Kocaeli) and 2015 (in Yerevan) called ‘Yavas-­ Gamats Summer School’ (meaning ‘slowly’) for Turkish and Armenian teachers from Turkey and Armenia to exchange ideas and “to support the inter-communal process of building trust and reconciliation between communities of Turkey and Armenia” in the Assembly’s own words. At the summer schools, the academic members of the History Foundation gave lectures, demonstrating the cooperation and networking that can take place between civil organizations for the common cause, focusing on movement culture, while also attempting to facilitate many different types of change within the society. These civil organizations, initiatives and mobilizing agents strive to develop parallel organizations, raise consciousness, change public opinion and reform mainstream institutions, all of which involves the politicization of everyday life as the “relation between the individual and the collective is blurred” (Johnston et  al. 1994, p.  7). All these efforts contribute to creating a new identity in contemporary Turkey which requires the state to confront its past and promise a better future. In other words, contemporary collective actors in Turkey see that the creation of this identity involves social contestation around the reinterpretation of norms, the creation of new meanings and a challenge to the social construction of the

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boundaries between public, private and political domains of action. The equation of the personal and political posits not only an identity politics but also a lifestyle politics in which everyday life becomes a major arena of political action. For instance, replacing profile photos on social media (mainly Facebook and Twitter) with the photo of Dink on 19 January, the day he was assassinated, is among the actions involved in protesting and commemorating the assassination. Even those who do not actively support the cause in public or take an active role in any initiatives or civil groups can change the photo to express their protest and show solidarity. This can also be seen as a response in the arena of ‘low-risk activism’ (Gladwell 2010), reflecting the systematic politicization of life, which is also reflected in musical and artistic productions.

5.6   Resistance Performance: Alternative Art, Music and Media The impact of social media has hastened the speed at which such processes occur (van de Donk 2004). The role of broadcasting and printing in mobilization, which can be evaluated as an element of resource mobilization, has also been extensive during the last ten years. Atkinson has provided insight into the role of alternative media in new social movement networks through research concerning “resistance performance” (RP), which illustrates how activist interactions with alternative media processes construct multiple communities of activism or “theatres” (Atkinson 2009; Atkinson and Cooley 2010; Atkinson and Dougherty 2006). These theaters constitute socially constructed sites where resistance can be performed. Essentially, activists use narratives concerning social justice problems defined by broad themes of “human rights” and “democracy” found in alternative media to build “theatres” where militant or adjustive communicative resistance against corporations is performed. Mihran Tomasyan, a modern dancer who founded the dance company Çıplak Ayaklar Kumpanyası (Naked Feet Company), and who was also Yetvart Tomasyan’s son, organized an event to commemorate Dink by arranging for 70 people to lie down as Dink did after being assassinated. Yetvart Tomasyan (2016) says, “I got many calls from cemaat [Turkish for ‘community’, here referring to the Armenian community] to not let my son organize this because of security concerns, but I took the risk, I did not stop my son doing this.” The protest was very influential in triggering

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other similar artistic protests.60 As Cohen (1985, p. 670) points out, contemporary collective actors often create democratic public spaces and transform formerly private domains into social arenas for the creation of their collective identities and demands. In this regard, Mihran Tomasyan, who has always been at the forefront of mobilizing the civil society in public spaces using his own artistic background, has directed and acted in a play titled ‘You Are Not a Fish After All’ (Sen Balık Değilsin ki) representing the death of Dink, which has been staged a number of times in different venues and attracted the attention of many. In relation to such musicians’ and artists’ individual activism, according to Della Porta and Diani (2007, p. 21), no single organized actor, no matter how powerful, can claim to represent the movement as a whole. In other words, the efficacy lies in the cooperation with their agents. More opportunities arise for highly committed and skilled individuals to play an independent role in the political process when the action is spread among a number of agencies and initiatives. This category of cultural resources as mobilizing agents also includes movement- or issue-related productions like music, literature, blogs, web pages or films/videos. Such cultural products facilitate the recruitment and socialization of new adherents and help movements maintain their readiness and capacity for collective action. Individual activists’ efforts, especially through the use of artistic forms after Dink’s assassination, are also worth mentioning. The band called Kardes Türküler (Sibling Songs) have been giving voice to songs in all Turkey’s languages since the 1990s, when it was taboo to express different identities. Many Turkish people heard their first ever Armenian song thanks to Kardeş Türküler, although none of the band members is Armenian. In relation to utilizing Armenian songs as ‘vehicle of memory’ (Yerushalmi 1982), the founder and main vocalist of the group, an ethnic Kurd, Vedat Yıldırım (2016), says that they had done research on Armenian culture with the help of Armenian foundations so that they would internalize the songs much better when they sang them.61 Yıldırım (2016) asserts, Hrant had a bequest for Armenia. We made a song about Dink called Akhtamar [an island in Lake Van, part of historic Armenia] and we went to Yerevan with Sayat Nova Chorus, which has 100 members, and gave a concert. We do not sing sad Armenian music with duduk [traditional Caucasian instrument with double reed made of wood]. We give a big part to the Armenian halay [folk dance] songs too.62

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Because the idea of multiculturalism in Turkey was directly related to the remembrance of the violent annihilation of ‘difference’ in Anatolia with the establishment of the nation-state, many intellectuals and activists adopted a strong critical stance in order to bring the violence and discrimination of the past and present into public discussion. However, the voice of those opposing (against) the Turkish nationalists has recently been raised even more strongly. Along with civil organizations, solidarity groups and initiatives, the intersectional activism which increased after Dink has influenced a great many artists and directors. When asked about the difficulty of directing a film on such a taboo subject, Kızılaslan (2017) says “the state institutions are aware of the influence of such productions so they pass all the required laws to apply censorship or obstacles. For instance, they want a certificate of registration from the producer to allow you to show the film in public, which is very hard to get.” Kızılaslan points out that “mostly non-Armenians watched my documentary,” and adds “we could not speak of the Armenian Genocide so that’s why the Madımak [1993, also known as the Sivas massacre]63 or the Roboski massacre [in 2011]64 took place or people were burnt in Cizre.”65 Deniz Özden’s documentary, Ali Değil, Ari Komutanım (It is Ari Sir, Not Ali), focuses on the experiences and memories of Jewish and Christian Turkish citizens performing their mandatory military service in a country where the majority of the population is Muslim. Presenting the viewers with interviews with these former soldiers, the film helps the audience members empathize and understand the difficulties and ironies of what it is like to be a marginalized minority in the military. Censorship has become very targeted and widespread. Iż Öztat, a Turkish contemporary artist, was asked to remove a mention of the Armenian Genocide in a booklet she wrote for an exhibition in Madrid in 2013. Similarly the director and photographer Kızılaslan had received funding from the Turkish government for her fılm on Islamized Armenians and had to comply. She says, “[T]hese are the invisible boundaries. You do not know they are there until you cross them.”66 Another example of this policy occurred during the Turkish cultural season in France [La Saison de la Turquie en France] when the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs organized cultural activities around France to promote Turkish culture and history. In March 2010, as a part of the cultural program, an exhibition was held at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Paris (School of Fine Art in Paris), titled États d’âmes: une génération hors d’elle (Moods: A Generation Coming Off the Hinges) by artist Tayfun Ertaş. Along with prominent contemporary Turkish artists

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such as Nevin Aladağ, Șener Özmen and Nilbar Güreş, Tayfun Serttaş also contributed to the exhibition, which challenged Turkish militarism, Kemalism and national identity. The catalogue of the exhibition, printed in four languages (French, Turkish, Armenian and English), was censored in Turkey. The Turkish government made the curator Tayfun Serttaş remove any mention of the word ‘genocide’ from the catalogue. However, Serttaş integrated this state intervention and censorship into his work. The artist printed the censored text as his exhibition catalogue, which clearly shows how the word genocide had been blacked out in four languages. In this way Serttaş demonstrates how art can be a resilient and resisting tool. The activists in general, through electronic and digital media, can share a belief regarding the cause of a problem. They bypass traditional media, which is often controlled by the state and/or corporations opposing the movement, and they digitally expand the information within the public sphere. Networking through new technology ranges from people making Dink their profile photos to e-mails regarding case results, calls to protest or for direct action against the state-backed press releases and news. For ̇ instance, Babil (Bağımsız Araştırma Bilgi ve Iletiş im Derneği, Independent Research Information and Communication Foundation), focusing on ‘memory’, was exclusively established for this purpose. For the 100th anniversary commemoration of the genocide in 2015, with the cooperation of the History Foundation (Tarih Vakfi), they organized a public exhibition titled Bizzat Hallediniz (Just Sort It Out). The title originated from a well-known statement in the form of an order to kill by Talaat Pasha during the genocide. The exhibition was based on 350 telegrams from the Ottoman authorities related to the genocide sent between 1914 and 1917. A booklet on the exhibition was also published and distributed without charge. The proliferation of conservation and preservation consciousness is closely related to the emergence of memory mania. This can be seen as the product of the shifting parameters from memory to history. Nora asserts “the passage from memory to history has required every social group to redefine its identity through the revitalization of its own history. The task of remembering makes everyone his own historian” (1992, p. 15). To avoid being swept away by history, marginalized groups who have been ostracized in the grand narratives of the national historiographies reinvent their past by creating a site of memory. In this regard, the ̇ ̇ contribution of the Ismail Beşikçi Foundation (Ismail Beşikçi Vakfı), which was founded in 2012  in Istanbul by a group of intellectuals and

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̇ businessmen in honor of Ismail Beşikçi, a Turkish socialist who is mostly known for his pro-Kurdish books, is also very noteworthy for disseminating debates on the Armenian Genocide and current issues concerning Armenians as a non-Muslim minority in Turkey.67 One can see the presence of Armenians and debates on the genocide in Kurdish publications as well. Avesta, the first and biggest Kurdish publishing house, founded in 1996, which started out with a translation into Kurdish of Migirdic Margosyan’s Turkish story compilations titled Gâvur Mahallesi (Non-­ Muslim Neighbourhood), also published a number of books on Armenians.68 Abdullah Keskin argues that Kurds are more courageous in their publication of books on the genocide than the Armenian publishing house Aras. The chief editor of Aras, Koptaş (2016), shares this view, observing that “we always avoided referring to the genocide directly, it has always been a taboo, but we published some literary works by Armenian authors such as Kirkor or Magosyan who refer to genocide very implicitly, and careful readers can notice this.” Koptaş underlines the censorship practices of Aras, “[E]ven with the translations of Armenian writers, we had to apply censorship on their narrations of massacres, or we softened some writers’ anti-Turk discourses in their lines until the beginning of the 2000s, then the Armenian issue started to be debated in public more often and more bravely, which also led us to loosen our censorship.”69 Kurdish media, including newspapers, have expressed their recognition of the Armenian Genocide in a wide range of ways. For instance, the leading Kurdish daily Özgür Gündem (published in Istanbul) has carried personal narratives, detailed accounts of events and historical documents.70 The 24 April 2015 issue marked the 100th anniversary of the genocide with the Armenian headline, ‘See, Hear, Confront’ (Gör, Duy, Yüzleş), and the newspaper has commemorated the genocide every year with special interviews and articles. However, as noted above, the failed military coup in July 2016 dramatically affected freedom of speech and media censorship. The AKP blames the Gülen religious movement for orchestrating the coup attempt, but opponents including the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) and other Kurdish organizations were also heavily targeted during the two-year state of emergency. Accordingly, Özgür Gündem, along with 14 other media outlets, was shut down in line with a post-coup government decree in October 2016 because of its content relating to the Kurdish and Armenian Questions. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) found the paper had been targeted unfairly by the

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Turkish state, noting that some of the articles concerned contained Christmas greetings, which did not amount to calls for violence or hate speech. Discussion of Armenians in public arenas included debate on some Turkish television channels. This continued until the 2015 general election, after which it declined considerably as freedom of speech was severely restricted by the government. A number of studies have highlighted the critical role of the media in transforming the character and impact of collective action among contemporary social movements. For instance, Namık Kemal Dinç, a historian and human rights activist and former political prisoner, made a TV series called Yüzyüze (Face to Face) on the Armenian Genocide for the opposition-affiliated, pro-Kurdish Turkish language channel, IMC (International Media Centre) TV,71 hosting controversial figures such as Ahmet Türk, one of the first Kurdish politicians to recognize the genocide and to apologize on behalf of his grandparents who were involved in the massacres. In 2011 IMC TV hosted a talk show series called Gamurç/Köprü (‘Bridge’ in Armenian and Turkish)—the first of its kind in Turkey focusing exclusively on Armenian-Turkish relations. As well as IMC TV, a number of Turkish theory and literary magazines, mostly run by human rights activists, such as Ayrıntı, Birikim and Notos, published special issues during the 100th anniversary commemoration of the genocide, gaining the attention of Turkish literary and cultural circles.

5.7   The Rise and Revelation of Islamized Armenians After the lifting of certain taboos in Turkey which arose from the EU accession process, the question of Islamized Armenians (or what are sometimes called ‘Kurdified’, ‘Turkified’, ‘hidden’, ‘crypto-Armenians’, or ‘Armenians of silence’, or even, in a pejorative sense, ‘remnant of the sword’ (Kılıç artıkları) or dönme [convert]) has also come to the fore despite them having difficulties in proving their Armenian ancestry.72 Despite the terminological problem involved, the term ‘Islamized Armenians’ is often used by scholars working on the history of atrocities against Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic in reference to the policies of mass forced conversions to Islam and absorption of Armenian women and children into Muslim households. It is difficult to estimate the number of Islamicized Armenians in Turkey and even more

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difficult to determine what proportion of them are aware of their Armenian roots, or how many are willing to regain their Armenian identity. Although the number of the resultant ‘invisible Armenians’ remains unclear, Akçam speaks of 200,000. But the director of the Centre for Western Armenian Issues, Haykazun Alvtrsyn, estimated that there were 2.5 million Islamized Armenians in Turkey (2013). After the genocide, survivors fled to live in Middle Eastern countries (especially Lebanon and Israel) and in many cases Europe (particularly France), the USA or former Soviet Union countries including Georgia and Armenia. However, those who were left in the Eastern provinces of Anatolia have long remained unknown. According to the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the majority of those left behind were women and children, their numbers reaching an estimated 100,000  in 1919–1920, while the Patriarchate itself counted around 100,000 orphans in its care (Kevorkian 2011). While some of them survived thanks to the protection of Kurdish tribes, some of these women or orphans were kidnapped and forcibly married and were obliged to integrate with their new Turkish and Kurdish families.73 However, since the early 2000s, and especially after the number of those applying to the church to be baptized increased after Dink’s assassination, there has been greater awareness of their existence. Yıldırım (2016) underlines one of the other positive and constructive developments following Dink’s assassination, “Islamized Armenians who are mostly from Anatolia and considered as backward by Istanbul Armenians have closer relations with Armenians in Istanbul after Dink and the social movements.”74 In the changing political geography, the emergence of these conversions on the Turkish public scene were interpreted as courageous acts of a hidden minority now embracing its real identity despite the longstanding national sensibilities against mention of the Armenian Genocide. The proponents of pluralism challenged national homogeneity and argued for the Turkish state’s proper acknowledgment of the Armenian identities of the converts.75 Hrant Dink himself had described the Islamized Armenians as “wandering souls” (göçebe ruhlar) and tried to raise awareness of the issue. In this regard, Estukyan (2016) notes that Islamized Armenians have collectively started to visit Agos weekly in the last few years to be informed about Armenian culture, whereas before very few did so. They are not welcomed warmly by the Patriarchate, so they prefer to come to Agos instead for information. Hrant Dink Foundation director Taşkın also refers to the high number of Islamized Armenian visitors coming to the foundation to consult their archives in order to obtain information about their roots.

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The increased number of known Islamized Armenians has also led to a diverse range of interpretation of ‘who is Armenian and who is not’, which has also resulted in internal conflicts and mutual expulsions. For the Turkish community, Turkish law and the Patriarchate, the confines of Armenian identity are fixed (Ritter 2016), and they do not consider Islamized Armenians to be Armenian. According to Hrag Papazian’s doctoral research at Oxford University based on empirical data collected in Turkey, there are three types of Armenians currently living in Turkey: first, the members of the traditional Christian Armenian minority, famously called Hamaynk (community); then, the Muslim Armenian citizens of Turkey (with their own internal distinctions); and thirdly, the migrant workers from the Republic of Armenia.76 Despite the internal conflicts within Armenian groups, Dink’s assassination has united and triggered a social mobilization within all three categories and outside Armenian communities in Turkey. Project Rebirth organized trips to Armenia for a large group of hidden Islamized Armenians from Diyarbakir, Urfa, Dersim, Sason, Van and the Hamshen regions of Turkey, to help them find their roots, language, culture and history in 2015. Following the failed coup attempt against President Erdoğan in July 2016, dictatorial powers and the state of emergency have resulted in repression of Islamized Armenians as well. For instance, the efforts of Project Rebirth to help the hidden Islamized Armenians find their Armenian roots, culture and language by organizing Armenian language classes in places like Diyarbakir and Dersim, as well as planning trips for them to Armenia, are now on hold. The regular monthly breakfast meetings of the hidden Armenians of Diyarbakir at the Surp Giragos Church do not take place anymore. The Armenian language classes attended by Islamized Armenians in Dersim and Diyarbakir have long been suspended. After the publication of Fethiye Çetin’s book (My Grandmother) in 2004, the fate of these crypto-Armenians in Turkey became politicized even further. The internet has provided a convenient, anonymous platform for assembling information and reaching out to family members abroad. The website www.hyetert.com, for example, aims to help members of the Armenian community of Istanbul to trace their Armenian ancestors, particularly their grandmothers. Crypto-Armenians have even been openly threatened by the Turkish Historical Society (Türk Tarih Kurumu), the Kemalist official producer of nationalist historical narratives. Its former director, Yusuf Halaçoğlu, now a member of the Turkish Parliament representing the electoral district of Kayseri for the nationalist and

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liberal-conservative Good Party (Iyi Party),77 went so far as to declare that he had in his possession a “list” of names, “house by house,” of crypto-­ Armenians living in Turkey, claiming he would not hesitate to “make it public.”78 It seems that those who have themselves suffered from inequalities and atrocities now or historically feel more sympathy for Armenians. The journalist Cafer Solgun, who is an Alevi Kurd from Tunceli province (formerly called Dersim, which is preferred in this book),79 observes that Kurdish Alevis especially in Dersim have sympathy for Armenians as they have also suffered from mistreatment due to their beliefs, and he refers to a book named Combat Commands: Suggestions, Remarks, Recommendations written in 1906 by an Armenian military commander and statesman named Andranik Ozanian (1865–1927), in which he talks about the good relations between Armenians and Alevis. Alevis from Dersim are believed to be crypto-Armenians by many, but Solgun (2017) is not happy with the generalization that Dersim people are Armenian in origin. Yusuf Halacoğlu claims that Dersim Alevis are Armenians. In fact, Dink’s murder ignited the spark of self-recognition and self-assertion which resulted in a campaign of return to ancestral roots among Turks, Kurds and Armenians. New social movements create new identities or uncover repressed ones (Johnston et al. 1994), and in this case, thanks to the movements, people wanted to uncover their Armenian heritage. Some Alevis from Dersim have revealed their Armenian origin and attempted to rediscover their historical roots. The slow and continuous process of Alevization of the Armenians began in the nineteenth century and accelerated in the twentieth after the 1915 genocide and Dersim massacres of 1938, making it virtually impossible to differentiate between Armenians and Alevis (Kharatyan 2014).80 Modus Vivendi Centre, a non-­ governmental organization founded in Yerevan in 1999 with the mission of solving regional problems, has been cooperating with the region of Dersim through cultural festivals there with the participation of troops from Armenia for several years. The goal of the festival was to enable people from Dersim to get to know Armenia and pay tribute to the victims of the 1915 genocide. Through the efforts of Modus Vivendi Centre and the Union of Armenians and Alevis of Dersim, lessons in the Armenian language have been held. To Cafer Solgun (2017), the claim that Dersim Alevis are crypto-Armenians is “a political effort in order to destroy the Kurdish movement. They claim Kurds to be Turks, Alevis to be Armenians.”81

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Although Islamized Armenians in Kurdish regions seem to be more active in exploring and confronting of their Armenian roots, one should not forget the Hemshin, also known as Hemshins, who are a community with Armenian roots inhabiting the Black Sea coastal areas of Turkey, Russia and Georgia. In the eighth century, the Hemshin Armenians are commonly believed to have migrated from the region that is today the Republic of Armenia to the Byzantine Empire (today’s Turkey), whose eastern part constituted historic Armenian provinces. The Muslim Hemshin, numbering about 500,000, speak a dialect based on Armenian, but had never identified themselves as Armenian until recently. However, many Turkish historians deny Hemshins’ Armenian roots.82 According to Armenian journalist and historian Vicken Cheterian (2015: 206), “in the officially sanctioned Turkish historiography, the Hemshins do not have an Armenian past but are of Turkish origin, belonging to tribes who had migrated to their current location from Central Asia.” Hale Güzin Kızılaslan is one of the directors who looked at Armenians from a cinematographic perspective. Kızılaslan directed a documentary on an Islamized Armenian family living in Adıyaman.83 Although she grew up, as she says, “in a small bourgeois family with a Kemalist background,” Kızılaslan, an engineer and photographer, could not ignore the violations around her, and she made a documentary titled Veratarts (Return) in 2015, focusing on three generations of an Islamized Armenian family based in Adıyaman. The photos taken during the shooting of the film were displayed in an exhibition in Istanbul, and she describes her contribution as ‘normalization’ of the existence of Armenians, especially Islamized Armenians, who are sometimes even ignored by other Armenians. For the 100th anniversary commemoration of the Armenian Genocide, many of her photographer and director colleagues wanted to make a contribution, but she says she is one of the few lucky ones to achieve it. As Kızılaslan (2017) describes it, “many of the audience started to research their ancestry to see if they have any Armenian roots. Because it is a fact that due to the genocide, in order to save their lives, many Armenians, especially women, converted to Islam, and most of their grandchildren do not know about their grandparents.” Such artistic, literary and documental contributions have encouraged the public to question their background and take a step further to explore the past. A number of novels were also written by Turks or Kurds on their discovery of their Armenian ancestors with their own personal stories.84

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It is also of greater concern to us how other Armenians are dealing with the Islamized Armenians. It seems that the Istanbul Armenian community and, more critically, the Istanbul Armenian Patriarchate are unable or unwilling to accept the hidden Armenians coming out as Armenians, unless these people accept Christianity, get baptized and learn to speak Armenian. Considering that some descendants choose to ‘go back’ to Christianity, while some others combine Islam, Kurdishness, Socialism, Feminism or other cultural components of their identities with Armenian identity, the descendants of Islamized Armenians do not constitute a homogeneous and well-bounded group (Korkmaz 2015). In addition, in terms of the revelation of their Armenian roots, one should acknowledge the fact that Kurds have been more enterprising than Turkish people. This is reflected in the actions and initiatives of Kurdish politicians, political parties and key individuals. The following section focuses on how the activism of leading Kurdish civil organizations and figures with regard to the Armenian Question and the acknowledgment of the Armenian Genocide would lead to Kurds displaying a higher level of acceptance of their Armenian ancestry.

5.8   The Kurds in the Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation Process Relations between the Kurds and Armenians have also changed dramatically during the last century. The Kurds were among the main perpetrators of violence against Christian minorities in the late Ottoman and early Turkish Republican periods, most notably during the Armenian Genocide. Themselves denied basic national and cultural rights since the foundation of the republic, Kurds in recent decades have been advocates of acknowledging the genocide. In this sense, Kurds play a particularly significant role in the Turkish-Kurdish Armenian reconciliation process and recognition of the genocide. This section concentrates on the efforts of Kurdish parties and organizations toward recognition of the genocide and the enablement of reconciliation. The Kurdish challenge to the denial of the Armenian Genocide is significant in two ways, as not only were Kurds perpetrators but they have been going through similar oppression and experiencing the state’s denial policy, and most of the Armenian population lived in what is now the Kurdish region (the eastern part of modern Turkey). Throughout the period of the genocide in the late nineteenth

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and early twentieth centuries, Kurdish reactions to it, and the nature of their involvement in it, were diverse. In several parts of the region, Kurdish chiefs and bands participated in the genocide, while others opposed it, in many cases even hiding or adopting Armenian refugees. Kurds in prison were given amnesty and released if they would massacre Armenians. While, on the one hand, those who were reluctant to attack Armenian civilians and refugees were punished by the Ottoman government, on the other, some were actively involved with the semi-official Hamidian massacres in the second half of the nineteenth century and with the killings or destruction associated with the systematic policies and genocidal campaigns of the Young Turks. Turkish intellectual and political discourse on Armenians still closely resembles the state’s official narrative when compared to that of Kurdish actors, who do not exclude issues of justice, restoration and official recognition of genocide, and also make more concrete reconciliation efforts. To Bilgin Ayata (2016), “Instead of proactively supporting the demands of the Kurds and Armenians, public intellectuals in Turkey have been dragging behind the official discourse, with their concerns that the nation suffer the least collateral damage possible prevailing over the quest for justice, acknowledgment, and truth.” For instance, the text of the ‘I Apologize’ (Özür Diliyorum) campaign of 2008 run by Turkish intellectuals did not include the word ‘genocide’, instead using the term ‘Büyük Felaket’ (Great Catastrophe), and thus avoiding recognition of the crime. This led a group of Kurdish intellectuals to issue a critical declaration titled ‘It’s Not a Catastrophe, But Genocide’, which was circulated among the Kurdish virtual community on the web. The declaration can be regarded as an open and honest confrontation of past atrocities, rather than merely circling ̇ round the issue. Even to Ahmet Insel (2017), who has both worked academically on the Kurdish issue and been actively involved in social movements on both Kurds and Armenians, and who was one of the initiators of the ‘I Apologize’ campaign, Kurds are more involved in questioning the ̇ Armenian issue than Turks. Insel (2017) adds that the actors in the Kurdish movement’s participation in parliament as a party, and their reference to groups of left wing democrats, and the young generation of Kurdish political figures like Gültan Kışanak (Former mayor of Diyarbakir), Sebahat Tuncel (Former Istanbul MP) and Selahattin Demirtaş (Former HDP co-leader),85 accelerated the process of coming to terms with the Armenian Genocide within the Kurdish political world.86

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During the interview with Sevan Değirmenciyan (2016), he also confirmed Kurds’ efforts to achieve recognition of and confrontation with their role in the genocide in contrast to the Turks. Accordingly, despite controversy around Kurdish involvement, many Kurds, including prominent political figures since the 1980s, and particularly in the late 1990s, have condemned Kurdish participation in the massacres and recognized the genocide. The Kurdish Parliament in Exile (Parlamanta Kurdistane li Derveyî Welat), founded in 1995  in Brussels and also known as the Kurdistan National Congress (KNK), passed a resolution on 24 April 1997 recognizing the Armenian Genocide. The resolution states: The blueprints of and the logistics for this genocide being prepared ahead of time, they employed Hamidiye Alaylari (Hamidiye Cavalry) from Kurdish tribes (similar to the present-day system of Village Guards who kill our people) to commit history’s, until then unknown, Genocide. In this Genocide, millions of Armenians and Assyrian-Syrians were killed, and millions of others were deported from their homes and land and scattered to the four corners of the world.87

On 10 April 1998, in a personal letter to Robert Kocharyan, the newly inaugurated president of Armenia, Öcalan congratulated him on his election victory and expressed his hope that the genocide would be officially recognized in Turkey. Öcalan reiterated this position in a letter published on 30 January 2014 by the Istanbul-based Armenian weekly Agos. ̇ Throughout the letter, written from his cell in Imralı Prison, he repeatedly used the word ‘genocide’ to characterize the atrocities. In an interview with Onnik Krikorian from the Armenian News Network conducted on 20 August 2004, Kongra-Gel’s Caucasus representative Haydar Ali acknowledged the genocide and confirmed the role of Kurds in its execution. On numerous occasions, the pro-PKK media—based primarily in Europe—has apologized for Kurdish complicity in the genocide and for the silence during the years following (Galip 2016). As well as pro-PKK groups and organizations, other Kurdish groups have also expressed their recognition of the genocide. For instance, in 1999, the final declaration of the first conference of the Liberation Party of Kurdistan (Rizgari, PRK, also leftist and nationalist and the main opponent of PKK) stated: “Our party conference denounces the massive genocide against the Armenians in 1915 as a black stain on the history of mankind. Our conference acknowledges that this bloody course of action, in which Kurdish feudal

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lords participated as collaborators of the Ottoman-Turkish colonialists, constitutes a historical injustice.” After Dink’s assassination, ‘genocide’ has been expressed more often by a range of Kurdish political groups, organizations and parties, including the main pro-Kurdish political party, HDP. The presence of Kurdish representatives in parliament since 2007 has also reinforced expressions of recognition and apology for the genocide. Many pro-Kurdish party representatives have publicly announced their stance on the genocide. For example, in 2008, Ahmet Türk, a leader of the pro-Kurdish DTK, acknowledged the Kurds’ role, saying, “Kurds have contributed to the loss of this (cultural) richness. We are ashamed when we look at our Armenian or Assyrian brothers.” Again, in 2013, during an interview by journalists Roni Margulies and Hayko Bağdat on IMC TV, speaking as BDP mayor of Mardin in south-east Turkey, Ahmet Türk repeated his apology and called on the government to acknowledge and recognize the genocide: “The Kurds have their share in that as well. Our grandparents persecuted these people. As descendants, we apologize to them […] The Armenians suffered greatly in 1915. The Kurds have their share [of guilt] in this too.” Offe (1985) and Tarrow (2011) both suggest that social movements may well be beyond their mobilization apex, but that movement-generated impulses are being incorporated into the established system of party politics which is true in the case of Garo Paylan or Abdullah Demirbaş, who are ‘institutional actors’ (members of political parties), or Pakrat Estukyan and Hayko Bağdat (journalists and activists) as ‘semi-institutional actors’. Apart from the official apologies by Kurdish representatives and media bodies, cultural events to promote Armenian identity in Kurdish and Armenian cities have been launched by Kurdish mayors. To the Agos editor Estukyan (2016), “the demands for Armenians made by HDP were made by Armenian MPs a hundred years ago. The HDP MP Garo Paylan takes quotations from the speeches of those Armenian MPs during the Ottoman period in his own speeches in the Turkish parliament,” and he adds, “all over the world, the minorities take the side of hegemony. Armenians or Assyrians have done that. But 70–80 per cent of Christians living in Turkey voted for HDP despite some Armenians blaming Kurds for taking advantage of the non-Muslims issue for their own cause.” Ahmet Türk, the influential Kurdish politician who has recently been dismissed from his post as mayor of Mardin, has apologized many times on behalf of the Kurdish people for the role of Kurds in the Armenian Genocide.88 Similarly, another influential Kurdish politician, Osman

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Baydemir, said during my interview with him: “We refuse the legacy of our grandfathers who took part in the massacres during the First World War against Armenians, we refuse to be a part of what they lived, and we commemorate those of our grandfathers who were opposed to this massacre and cruelty.” Former co-leader of HDP, Selahattin Demirtaş, who has been imprisoned since November 2016, explained the party’s policy about Armenians and the genocide during my interview with him before he was imprisoned, “the establishment of HDP is based on all ethnic groups living equally, and Armenians deserve to receive our confrontation with the truth for what their ancestors went through during the genocide.” Osman Baydemir, lawyer, former Mayor of Diyarbakir and HDP MP for the south-eastern city of Urfa during the interview, but stripped of his deputy status in the Turkish Parliament, is one of a number of Kurdish political figures acknowledging the Armenian Genocide during his years in office at Diyarbakir.89 Baydemir laid flowers at the Eternal Flame at the Tsitsernakaberd Memorial during his Yerevan visit in 2014 (he was mayor of Diyarbakir at that time), which led to great controversy in Turkey. In addition, Baydemir, as mayor of Diyarbakır, and Abdullah Demirbaş, as BDP (Peace and Democracy Party, now HDP) mayor of the Sur District, started providing multilingual municipality services including Armenian in 2007, and were put on trial many times for providing services in other languages along with Turkish.90 Apart from the official apologies by Kurdish representatives and media bodies, cultural events to promote Armenian identity in Kurdish and Armenian cities have been launched by Kurdish mayors. In the words of Abdullah Demirbaş, “[W]e tried to put what Dink used to dream of or defend into practice.” In 2010, hundreds flocked to the island of Akdamar (Aghtamar in Armenian) in the eastern province of Van to attend an inaugural mass at the newly restored Church of the Holy Cross (formerly the Armenian Cathedral), built in 921–927. The church is now a museum, but mass is held there on religious holidays. On 12 September 2013, Abdullah Demirbaş held the official inauguration of the Monument of Common Conscience, apologizing in the name of the Kurds for the Armenian and Assyrian Genocide. Demirbaş also called upon the Turkish authorities to issue an apology and do whatever necessary to atone for the genocide. Osman Baydemir, the ex-mayor of Diyarbakir, had helped enable the restoration of Surp Giragos, an Armenian Orthodox church in Sur district that had lain in ruins for decades.91 In addition to Surp Giragos, there are only three other active Armenian churches remaining in Anatolia.

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Two of those are served by the same priest in the region of Hatay, and the third, the St. Gregory Church in Kayseri, has a groundskeeper and a foundation board, but no congregation and no priest. Surp Giragos was reopened in 2011 and contains a museum which recounts Armenian life in Diyarbakir. Demirbaş’s municipality published cleaning flyers for the public in Armenian, Kurdish and Assyrian, as well as children’s storybooks in these languages. They launched Armenian language courses in 2009. Demirbaş also struggled hard for the Surp Giragos Church reconstruction in 2011. On the day of the re-opening of the church, when Onno Tunciyan gave what was the first Armenian concert in Diyarbakir, he addressed the Armenians who had gathered there: “Welcome, my brothers and sisters! We are very glad to see you in your own country, your own city!” Similarly, Baydemir, during his time as mayor of Diyarbakir, issued a call for exiled Armenians to return to their city. Demirbaş explains all their work on the Armenian language and church as resistance to the Turkish state’s ‘one flag, one language and one state’ motto and as reforming the real identity of Diyarbakir to include the culture and language of minorities, non-­ Muslims.92 “When I was appointed to this job, there were two or three people saying that they were Armenians, but by 2012, this number had increased to 300-400,” said Demirbaş. Garo Paylan, the only Armenian HDP MP, values the role of Dink but he argues that Dink himself was influenced by the Kurdish movement, as the Kurdish struggle encouraged him to defend Armenians’ rights too. Director and photographer Hale Kızılaslan (2017) underlines the role of the Kurdish movement in the increasing level of recognition of the genocide, saying, “the Kurdish movement started identity interrogation along with identity struggle, so many Kurds, or other sympathizers of the Kurdish movement, started to wonder whether they may have any Armenian roots, because the Kurdish movement encourages such interrogation.” Similarly, the academic and historian Bülent Bilmez (2017) points out that “the path to the recognition of the genocide among Kurds started with the efforts of the Kurdish movement, which has had a big impact on Kurdish people. The genocide discourse is something missing in the Turkish Leftist discourse.”93 In addition, the director of Nor Zartonk publicly announced his support for HDP. Tekir also confirms the role of HDP in the politicization and mobilization of Armenians, and states, “HDP has started to be supported not only by Kurdophones (Armenians speaking Kurdish) but other Armenians, especially by the Armenian candidates in the local elections.” On the one hand, Görgülü (2016) claims

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that HDP support for Armenians needs to be linked to the self-interest of the party to increase its poll ratings; on the other hand, Sevan Değirmenciyan (2016) says that the Armenian population is very small, so HDP could not be thinking about the votes they could be getting. Koptaş says, “Compared to 20 years ago, Armenians are known much better. The majority of Kurds recognize the genocide, and Kurds are many. So I think 20 per cent of Turkey’s population recognize the genocide.” In order to negate the claims of Etyen Mahçupyan of the Kurdish population of Turkey being ‘marginal’, during the interview for this book and in some other media outlets, Koptaş says, “[T]he proportion of 20 per cent is rather high to be marginal.” HDP’s recognition of the Armenian Genocide and discourse in support of the Armenians has been embraced by its voters. In this respect, Çelikkan (2017) thinks there is correlative mutual reformation between Kurdish HDP supporters and HDP itself in relation to the recognition of the Armenian Genocide and that they nurture each other. However, Namik Kemal Dinç (2016), historian and TV programmer who made a series of programs based on the Armenian Genocide at IMC TV, thinks that HDP and PKK were indirectly pushed to concern themselves with the Armenian Question and recognize the genocide. He adds “Kurdish people, particularly from the ruined and evacuated villages, have started to voice their confrontation with the massacres of Armenians by believing that they are subjected to the same atrocities that Armenians were subjected to a hundred years ago.”94 During the interview, Dinç shares one of the statements made to him by one of the Kurds whose village was set on fire in 1994, who said tearfully, “[T]his is the curse of Armenians in 1915.” Similarly, Em şiv in hun paşivin (‘We are dinner, you will be sahur’ [meal consumed early in the morning]), a well-known statement by an anonymous Armenian in Kurdish, implying that Kurds will find themselves in the same situation as Armenians in the future. “Whatever they did to Armenians a century ago, they try to do the same to Kurds,” said Demirbaş. Likewise, Sevan Değirmenciyan says, “Armenians are replaced with Kurds, the only difference, Armenians attained national consciousness much before and even in 1919 Ahşarel Alboyacıyan, addressing the Turkish Republic, wrote ‘what would you do when Kurds start to acquire consciousness?’, so he sensed what would happen a century later.” To the Armenian journalist and public speaker Hayko Bağdat (2016), “the picture of 1915 is in the east of Turkey right now. Kurds are going through the same situations as the Armenians during the genocide. A third of Kurds are migrants now.”

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This has become a common motto among Kurds affected severely by the conflicts in their region. The number of revelations of their crypto-Armenian identity is more common among Kurds than Turks, which is partly related to their sharing the same region, southeast Turkey, but mainly to do with their political affiliations, which encourage such revelations. To co-director of Truth Justice Memory Centre Çelikkan (2017), because Kurds are mostly actively involved in their own freedom movement, which regards the Armenian Question as a way to see their own cause, and not in the hegemonic majority, they tend to confront their crypto-Armenian identity more than Turks.95 Similarly, human rights lawyer Eren Keskin (2017) takes the view that there is a much greater possibility of Kurds recognizing the genocide than of Turks doing so.96 It is true that there are also many Turks who recognize the genocide, but there is no Turkish party for them to relate to like HDP. There are some Turkish MPs struggling for recognition, but they are not supported by their own parties, for example, Istanbul CHP MP Selina Doğan, who is of Armenian descent. There is consensus in respect of genocide denial in all Turkish left- and right-wing parties apart from the pro-Kurdish HDP. In relation to this, Keskin (2017) observes, both left and right-wing Turkish parties feed from the Ittihat mentality (Committee of Union and Progress) during the years of genocide. When we, as a Human Right Organization (IHD), recognized the Genocide for the first time, Turkish leftists didn’t accept it. Even Ibrahim Kaypakkaya, whom I adore politically, regarded the Genocide as a game of imperialism. The official ideology chills us to the bone.97

Blackening Kurds by association with Armenians is also common behavior among the Turkish public and authorities, another indication of anti-­ Armenianism together with the aggressive denial of the Armenian Genocide or belief in an Armenian conspiracy to fabricate history and manipulate public and political opinion for political gain. Cenk Saraçoğlu (2011, p. 175) argues that anti-Armenian attitudes in Turkey “are no longer constructed and shaped by social interactions between the ‘ordinary people’ […] Rather, the Turkish media and state promote and disseminate an overtly anti-Armenian discourse.” One recurrent label and derogatory characterization is the expression Ermeni piçi (Armenian bastard) to refer to the Kurds. PKK guerrillas were defined as crypto-Armenians. The human rights lawyer Eren Keskin shares an anecdote regarding her legal

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cases saying, “I took the case of a woman guerrilla in Urfa, and two of her friends were killed next to her. The soldiers checked the dead bodies’ sexual organs to see if they were circumcised, to see if they were Armenians.” “By claiming that ASALA and PKK, both seen as dangerous organizations, are cooperating with each other is to criminalize Kurds and Armenians, which is achieved to some degree among the Turkish public,” said Demirtaş (2016). It can also be said that the debates on Armenians have become very visible within pro-Kurdish civil organizations and movements after Dink. Elif Al (2017), the spokesperson of the Open Society Foundation, states that the number of Kurdish organizations applying to them to get funding for projects focusing on the 1915 events increased after Dink’s assassination.98 Recognition of the genocide, and Kurds involvement in it, is not shared by all Kurdish intellectuals and activists or by Kurdish civil society. Kurdish denialism over the role of the Kurds in the genocide and the significance of this role for the present also exists (Ayata 2009). Despite common acknowledgment within Kurdish society, many Kurds, including some of my journalist and historian interviewees (i.e., Namık Kemal Dinç, Abdullah Keskin and Cafer Solgun), are not comfortable being seen as the main scapegoat for the massacres. They believe pointing fingers at Kurds as the main perpetrators is a way of covering up the real ones. The journalist Cafer Solgun (2017) says, “Kurds followed the politics of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), and Armenians were massacred and mistreated everywhere, not just in Kurdish regions.” Second, Kurds are not trusted by some Armenians. Eren Keskin (2017) argues, “[T]he Armenian Cemaat [community] in Istanbul does not trust Kurds. They think they will be deceived once more.” Kurdish anti-Armenian politics is conceived differently by different actors. For instance, Aras Publishing House editor Koptaş (2016) says, [W]hat Kurds do is not enough. Not everybody thinks the way Baydemir thinks. There are those like Bese Hozat [co-President of the Kurdish Workers’ Party and member of the Union of Communities of Kurdistan (KCK)] who during one of her interviews alleged conspiracies by ‘Armenian, Jewish and Greek lobbies’ to undermine the democratic movement in Turkey.99 There should be more concrete steps taken, like giving Armenian properties and lands back to their real owners.100

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In fact, some Kurds have attempted to return the lands confiscated during the 1915 genocide to the real owners in order to set a historical example of apology- and justice-based reconciliation. For instance, in October 2008, Kurdish writer Berzan Boti transferred property deeds to the Seyfo Centre in the Netherlands, an Assyrian organization that campaigns worldwide for the recognition of the Assyrian Genocide, when he found out that the real owners had been killed during the genocide.101 PODEM co-director Aybars Görgülü is also very skeptical about HDP attitudes to Armenians and questions their sincerity by asking, “If they came into government, would they give Armenian lands back to them in the Kurdish region? I believe HDP is instrumentalizing the Armenian issue for their ̇ own cause.”102 However, Insel concludes, “Kurds are very heterogeneous. There are very left-wing people but there are also Hezbollah [Shi’a Islamist militant and political party] supporters among them.103 But personally I sincerely believe in the efforts of HDP in relation to Armenians.” Despite different views on the role of Kurds in the Turkish-Armenian reconciliation process, along with restoration of churches in eastern provinces where most Armenians lived before the genocide, the discourses on the recognition of the genocide, the call of Diyarbakir municipality to Armenian diaspora to return to their home towns, the land return efforts by some members of Kurdish civil society in the region, Kurdish leaders paying respect at Armenian Genocide memorials, individual acts of apology and comprehensive pro-reconciliation coverage in Kurdish media outlets and press, together seem to offer the potential for an alternative approach to the ongoing Armenian Question and show the way toward a dialogue and reconciliation process between the Turkish state and Armenians. Narrativization of remembered experiences, based on autobiographies and personal recollection of events, has also been attempted in Kurdish literature to create social and collective memory. Not only have Kurdish political figures apologized on behalf of perpetrator-ancestors, but also dozens of Kurdish novels have represented the experience of the Armenians by privileging ‘real’ historical events and biographies. The incorporation of the Armenian Genocide into Kurdish novels frames social memory and reflects evolving Kurdish politics.104 The novels recreate memories and traumas, describe the genocide’s impact on crucial characters, contribute new information to contemporary Kurdish collective memory, address the role of Kurds in the events and contextualize the latter via the theme of manipulation by Ottoman and Republican authorities. Similarly, through the politics of remembering, Kurdish novelists advocate a particular kind

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of politicization of national history; by incorporating shared heritages, they seek as well to create a complex and collective identity.105 Collective identities may also be based on shared orientations, values, attitudes, world views and lifestyles, as well as on shared experiences of action (e.g., individuals may feel close to people holding similar post-materialist views or similarly approving of direct action, without expressing any strong sense of class, ethnic or gender proximity). First, they create ‘collective memory’ of the past not only for Armenians by integrating social bonds, and second, they demand democratization for all, and the Armenian Question is an essential and primary step toward this. There is constant apathy and disaffection and a widespread indifference toward social or political causes, so along with this array of new social movements, they aim to enhance or renew citizen rights against various forms of established authority; they contribute to the enhancement of the political sphere (Roche 1995).

Notes 1. See Johnston et al. (1994); laran Johnson and Klandermans (1995). 2. For more on mnemonic opportunity structures, see Raj Andrew Ghoshal (2013). ‘Transformative collective memory: mnemonic opportunity structures and the outcomes of racial violence memory movements’, Theory and Society 42(4): 329–350. 3. For more on Dink’s life, see Çandar, T. (2017) Hrant Dink: An Armenian Voice of the Voiceless in Turkey, London: Routledge, which contains reflections on Dink’s life and work from 125 colleagues, friends and family members. 4. The word ‘agos’ is a village term shared by Armenian and Turkish, meaning ‘the furrow opened by the plough for sowing seeds’. Dink, who owned a bookshop at that time with lawyers Diran Bakar and Luiz Bakar, who was also the spokesperson of the patriarchate, businessman Harutiun Sesetian and public-relations professional Anna Turay, founded Agos in April 1996. 5. The confidentiality of data that identifies people’s lineage is treated as a national security issue in Turkey in order to hide the assimilated non-­ Muslims and avoid any debate on Turkishness. That’s why news and statements about crypto-Armenians, Greek and Jews have always been very sensitive. For instance, on 8 February 2018, the population registers were officially opened to the public via an online genealogy database, which created great debate. The database was closed shortly afterward.

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6. Just after the introduction of the surname act, Atatürk gave her the family name Gökçen on 19 December 1934. Gök means sky in Turkish and Gökçen means ‘belonging or relating to the sky’. Gökçen was the first Turkish female combat pilot. 7. According to research by the Committee to Protect Journalists, 18 other Turkish journalists have been killed for their work, making it the eighth deadliest country in the world for journalists. 8. FETÖ (Gülenist Terror Group), which is also blamed for the failed military coup attempt in 2016, has also been linked to efforts to thwart a thorough investigation of the murder. 9. For the hate discourse on minorities in Turkish media, see Köker, E ve Doğanay, Ü. (2010) Irkçı değilim ama: Yazılı Basında Irkçı-Ayrımcı ̇ Söylemler, Ankara: IHOP Yayınları. Hrant Dink Foundation carries out a Media Watch on Hate Speech Project along with ASULIS (Discourse, Dialogue, Democracy Laboratory) (https://hrantdink.org/en/asulisen/activities/projects/media-watch-on-hate-speech), which includes a number of reports titled ‘Hate Speech and Discriminatory Discourse in Media’ and regularly adds new reports. According to the reports, Jews are the most targeted group in Turkish media. For more on hate speech on Jews in Turkish media see, Rifat N. Bali (2009) ‘Present-day anti-semitism in Turkey’, Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism, Special Issue, 84, 16 August; ‘Antisemitism in the Turkish media (part I)’, MEMRI, Special Dispatch 900, 28 April 2005; ‘Antisemitism in the Turkish media (part II): Turkish intellectuals against antisemitism’, MEMRI, Special Dispatch 905, 5 May 2005; ‘Antisemitism in the Turkish media (part III): targeting Turkey’s Jewish citizens’, MEMRI, Special Dispatch 916, 6 June 2005; Şule Toktaş (2006), ‘Perceptions of anti-semitism among Turkish Jews’, Turkish Studies 7(2): 203–223; Efrat Aviv (2017) Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism in Turkey, Abingdon, UK: Routledge. 10. The Hrant Dink Foundation has been preparing the report on hate speech in the media since 2009. The top 15 national offenders were almost entirely ultrareligious or ultranationalist publications. Jews and Syrians are the groups most frequently targeted by hate speech in Turkish media. 11. See EU Turkey Civic Commission (2007) ‘Hrant Dink: Requiem to a Lesser Turkey’ (25 January). 12. ‘The Crises of Contemporary Democracy: The Hrant Dink Memorial Lecture’, Epress.am, http://epress.am/en/2017/01/21/the-crisis-ofcontemporary-democracy-the-hrant-dink-memorial-lecture.html 13. I interviewed Mr. Demirtaş at the Turkish Parliament, Ankara, in October 2016. He was detained in a police raid on his home overnight on 4 November 2016 over terror-related charges. He is among 12 HDP MPs,

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including his co-leader Figen Yüksekdağ, who were detained in a ­simultaneous swoop; now 9 HDP MPs remain in prison. Demirtaş risks up to 142 years in jail if convicted. Yüksekdağ was stripped of her MP status in February 2017, and she stepped down as the party’s co-chair in May 2017. 14. ‘Hrant Dink and Armenians in Turkey’, Open Democracy, https://www. opendemocracy.net/en/dink_armenian_4378jsp/ 15. Musa Anter, Kurdish writer and activist, is believed to have been killed in ̇ 1992 by JITEM (Jandarma Istihbarat ve Terörle Mücadale, Gendarmerie Intelligence and Counter-terrorism, which is the undercover wing of the Turkish Police—a military force that officially does not exist). Thousands of people from Turkish Kurdistan were disappeared during the 1990s (U. Erdal and H. Bakırcı (2006) Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights: A Practitioner’s Handbook, Geneva: OMCT). 16. ‘The failed Istanbul Armenian Patriarchate’, The Armenian Weekly, https://armenianweekly.com/2018/02/12/failed-istanbul-armenianpatriarchate/ 17. Şirinoğlu, who has good relations with the Turkish government, is, like Ateşhian, blamed for delaying the funds and Patriarch elections. 18. Many argue that steps that have been taken concerning confiscated estates are profoundly insubstantial and insincere. The General Directorate of Foundations has certified the return of only 96 estates out of the 1410 recent applications filed by community foundations for the return of estates confiscated by the state. 19. In 2003, in an official visit to neighboring Georgia, Erdoğan had said, “I am also a Georgian. Our family is a Georgian family that emigrated from Batumi to Rize.” Thus the source of the allegation that he was Georgian was Erdoğan himself. 20. Among the 17 signatories were the names of late journalist Hrant Dink’s son Arat Dink, Agos editor-in-chief Rober Koptaş and his close associate Karin Karakaşlı, as well as well-known Armenian names such as Anna Turay, Aris Nalcı, Garo Paylan, Hayko Bağdat and Yetvart Danzikyan, publishers and business people such as Ardasez Margosyan and Nazar Buyum. 21. The petition has been circulated in 13 languages. 22. For analysis of the statement, see A.  Erbal (2012) ‘Mea Culpas, Negotiations, Apologias: Revisiting the Turkish intellectuals’ “Apology campaign”’, in B. Schwelling (ed.). Reconciliation, Civil Society, and the Politics of Memory (Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript), 51–96. In January 2009, Armenian intellectuals launched their own campaign to apologize for killings of Turks by Armenian organizations during the final years of the Ottoman Empire and by the ASALA from 1975 to the early 1990s.

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23. Hambersom Aghashian (2015) ‘Turkish Intellectuals Who Have Recognized the Armenian Genocide: Nedim Gürsel’,16 July: https:// massispost.com/2015/07/turkish-intellectuals-who-haverecognized-the-armenian-genocide-nedim-gursel/ 24. See Leylekian, L. (2009) ‘Turkish intellectuals and state denial’, Armenian Reporter, 30 May. 25. From the interview with Insel (2017) in Istanbul. 26. ‘The Personal is Political’, the title of an essay written by Carol Hanisch of the New York Radical Women and published in Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation in 1970, is associated with the feminist movement and has been used to challenge the existing notion of the hierarchy between political and personal and to emphasize the fact that personal experiences are often shaped by existing political structures. It also conveys that personal problems are political and that there are no personal solutions but only collective action for a collective solution. This slogan has been applied by other movements as I do in this book. 27. For more on the Gezi Park protests, see E.  C. Gürcan and E.  Peker (2015) Challenging Neoliberalism at Turkey’s Gezi Park, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. 28. h t t p s : / / w w w. o p e n d e m o c r a c y. n e t / d e n i z - g - n c e - d e m i r h i s a r / emotion-and-protest-in-turkey-what-happened-on-19-january-2007 29. See, Tessa Hoffman (2002). 30. Arkun, Aram (2018) ‘Hrag Papazian Explores Armenian Identity in Turkey’, https://mirrorspectator.com/2018/10/25/hrag-papazianexplores-armenian-identity-in-turkey/ 31. This book is based on postdoctoral research, which was also supported by Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. 32. See ‘Armenians and Other Armenians in Turkey’ (20 June 2017), https://www.repairfuture.net/index.php/en/identity-standpoint-ofarmenian-diaspora/armenians-and-other-armenians-in-turkey 33. For a comparison between Armenian identity in the Republic of Armenia and diaspora, see Panossian, R. (2005) ‘Homeland-diaspora Relations and Identity Differences’, in E.  Herzig and M.  Kurkchiyan (eds). Armenians: Past and Present in the Making of National Identity, London and New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 65–88. 34. From the interview with Koptaş (2016) in Istanbul. 35. From the interview with Değirmenciyan (2016) in Istanbul. 36. Interview with Paylan (2017). 37. Interview with Tekir (2016). 38. Interview with Bağdat (2016). 39. Interview with Koptaş (2016). 40. Interview with Tekir (2016).

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41. ‘Two Hamshen Armenian Activists Released from Turkish Jail, December 9, 2017’, Horizon, https://horizonweekly.ca/en/ two-hamshen-armenian-activists-released-from-turkish-jail/ 42. The interviews conducted for this project were published in three books by Ferda Balancar: The Sounds of Silence I: Turkey’s Armenians Speak, The Sounds of Silence II: Diyarbakır’s Armenians Speak and The Sounds of Silence III: Ankara’s Armenians Speak. 43. This refers to the massacre that occurred in 1978 in the Turkish/Kurdish province Kahramanmaras, when Alevi Kurds were set upon by Islamic rightists. The attack led to the deaths of dozens of civilians. 44. Interview with Estukyan (2016). 45. He was arrested in November 2015 on charges of espionage while also facing other charges, released in March 2016 and rearrested soon after. In April 2018, he received a suspended jail sentence of 1 year and 6 months on charges of ‘conducting terror propaganda’ over columns he published in 2013 in Cumhuriyet newspaper. 46. The group called the ‘The Saturday Mothers of Turkey’ has been gathering at 12 pm every Saturday in Taksim, Istanbul, since 1995. In 2013, ‘Saturday Mothers’ were awarded the Hrant Dink Award. 47. The orphanage was expropriated by the Turkish state in 1987 on the basis of a 1936 bill preventing minority foundations from acquiring property. The Turkish government signed a decree in 2011 to return property taken from minority foundations, but the camp was excluded, alongside hundreds of other properties. 48. The Ankara-based organization has been publishing the journal KAOS GL (now a quarterly publication) since its foundation. The group operates the KAOS Cultural Centre, which hosts cultural activities, meetings and showings of films. The Centre also houses a LGBT history library. 49. The interview took place in March 2017 at KaosGL’s Ankara office. The spokesperson wanted to remain anonymous. 50. Interview with KaosGL spokesperson (2017). 51. Ergenekon refers to a mythical place located in the valleys of the Altay Mountains and has a connotation of ultra-Turkish nationalist sentiments. It was also the name given to an alleged clandestine secularist ultranationalist organization in Turkey with ties to members of the Turkish military and security forces. 52. ‘Reasons for the Current Upsurge in Memory’ Eurozine, 19 April 2002, https://www.eurozine.com/reasons-for-the-current-upsurge-inmemory/ 53. Massacres and major violations linked to the Turkish state after 1915, either directly or indirectly, include the expulsion of Jews from Thrace in 1934; the military massacre in Dersim in 1938–1939; the discriminatory

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Capital Tax on non-Muslims in 1944, causing looting and the reallocation of non-Muslim property; in 1955, under the pretext of the Cyprus question, attacks were plotted on the Greek community, known as the September 6–7 events; the massacres of Alevis in Maraş (1978), Çorum (1980) and Sivas (1993); the Roboski massacre. 54. For more see Nora’s article (2002) titled ‘Reasons for the Current Upsurge in Memory’ https://www.eurozine.com/reasons-for-thecurrent-upsurge-in-memory/. 55. Nora (1989) ‘Between Memory and History’. 56. Interview with Bilmez (2017). 57. The consortium partners include Civilitas Foundation (CF), Eurasia Partnership Foundation (EPF), Public Journalism Club (PJC), Regional Studies Centre (RSC) from Armenia and Anadolu Kültür (Anatolian Culture), the Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey (TEPAV), Citizens Assembly (CA), and Hrant Dink Foundation from Turkey. The overall objective of the program is to empower and engage civil societies of Turkey and Armenia to contribute to enhanced regional peace and stability, democratic pluralism and social inclusion across and within their societies. For more see: http://www.armenia-turkey.net/en/programme 58. BST is a grant-making initiative promoting regional cooperation and good governance in the wider Black Sea region. 59. The interview took place in June 2017 at the foundation’s Istanbul office. 60. For more on cultural and artistic protests in Turkey, especially throughout the Gezi Park protests, see Pieter Verstraete’s talk delivered at University College Cork in 2016, titled ‘How Did We Get Here?: Protest Culture, Political Theatre and Performative Protest in Turkey’. 61. The interview took place in June 2016 in Istanbul. 62. Interview with Yıldırım (2016). 63. The Madimak or Sivas massacre refers to the events on 2 July 1993 when a mob set fire to the hotel where the Alevi group had assembled. It resulted in the killing of 35 people, including Alevi intellectuals and two hotel staff. After long years of trials, the case was dropped despite appeals. Each year the victims are commemorated on the anniversary of the massacre. 64. The Roboski massacre refers to the Turkish air raid on a Kurdish area near the Iraqi Kurdistan border that killed at least 34 civilian Kurds in 2011. The news of the Roboski massacre was circulated through Kurdish media sources, while there was an attempt by the Turkish authorities to cover it up; the government imposed a broadcasting ban on news and reports on the massacre. 65. The interviewee refers to the basement massacre which occurred during the Turkish military curfew in Cizre between December 2015 and

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February 2016 after clashes between PKK and the Turkish military. According to the Human Right Association, 178 unarmed civilians were killed by Turkish security forces, many burnt while sheltering in the basements in Cizre on 7 February 2016. 66. Interview with Kızılaslan (2017). 67. Beşikçi (born 1939), a PEN Honorary Member and candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, served 17 years in prison on propaganda charges originating from his writings about Kurds in Turkey, and was released in 1999. Thirty-two of his 36 books have been banned in Turkey. 68. An arson attack against Avesta took place in June 2016. It had been persecuted for many years, and it was shut down in May 2018. 69. Interview with Koptaş (2016). 70. Yeni Ülke (Free Country) was one of the first newspapers to brave the Kurdish issue. Published weekly between 1990 and 1992, it had 40 of its 110 editions confiscated by court order. It was succeeded by Özgür Gündem (Free Agenda), published daily between 1992 and 1994. Even though this paper was shut down as well, the name Özgür Gündem has been associated with publications that started with Yeni Ülke and continued under many different names due to the frequent bans. One of these which adopted the former name Özgür Gündem was shut down by decree following the coup in July 2016. Turkey has been ordered to pay compensation to the owner of the newspaper, Ali Gurbuz, £3030 for the closure. Former editors and staff of the shuttered Özgür Gündem newspaper received prison sentences from a Turkish court. 71. IMC (International Media Centre) TV launched on 1 May 2011. It is a unique Turkish media outlet with its liberal content and its concentration on the sensitive issues in Turkey. It was shut down under the emergency statutory decree issued in the aftermath of the 15 July failed coup d’état, alongside 11 other television and 11 radio stations, on 4 October 2016. Police raided the television station’s headquarters in Istanbul for allegedly ‘spreading terrorist propaganda’. 72. For more on Islamized Armenians, see L.  Ritter (2014) ‘Armenian Identity in the Diaspora: Between Modernity and Preservation’, https:// www.repairfuture.net/index.php/en/identity-standpoint-of-armeniandiaspora/armenian-identity-in-the-diaspora-between-modernity-andpreservation-armenian; Ayse Gul Altinay’s article (2014) ‘Gendered silences, gendered memories: new memory work on Islamized Armenians in Turkey’; Ara Sarafian’s article (2001) ‘The absorption of Armenian women and children into Muslim households as a structural component of the Armenian Genocide’; Ugur Umit Ungor’s article (2012) ‘Orphans, converts and prostitutes: social consequences of war and persecution in the Ottoman Empire 1914–1925’; Erhan Başyurt’s book (2006) Ermeni

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Evlatlıklar: Saklı Kalmış Hayatlar [Armenian Adoptees: Secret Lives]; Selim Deringil’s book (2012) Conversion and Apostasy in the Late Ottoman Empire; Tijiana Krstic’s book (2014) Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire; Avedis Hadjian’s book (2018) titled Secret Nation: The Hidden Armenians of Turkey, London: I. B. Tauris on the stories of survival and discovery from those remaining after the genocide, in which he reveals the lives of people who have been converted or Islamized through travelling to a number of villages and towns which were densely populated by Armenians. Aysenur Korkmaz (2015) completed her MA thesis on Islamized Armenians in the provinces of Bitlis and Diyarbakir, Batman and Sasun drawing upon oral history interviews of family stories of the descendants of Islamized Armenians. Ceren Ozgul’s PhD thesis, titled ‘From Muslim citizen to Christian minority: tolerance, secularism, and Armenian return conversions in Turkey’, analyzes the return conversions of forcibly Islamized Armenians in modern Turkey back to Armenian Christianity. Kılıç Artıkları [The Remnants of the Sword] (2013), published by Laurence Ritter and Max Sivaslian and translated into Turkish by Cengiz Aktar, is another oral history project about the surviving Islamized grandchildren of those exterminated by the Ottoman Empire. 73. For sex-specific aspects of the genocide and its exceptions, for sexual abuse, forced marriage, forced conversion to Islam and the absorption of Armenian women and children into Muslim households as a structural component of the genocidal campaign, for suicide against rape and for cross-­dressing as a strategy of survival during the genocide, see (Sanasarian 1989; Miller and Miller 1993; Sarafian 2001; Dadrian 2003; Derderian 2005; Bjørnlund 2009; Tachjian 2009; Rowe 2011; Peroomian 2012; Ekmekçioğlu 2015, 2016). 74. Interview with Yıldırım (2016). 75. See https://tif.ssrc.org/2018/06/12/armenian-return-conversions-inturkey/ 76. See H.  Papazian (2017) ‘Armenians and Other Armenians in Turkey’, https://repairfuture.net/index.php/en/identity-standpoint-of-armenian-diaspora/armenians-and-other-armenians-in-turkey 77. Established on 25 October 2017 by former members of Turkey’s main established parties, most notably the nationalist MHP (Nationalist Movement Party). It is currently led by Meral Aksener, Minister of the Interior 1996–1997, from the center-right True Path Party (DYP), who then became an MHP member of parliament from 2007 to 2015. 78. Osman Özsoy, ‘Ermeniler neden Aleviliği seçti?’, Radikal, 22 August 2007; Şahin Alpay, ‘Halaçoğlu “maalesef” ırkçılık yapıyor’, Zaman, 25 August 2007.

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79. Tunceli was originally named Dersim Province (Dersim vilayeti), then demoted to a district (Dersim kazası) and incorporated into Elâzığ Province in 1926. It was finally changed to Tunceli Province on 4 January 1936 by the ‘Law on Administration of the Tunceli Province’ (Tunceli ̇ Vilayetinin Idaresi Hakkında Kanun) as part of the assimilation policies of the state, but some, especially those who are politicized and critical of assimilation politics, still call the region by its original name. 80. See H.  Kharatyan (2014) ‘The Search for Identity in Dersim: The Alevized Armenians in Dersim’, https://repairfuture.net/index.php/ en/identity-standpoint-of-armenia/the-search-for-identity-in-dersimpart-2-the-alevized-armenians-in-dersim-armenian 81. Interview with Solgun (2017). 82. For more on Hemshin, see A. Manoukian (2015) New Saints: Canonizing the Victims of the Armenian Genocide, Norderstedt, Germany: Books on Demand; R.  Kevorkian (2011) The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History, London: I. B. Tauris; H. H. Simonian (ed.) (2007) The Hemshin: History, Society and Identity in the Highlands of Northeast Turkey, Abingdon, UK: Routledge. 83. The interview with Kızılaslan took place in Istanbul in 2017. 84. Examples of these novels are Fethiye Cetin (2004) Anneannem [My Grandmother]; Baskin Oran (2014) M. K. Adli Cocugun Tehciranilar. 85. Kisanak was elected in 2014 as the first female mayor of Diyarbakir, but on 25 October 2016, Turkish authorities detained her. Since 5 November 2016, Tuncel has been imprisoned. Kisanak and Tuncel were accused of joining protests on the anniversary of the abduction of the Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan and of attending demonstrations against the collective actions of the Turkish government security services in 2015. 86. Interview Insel (2017). 87. ‘Kurdistan/Kurdistan Recognitions-the Christian Genocide in 1915’, Kurdish Armenian, https://kurdisharmenian.blogspot.com/2007/07/ communism-and-genocide-recognitions.html 88. One needs to mention the Armenians who believe that genocide acknowledgment without accountability (land, reparation and restitution) is meaningless and that Kurds cannot be trusted. 89. Before 1915, Diyarbakir was a significant city for Armenians. According to M. Bardacki Talat Pasha’s Black Book, there were more than 50,000 Armenians living in Diyarbakir before 1915. 90. Due to the provision of these services, Demirbaş was removed from his post in 2007, but he and his team continued to provide them in their own way in an alternative building next to the municipality building. He was reelected in 2009 with a 10 per cent higher vote compared to his first election in 2004. He received several international awards.

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91. Diyarbakir’s Sur district suffered tremendously during the campaign of violence triggered by the Turkish state after the general election in June 2015, which transformed the area into a war zone. 92. From the interview with Demirbaş (2017) in Istanbul. 93. Interview with Bilmez (2017). 94. The interview with Namık Kemal Dinç took place in December 2016 in Istanbul. He studied history at Istanbul University and was imprisoned for 10 years (1994–2004) due to his Kurdish politics. One of the founders of a history and politics magazine in Turkish called Toplum ve Kuram (Society and Theory). With co-author Adnan Çelik (2015), he undeṙ took research titled Yüz Yıllık Ah: Toplumsal Hafızanın Izinde 1915 Diyarbekir [A Hundred Years of Oh: In the Path of Collective Memory of 1915] based on the oral histories of Kurdish people from Diyarbakir relating to the 1915 killings in Armenian populated towns in that region. He also published a book titled Onlar gitti ve biz barışı yitirdik [They Left and We Lost the Peace] based on his series of ten TV programs (Yüzyüze) about the Armenian Genocide. 95. Interview with Çelikkan (2017). 96. Interview with Keskin (2017). 97. Ibrahim Kaypakkaya (1949–1973) was leader of the Communist movement in Turkey and the founder of the Communist Party of Turkey/ Marxist-Leninist (TKP/ML), which was cracked down on by the Turkish government following the military memorandum of 1971. He was executed by shooting in prison in 1973 after being tortured for four months. He has been seen as a symbol of resistance by his admirers. 98. Interview with Al (2017). 99. Numerous Turkish, Kurdish and Armenian intellectuals, the T24.com.tr website and the vice-chairs of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) of Turkey, however, strongly criticized Bese Hozat for her statement. A letter from PKK’s imprisoned leader Abdullah Öcalan was published in Istanbul’s Agos weekly, which appeared to condemn Hozat’s incendiary remarks. 100. Interview with Koptaş (2016). 101. Boti is a Kurdish writer from Siirt who spent 11 years as a political prisoner in Diyarbakir prison before being released in 1991. 102. Interview with Görgülü (2016). 103. Hezbollah, which literally means Party of Allah (God), was initially funded by Iran, primarily to harass the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon in 1982. Besides the town of Batman in Turkish Kurdistan, the Kurdish Hezbollah group was strongest in the Silvan district of Diyarbakır province during the 1990s. For a long time, the village of Yolaç was used

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as their base. They were active against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Government of Turkey. 104. Some of these novels are Irfan Amîda (2011) Pêsengeha Suretan [Exhibition of Photos]; Mehdi Zana (2005) Oy Daye [Oh Mother]; Yaqup Tilermeni (2009) Bavfileh [Proselyte]; Eyub Guven (2011) Guhar; Mehmet Deviren (2013) Kortika Filehan [The Ravine of the NonMuslims]; Sabri Akbel (2006) Evina Pinkan [Hidden Love]. 105. For more analysis of Kurdish novels on Armenians, see Ozlem Galip (2016), ‘The Politics of Remembering: Representation of the Armenian Genocide in Kurdish novels’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 30 (3), 458–487, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311892457_ The_Politics_of_Remembering_Representation_of_the_Armenian_ Genocide_in_Kurdish_Novels; Adnan Çelik and Ergin Öpengin (2016) ‘The Armenian Genocide in the Kurdish Novel: Restructuring Identity through Collective Memory’, European Journal of Turkish Studies, https://journals.openedition.org/ejts/5291

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Tuncel, S. (2017, March 15). Personal interview. [Personal interview]. Turner, R., & Killian, L. (1987). Collective behaviour. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. van De Donk, W., et al. (2004). Introduction: Social movements and ICTs. In W. van de Donk, B. D. Loader, P.G. Nixon, & D. Rucht (Eds.), Cyberprotest: New media, citizens and social movements (pp. 1–25). London: Routledge. Yerushalmi, Y.  H. (1982). Zakhor: Jewish history and Jewish memory. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Yıldırım, V. (2016, July 4). Personal interview [Personal interview]. Zald, M. N., & McCarthy, J. D. (2002). The resource mobilization research program: Progress, challenge, and transformation. In J.  Berger & M.  Zelditch (Eds.), New directions in contemporary sociological theory (pp.  147–171). Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Zekiyan, L. (1997). The Armenian way to modernity. Venezia: Supernova/ Eurasiatica. Zelizer, B., & Tenenboim-Weinblatt, K. (Eds.). (2014). Journalism and memory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Zolberg, A. (1995). From Invitation to Interdiction: U.S. Foreign Policy and Immigration since 1945. In M. S. Teitelbaum & M. Weiner (Eds.), Threatened peoples, threatened borders (pp. 117–158). New York: W. W. Norton.

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Concluding Remarks

Even if genocide were to be recognized, the recognition of wrongdoing by half the population would create a big challenge, as the dispute between Turkey and Armenia is multidimensional, so any possible (and the possibility looks very remote) reconciliation would face immense challenges at the individual, societal and state level. Armenians everywhere have been impacted by their genocide and the widespread denial by the Turkish government and its people (Garavanian 2000). These impacts on the identity formation of Armenians, creating the idea that Armenians are forgotten people and fabricators of the Turkish-led massacre that attempted to eliminate the Armenian people (ibid.). However, Turkey is still adamant in continuing its denial policy. It is crucial to underline the link between the historical memories and nation building, which is always prone to political exploitations by the rulers for the sake of creating a nationhood or national identity (Aktürk 2012; Assmann 2011). So that’s why massacres on Armenians considered as inappropriate memories were discarded from Turkish historiography, whereas the victory of Ottoman army during the Battle of Gallipoli is retained. To start with, there is not even a judicial system in Turkey to put the perpetrators of the genocide on trial in line with ‘no impunity for perpetrators’. For instance, the return of lands and properties to descendants of the victims, although there have been some instances, would cause great disturbances both within the state itself and among the citizens involved. © The Author(s) 2020 Ö. B. Galip, New Social Movements and the Armenian Question in Turkey, Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59400-8_6

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Additionally, for instance, the racism and language of hatred in officially approved school textbooks is very intense. These books still show Armenians as the enemies, so it would be necessary for these books to be amended to promote equality and human rights among all Turkish citizens, and the institutional stance of the state in relation to the past human rights violations would have to be changed. More importantly, Turkey needs an honest confrontation with its heavy historical legacy. Although during the First World War, pan-Ottomanism was abandoned and replaced by pan-Turkism, the relationship with Ottoman history is still two-faced and contradictory. On the one hand, its legacy is valued; on the other hand, Armenian massacres are attributed to the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), while the establishment of the Turkish Republic is idealized, and the republic purged of guilt, even though atrocities against both Armenians and other Turkish citizens continued even after the establishment of the Republic. Indeed, since the establishment of the Turkish Republic, the Christian minority, despite holding citizenship, has been subjected to discriminatory politics such as restricted property rights for their foundations, special taxes, pogroms in the 1950s, restricted appointment to certain state posts and so on. In some cases, laws were misused by the regime in order to suppress minorities in Turkey. There have been oppressive governmental policies concerning non-Muslim minorities’ educational, religious and organizational issues; the securitization of minority issues and the property rights of minority community foundations. The way the term ‘minority’ is used in Turkey falls short in representing the experiences of violence, oppression, invisibility, alienation, uneasiness and so on that the non-dominant groups experience within nation-states. Apart from the anti-Armenian sentiments and anti-­ democratic political positions taken against them, the hostile diplomatic relations between the Republic of Armenia and Turkey also worsen the lives of Armenians and their relations with the state and the rest of the society. It is true that many international and regional factors may have contributed to the failure of the normalization process between Armenia and Turkey, including the worsening of relations between Russia and the West following the Ukrainian and Syrian crises, the Nagorno-Karabakh crisis and the Azeri reaction to the Zurich protocols and Ankara’s loss of interest in the accession to the EU. And now the authoritarian regime, anti-democratic rule and the politics of denial which has gone on for years not only leads to the continuation of the Armenian Question which stretches back more than a century, but it

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also creates a fundamental detachment of the Armenian community living in Turkey from the rest of society and results in Armenians distrusting state apparatus. The increasing level of Turkish nationalism inevitably leads to a sense of isolation and reaction among Armenians in Turkey. As Sayat Tekir (2016) states, “the more Turks have become nationalist, the more Armenians have become Armenians. In Turkey you never forget your Armenian identity.” Sevan Değirmenciyan (2016) is an Armenian journalist, translator and editor who was born in Istanbul and lived there until he was 17, when he moved to Armenia to study. He shares Tekir’s point of view, saying, “I forgot to be Armenian in Armenia as I was only an ordinary human being. Turkey and its politics impose on you to be an Armenian,” and he adds that Turkish politics lead Armenians to struggle to remain Armenian. Değirmenciyan was a youngster when he left Turkey for the Republic of Armenia due to the pressures on Armenians of Turkey resulting from their portrayal as enemies and traitors. He had also become involved with ASALA. He returned to Turkey in 2005 after living 121 years in Yerevan. Similar to Değirmenciyan, the Armenian journalist Hayko Bağdat (2016) also comments on the reactionary Armenian identity arising from anti-Armenian and Turkish nationalist sentiments and actions saying, [I]t is not my choice to keep my Armenian identity on the surface. I have many identities. I also have gender and sexual identities, but I need to keep my Armenian identity as they remind me of being ‘other’ all the time. Being an Armenia in Turkey is a political act by itself. I always defined myself as leftist and tried to look at all the issues from the same point of view, but in Turkey your Armenian identity is imposed on you.

It appears that prejudice against Armenians and anti-Armenian sentiments among Turks does not differ between the elite class and the general public, and, as Görgülü (2016) confirms, most Turkish people have never seen an Armenian in their life and think that Armenians live in luxury and wealth, thereby endangering their own wealth and welfare. Direct interaction between Armenians and Turkish society would definitely contribute to a resolution, and Paylan (2017) shares the positive effects of visiting Turkish and Kurdish cities as an MP of Armenian descent, saying, [W]hen I go to different regions, I really get treated nicely by the public. They have always associated Armenians with betrayal or swearing. They had

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never met an Armenian in their life. When they meet me in person, I can see the change, their nationalism softening. For peace, both sides should come together and interact. If we cannot face the historical truth, we cannot recover.

When Hrant Dink was assassinated in 2007, hope for resolution and closer interaction blossomed because of the number and variety of people protesting against the brutal crime and demanding justice and resolution. The fact that Turkey was relatively liberal then compared to today enabled them to express their anger against Dink’s murder along with other protests against state crimes, violations and oppression both ongoing and in the past. Response to Dink’s assassination amply demonstrates the level of continuing support for the view that responsibility must be taken for committing collective violence against Armenians within the Turkish state and society (Göcek 2015, p. 390). Even on the day of the assassination, thousands of people rushed to the place where he had been killed. This gathering was spontaneous, an immediate reactive mobilization, without any arrangement or planning. The slogan ‘We are all Hrant, We are all Armenians’ was a turning point. The protest that followed the assassination on 19 January 2007, which can be defined as “moral shock” (Jasper 1997), resulted in fast and effective recruitment for a new phase in the development of a social movement in which people internalized the incident and saw it as an extremely personal experience. The emotions of those people attending or supporting protests over such assassinations are based on collective experiences rather than a direct bond with the victim (Demirhisar 2016). Mass media, personal networks and social media enabled widespread transmission of a grieving and protesting voice in a very short period of time. Following his murder, new initiatives and groups were created and existing civil organizations started to show solidarity for the Armenian cause and the recognition of the genocide. Dink’s commemorations and protests over the unfair trial for his murder revealed current ‘emancipation movements’ dealing both with the peaceful resolution of the Kurdish issue and the right to equal citizenship for all who are different. The grassroots membership of social movements created or expanded after Dink’s assassination is cross-community rather than single identity. In a sense, it can be said that they have pointed the way to “humanist politics forged through post-national and cosmopolitan identity” (Nagle 2008, p. 306). Through street protests and non-violent direct action related to Dink’s assassination, they have focused on pacifist and

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pedagogic campaigns, which stimulate public awareness of important socio-political issues of Turkey and foster a more pluralized society and public space with alternative identities. The link between post-materialist orientations or values (Inglehart 1977, 1990) including an emphasis on personal and political freedom, political democracy, openness to the new ideas and caring society toward freedom of speech, direct democracy and the new social movement has been questioned. So post-materialist values emphasize the quality rather than the quantity of life (Habermas 1987); in order words rather than seeking power, control, or economic gain, such movements are more inclined to seek autonomy and democratization (Rucht 1988). In other words, for most, bringing the truth of genocide to the surface and resolving the Dink murder case has meant calling on the Turkish state to confront its atrocities and to preserve the cultural, ethnic and religious identities of Turkish citizens. Young Armenians, despite being the children of a very silent generation, also became more conscious of other issues within Turkey, such as Alevis, Kurds, LGBT rights, protection of the environment and women’s rights. Thus, rather than narrow self-interest, it is claimed that participants in NSMS are motivated by ideological goals and pursuit of collective good (Mitchell 1978; Muller and Opp 1986). Unlike the republican establishment and other entities of political Islam, in the first years of its rule from 2002, AKP gave the impression that they acknowledged Turkish society’s religious, linguistic, sectarian and ethnic diversity, and associated themselves with the approach of Ottoman-Islamic tolerance toward other religions. The official Turkish position softened over the course of a decade. However, the AKP has consolidated its grip over the state apparatus in recent years and has started returning to the traditional parameters of Turkish foreign policy (Birdal 2017), and oppression and repression of any who would oppose him and his government. Particularly since the June 2015 general election, when AKP failed to obtain an overall majority, and then after the failed military coup in July 2016 allegedly organized by the Gülen Movement, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has steadily increased his grip on power, with a majority of members of parliament, police raids and closure of hundreds of media outlets and civil organizations, the imprisonment of opposition journalists and politicians on falsified charges, severe repression in the Kurdish-­ populated region and arrests of Kurdish politicians and representatives for alleged terrorist ties, and interference with the independent judiciary by either silencing the judges or appointing his own judges. While there are number of ways in which we can read the contemporary moment after the

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attempted coup on 15 July 2016 vis-à-vis religious minorities as still ‘ambiguous’ For instance, despite all the crackdowns, the minority newspapers have been left alone, and while most of the Kurdish leadership of the HDP has been imprisoned, the Armenian parliamentarian Garo Paylan, even after a confrontational speech about the Armenian Genocide in Parliament, was given a relatively minor punishment (Sheklian 2018, pp. 414–415). New social movements are, as suggested by Jean Cohen, “self-­restricting radicalisms” (Cohen 1985, p. 664). In other words, they do not pursue millenarian, utopian and totalizing goals in the main, but rather, they seek particularistic and pragmatic goals. In this case, these include the demand for a truth commission in order to enable Armenians to “overcome communal and official denial atrocity and gain public acknowledgement” (Minow 1998, p. 78), post-genocide reconciliation, the return of immovable properties to the Armenian foundations, the restoration of damaged churches and opening the Turkey-Armenian border. But it is also beyond the democratic resolution to the Armenian Question. Based on the empirical data arising from this research, it can be concluded that there is a widespread democratic deficit in Turkey not just in terms of the recognition of the Armenian Genocide or issues caused by non-recognition. The Armenian issue is one of many, including social-political repression, censorship, lack of freedom of speech, human rights violations, crimes against workers, LGBT rights and the Alevi and Kurdish Questions. However, it can be concluded that if the Turkish state were to confront the Armenian Genocide and achieve reconciliation with it, this would also bring resolution to other crucial socio-political issues. Sayat Tekir (2016) sums it up, “because the 1915 events or Armenian Genocide is not confronted, we can witness such massacres on Kurds as happened in Cizre [2017] or Roboski [2011] in more recent times.” It is not correct to isolate issues of political or ethnic identity or belief from each other as these issues occur due to the same authorization and denial process. Therefore, it is also wrong to tie all the issues to the Kurdish Question in a way that suggests that it is not the right time for the issues of other ethnic or belief groups to be brought to the fore. However, according to the actors interviewed, the Kurdish issue seems to be main barrier to the democratization of Turkey. Starting to talk about the genocide openly was essential to finding a solution to the Kurdish Question. This obstacle blocks the quest for freedom and democracy by other people in Turkey. In other words, it is believed that if the Kurdish issue were resolved democratically, that would bring freedom and democracy in general, to the benefit of other ethnic

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groups and minorities. As Aybars Görgülü (2016) repeats, “there is a civil war over Turkey and the Armenian issue, but this is not a priority for Turkey, so the Kurdish issue needs to be resolved first.” Similarly, Koptaş thinks of resolution for the Armenian Question alongside resolution of the Kurdish Question as the two are strongly interrelated, and he adds “Kurdish guerrillas are claimed to be Armenians or it is said that there are PKK camps in Armenia, so through Kurds, Armenians are attacked or vice versa. The resolution of the Kurdish Issue will directly affect the Armenian Question positively or vice versa.” The deteriorating relations between the Republic of Armenia and Turkey also affect the lives of Armenians in Turkey. Thus, for resolution, international border should be reopened and full diplomatic relations between the Turkish Republic and the Republic of Armenia countries should be established. To Cohen (1985) the key to the new self-understanding of the non-­ fundamentalist dimensions of contemporary movements is its self-­limiting character in four senses. First, the relevant actors do not seek to return to an undifferentiated community free of all power and all forms of inequality. Second, the actors limit themselves vis-a-vis one another which means they struggle in the name of autonomy, plurality and difference without, however, renouncing the formal egalitarian principles of the formally democratic state. Third, the actors are self-limiting regarding their own values as they draw upon existing expertise and confront technical or strategic problems to make a conscious attempt to learn from past experience. Fourth, they, as contemporary activists, accept the existence of the formally democratic state and the market economy. In this regard, the activists and actors involved in the recognition of Armenian Genocide not only make call for the justice of Dink’s assassination but they also attempt to rewrite the history against the official one quest for democracy and pluralism within its existing structure. However, with the increasing militarization and authoritarianism of the government, it does not seem to be moving toward solving its issues and taboos through democratic and peaceful ways, but instead it is heading toward being a full-blown civil dictatorship. The law has even been changed with regard to ‘riot’ and the right to protest, in order to demobilize civil society and demonstrate the capacity of its authoritarian regime. The resistance of civil society, cultural and academic initiatives aiming to reconnect Armenians with the rest of Turkey, and the struggle of both Turkish and Armenian civil society groups working toward the normalization of relations between Turkey and Armenia have been severely

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obstructed by the dictatorship, but the struggle has not disappeared completely because, as Selina Doğan observes, there is no way of going back to the past and unliving whatever was lived. Pandora’s box has been opened.

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Index1

A Abandoned Properties Law, the, 29 Abdülaziz I, 24 Abdülmecid I, 24 Açık Toplum Vakfı, 14, 17n5, 84, 110, 143, 144, 164 Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP), 3, 6, 9, 16n1, 38, 51, 56n32, 59–90, 97n51, 104, 127, 128, 150, 189 Agos, 17n5, 49, 63, 68, 69, 72, 73, 91n6, 107–109, 113, 115, 116, 133, 136, 144, 152, 158, 159, 166n4, 168n20, 175n99 Akçam, Taner, 27, 30, 33n10, 69, 70, 72, 126, 152 Akdamar, 147 Church, 75 Island, 75 Akhtamar, see Akdamar AKP, see Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi Aktar, Cengiz, 15, 117, 173n72

Al, Elif, 84, 110, 144, 164 Alevis, 88, 131, 154, 171n53, 189 Allied Forces, 32 American Near East Relief (NER), 29 Anadolu Kültür, 5, 8, 14, 17n5, 81, 143, 144, 171n57 Anatolian Armenians, 1, 79, 129 Anatolian Culture, see Anadolu Kültür Anti-Terror Law, 8, 93n12, 140 Apology Campaign, 7, 15, 64, 117–121 Armenian Genocide, 1–3, 7, 22, 28, 29, 32, 39, 41, 44, 45, 48–51, 54n20, 68, 69, 71, 73, 75–77, 79, 83, 86, 87, 90, 93n14, 103–166, 190, 191 Armenian National Constitution, see Nizâmnâme−i Millet−i Ermeniyân Armenian National Council of America (ANCA), 43 Armenian orphans, 29

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 Ö. B. Galip, New Social Movements and the Armenian Question in Turkey, Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59400-8

215

216 

INDEX

Armenian Question, 1, 3–5, 7, 9, 15, 16n2, 22, 30, 32, 45, 60, 67, 69–71, 74, 79, 81, 88–89, 103–106, 111, 114, 118, 120, 126, 132, 134–136, 138, 140, 150, 156, 162, 163, 165, 166, 186, 190, 191 Armenian Republic Committee, the, 31 Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), see Dashnak Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA), 44, 45, 88, 125, 164, 168n22, 187 ASALA, see Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia Assyrians, 22, 28, 34n13, 41, 77, 82, 134, 159–161, 165 Atatürk, 39, 52, 92n7, 108, 167n6 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal, see Atatürk Avesta, 17n5, 67, 150, 172n68 Azınlıklar Tali Komisyonu, 45, 66 B Bağdat, Hayko, 9, 17n5, 74, 76, 87, 88, 90, 108, 122, 125, 126, 137, 159, 162, 168n20, 187 Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi (BDP), 91n2, 120, 159, 160 Baydemir, Osman, 9, 17n5, 82, 159–161, 164 Berlin Treaty, 25 Bilmez, Bülent, 17n5, 88, 141, 161 Birikim, 38, 151 Büyük Felaket, see Great Catastrophe C Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 145 Çelikkan, Murat, 8, 17n5, 66, 92n12, 109, 110, 139, 140, 162

Cemaat, 112, 116, 124, 126, 146, 164 Cemiyetler Kanunu, 39 Central Powers, 30 Ceyhan, Kirkor, 49, 55n24 Chaldeans, 28, 34n13, 82 Churches Committee on Migrant Workers in Europe (CCMWE), 45 Cilicia, 29, 31, 32 Circassians, 22, 26 Cizre, 82, 148, 171–172n65, 190 Cohen, J., 10 Committee for Inquiry into Turkish History, the, see Türk Tarihi Tetkik Cemiyeti Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), 22, 23, 27–29, 50, 52n5, 64, 87, 88, 90, 163, 164, 186 Constantinople, 2, 80 Crypto-Armenians, 151, 153, 154, 163, 166n5 Cumhuriyetçi Halk Partisi (CHP), 17n5, 41, 62, 77, 86, 87, 92n10, 105, 114, 134, 136, 163 D Dashnak, 25, 27, 30, 33n6, 34n11, 116 Party, 25, 116 Dashnaktsutyun, see Dashnak Değirmenciyan, Sevan, 16n5, 85, 124, 144, 158, 162, 187 Demirbaş, Abdullah, 17n5, 75, 77, 78, 159–162, 174n90 Demirtaş, Selahattin, 8, 17n5, 111, 157, 160, 164, 168n13 Denialism, 6, 47–52, 116, 127, 164 Deportation, see Tehcir Der Zor, 27 Dersim, 94n21, 95n36, 139, 153, 154, 170n53

 INDEX 

Devlet-i Aliye-i Osmaniye, see Ottoman Empire Dinç, Namık Kemal, 17n5, 84, 111, 151, 162, 164, 175n94 Dink, Hrant, 2–4, 6, 16n4, 64, 67–69, 72–74, 81, 84, 85, 88, 104–116, 118–121, 124–130, 132–134, 136, 137, 139, 141, 142, 146–149, 152, 154, 160, 161, 164, 166n3, 166n4, 168n20, 188, 189 Dink’s assassination, 2–7, 9, 15, 69, 72–78, 103, 105–107, 109, 110, 112, 113, 115, 117, 120, 121, 124–130, 132, 138, 140, 141, 143–145, 147, 152, 153, 159, 164, 188, 191 Directorate General of Intelligence and Research, see Istihbarat ve Araştırma Müdürlügü Diyarbakır, 3, 6, 26, 38, 42, 77, 78, 82, 83, 97n50, 129, 130, 139, 143, 153, 157, 160, 161, 165, 173n72, 174n85, 174n89, 175n91, 175n94, 175n101, 175n103 Doğan, Selina, 17n5, 77, 86, 105, 134, 163, 192 Dur De platform (Say Stop Platform), 5 E Emval-i metruke, see Abandoned Properties Law, the Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip, 9, 60–63, 65, 66, 73, 75–77, 82–90, 96n48, 115–117, 127, 131, 153, 168n19, 189 Ermeni Meselesi, see Armenian Question Ermeni Sorunu, see Armenian Question

217

Ermeni Soykırımı, see Armenian Genocide Estukyan, Pakrat, 16n5, 63, 67, 82–84, 91n6, 109, 115, 132, 152, 159 EU, see European Union European Convention on Human Rights, 90, 91n3 European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), the, 66, 109, 150 European Union (EU), 60, 61, 66, 69, 75, 79, 90, 93n15, 129, 143, 151, 186 membership, 3, 59, 79 F Feminism, 7, 156 First Constitutional Era, 24 First World War, 21, 22, 28, 30, 31, 38, 41, 43, 50, 56n34, 87, 95n35, 134, 160, 186 Forty Days of Musa Dagh, the, 44 G General Directorate of Foundations, see Vakıflar Genel Müdürlügü (VGM) Gezi Direnişi, 120 Gezi Park protests, 8, 60, 65, 85, 117–121, 133, 171n60 Gezi protests, see Gezi Park protests Gezi Resistance, see Gezi Direnişi Gökalp, Ziya, 52, 63 Gökçen, Sabiha, 108, 167n6 Görgülü, Aybars, 17n5, 64, 71, 75, 76, 114, 116, 161, 165, 187, 191 Great Catastrophe, 157 Great National Assembly, 30 Gül, Abduallah, 64, 92n10 Gülen movement, 51, 56n32, 96n48, 189

218 

INDEX

H Habermas, J., 10, 13, 131, 189 Hafıza Merkezi, 8 Hakikat Adalet Hafıza Merkezi, 8, 66, 92n12, 139, 163 Halkevleri, 41, 53n7 Halkların Demokrasi Partisi (HDP), 8, 9, 17n5, 61, 82, 85, 87, 88, 91n2, 111, 133, 150, 159–163, 165, 167–168n13, 175n99, 190 Hamidian massacres, 26, 157 period, 26 Hamidiye Cavalry, 9, 26, 158 HDP, see Halkların Demokrasi Partisi Hemshin, 127, 155 History Foundation, see Tarih Vakfı Hizmet, see Gülen Movement Hnchak Party, 25 Hrant Dink Foundation, the, 17n5, 38, 54n21, 64, 80, 91n4, 129, 130, 144, 145, 152, 167n10, 171n57 ̇ Human Rights Association, see Insan Hakları Derneği (IHD) I ̇ IHD, see Insan Hakları Derneği Incident of the Twenty Classes, see Yirmi Kura Ihtiyatlar Inonu, Ismet, 31, 32, 34n12 ̇ Insan Hakları Derneği (IHD), 5, 14, 17n5, 64, 71, 82, 92n11, 117, 135, 136, 163 ̇ Insan Hakları ve Mazlumlar için Dayanışma Derneği, see Mazlumder ̇ Insel, Ahmet, 15, 17n5, 64, 68, 71, 92n9, 117–120, 157, 165 International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), 2

Irkçılığa ve Milliytçiliğe Dur de Platformu, 132 Islamized Armenians, 4, 6, 48, 54–55n21, 69, 70, 122, 123, 148, 151–156, 173n72 ̇ Ismail Beşikçi Foundation, 149 ̇ Istanbul Bilgi Üniversity, 17n5, 64, 77, 88, 96n43, 141, 142 Istihbarat ve Araştırma Müdürlügü, 45 Ittihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti, see Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) J Jamanak, 43, 68, 115, 124 Justice and Development Party, see Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP) K Kamp Armen, 131, 135, 136 Kaos Gay and Lesbian Cultural Research and Solidarity Association (KaosGL), 88, 112, 136, 137, 170n49 KaosGL, see Kaos Gay and Lesbian Cultural Research and Solidarity Association Karakaşlı, Karin, 17n5, 69, 87, 88, 111, 123, 126, 132, 133, 168n20 Kardeş Türküler, 65, 147 Karpat, KH, 32n1 Kavala, Osman, 8, 14, 17n5, 81, 95–96n42 Kemalism, 39, 72, 92n7, 118, 149 Keskin, Abdullah, 17n5, 67, 150, 164 Keskin, Eren, 17n5, 64, 81, 89, 92n11, 111–112, 114, 163, 164 Kızılaslan, Hale Güzin, 17n5, 148, 155, 161, 174n83

 INDEX 

Koptaş, Rober, 17n5, 67, 68, 124–126, 150, 162, 164, 168n20, 191 Kurdish issue, 4, 60, 61, 88, 89, 132, 133, 157, 172n70, 188, 190, 191 L Latin America, 10, 97n53 Law of Association, 39 Law on Foundations, see Vakıflar Kanunu LGBT, 10, 15, 17n5, 103, 112, 131, 133, 134, 136, 137, 170n48, 189, 190 Liquidation Law, 29 M Mahçupyan, Etyen, 17n5, 62, 63, 65, 115, 116, 162 Mahmud II, 24 Marmara, 43, 46, 68, 115, 124 Marxism, 7 Mashtots, Mesrop, 44 Mazlumder, 5, 17n5, 65 McCarthy, J. D., 4 Mesrob Patriarch, 78, 90 Millet, 22–25, 32–33n2, 37–52 system, 24, 32–33n2, 37, 39 Milli Güvenlik Konseyi, 45, 47 Milli Mücadele, 29, 50, 56n30 Millyetçi Haraket Partisi (MHP), 51, 62, 64, 92n10, 114, 127, 128, 173n77 Minority affairs, 45 communities, 42, 186 population, 41, 42 rights, 6, 32, 39, 60, 104 status, 32, 39, 46

219

Minority Commission, the, see Azınlıklar Tali Komisyonu Mutafyan, Mesrob, see Mesrob Patriarch N Nagorno-Karabakh, 38, 46 crisis, 186 Nationalist Movement Party, see Millyetçi Haraket Partisi (MHP) National Security Council, see Milli Güvenlik Konseyi NER, see American Near East Relief New social movements (NSMs), 2–16, 103, 104, 106, 111, 117, 129, 131, 133, 136, 138, 140, 146, 154, 166, 189, 190 Nizamname, 23, 43 Nizâmnâme−i Millet−i Ermeniyân, 23, 24 Non-Muslim communities, 21, 60, 109 minorities, 24, 31, 32, 34n13, 41, 42, 62, 66, 68, 71, 74, 80, 88, 150, 186 Nor Zartonk, 5, 16n5, 69, 84, 113, 116, 125–127, 130, 131, 133, 134, 161 NSMs, see New social movements O Öcalan, Abdullah, 47, 54n19, 87, 158, 174n85, 175n99 OHAL, 84, 142 Önder, Sırrı Süreyya, 120, 121 Open Society Foundation, see Açık Toplum Vakfı Oran, Baskın, 14, 15, 17n5, 69, 76, 93n14, 117–119, 138

220 

INDEX

Ottoman Armenians, 6, 16n2, 29, 30, 55n28, 80, 118 Ottoman Christians, 29, 30 Ottoman Empire, 1, 9, 21–32, 38, 39, 52, 52n3, 56n30, 64, 87, 129, 151, 168n22, 173n72 Ottomanism, 24, 52n5 Özal, Turgut, 46 Özdemir, Cem, 86, 87 Özgür Gündem, 8, 84, 93n12, 140, 150, 172n70 Özür Diliyoruz, see Apology Campaign P Pamuk, Orhan, 81, 82, 93n15, 96n43 Pan-Turanism, 23 Pasha, Cemal, 27, 28, 30, 133 Pasha, Ismail Enver, 27, 28, 30 Pasha, Ismet, see Inonu, Ismet Pasha, Talaat, 27, 28, 30, 149 Paylan, Garo, 17n5, 85, 86, 125–127, 159, 161, 168n20, 187, 190 Peace and Democracy Party, see Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi (BDP) People’s Democratic Party, see Halkların Demokrasi Partisi (HDP) People’s Houses, the, see Halkevleri Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, the, 46 PKK, 46, 47, 54n19, 87, 88, 158, 162, 164, 172n65, 175n99, 176n103, 191 guerrillas, 47, 61, 78, 163 PODEM, 17n5, 71, 75, 85, 114, 165 Public Policy and Democracy Studies, see PODEM R Republican People’s Party, see Cumhuriyetçi Halk Partisi (CHP) Republic of Armenia, the, 16n1, 46, 47, 54n18, 70, 95n29, 116,

121–123, 127, 153, 155, 169n33, 186, 187, 191 Resource mobilization theory, 9–16, 118–119, 121, 130, 138 Russia, 21, 26, 32, 87, 97n53, 155, 186 Russo-Turkish Treaty of San Stefano, 25 S Samast, Ogün, 16n4, 107, 108 Saraçoğlu, Şükrü, 42 Sarafian, Ara, 76, 83, 172n72, 173n73 Say No to Racism and Nationalism Initiative, see Irkçılığa ve Milliytçiliğe Dur de Platformu Single Trustees System, 40 Social Democratic Hnchak Party (SDHP), the, see Hnchak Party Social movement organizations (SMO), 14, 136 Solgun, Cafer, 17n5, 74, 110, 132, 154, 164 Special State of Emergency regime, see OHAL Surp Giragos, 160, 161 church, 77, 139, 153, 161 Syrian Desert, see Der Zor T Tanzimat, 24 Tarih Vakfı, 77, 135, 140, 141, 145, 149 Taşkın, Zeynep, 17n5, 80, 129, 152 Tehcir, 1, 2, 21–32, 39, 44, 46, 49, 56n34, 95n36, 123 Law, 27, 28

 INDEX 

Tekir, Sayat, 16n5, 69, 84, 93n13, 109, 112, 113, 125, 126, 131, 161, 187, 190 Temporary Act of Deportation, the, see Tehcir, Law Three Pashas, 27, 28 Tomasyan, Yetvart, 17n5, 68, 69, 87, 114, 122, 126, 146 Treaty of Lausanne, the, 30–32, 34n12, 42, 56n30, 62, 135 Treaty of Sevres, the, 30 Truth Justice Memory Centre, see Hakikat Adalet Hafıza Merkezi Türk, Ahmet, 17n5, 151, 159 Turkification, 41, 78, 95n37 Turkish Grand Assembly (TBMM), the, 61 Turkish Hearths, see Türk Ocakları Turkish Historical Association, see Türk Tarih Kurumu Turkish Republic, 2, 9, 21, 23, 31, 32, 37–41, 50–52, 56n30, 72, 74, 87, 92n7, 133, 135, 139, 151, 162, 186, 191 Türk Ocakları, 40, 52n5 Türk Tarihi Tetkik Cemiyeti, 40 Türk Tarih Kurumu, 40, 49, 153 U United Nations, 43, 45, 96n42 USA, 10, 30, 31, 44, 46, 48, 50, 75, 77, 79, 82, 96n48, 152

221

V VADIP, see Vakıflar Arası Dayanışma ve ̇ Iletiş im Platformu ̇ Vakıflar Arası Dayanışma ve Iletiş im Platformu (VADIP), 115, 124 Vakıflar Genel Müdürlügü (VGM), 42, 61, 62, 168n18 Vakıflar Kanunu, 39, 62 Varlık Vergisi Kanunu, 42 VGM, see Vakıflar Genel Müdürlügü W War of Liberation, the, see Milli Mücadele Wealth Tax, 42, 94n21, 95n36 West Germany, 11 Western Europe, 10, 11, 79 Wilson, Woodrow, 30 Y Yerevan, 2, 44, 76, 77, 90, 92n10, 133, 142, 145, 147, 154, 160, 187 Yerevan State University, 70, 83 Yıldırım, Vedat, 17n5, 65, 66, 147, 152 Yirmi Kura Ihtiyatlar, 41 Young Turks, 1, 21–23, 25–27, 29, 37, 39, 44, 157 Yüksekdağ, Figen, 8, 168n13 Z Zald, M., 4 Zarakolu, Ragıp, 83, 84, 97n49, 126