patrolling turkish history, part 3: a victory
As I've noted in previous posts on this subject, the last several years have witnessed the emergence of oppositional voices challenging the official, public, nationalist version of Turkey's history. I believe that this process is intimately connected to the steady progress of genuine democratization and civil society development, and that it is an important part of staking out a claim to a more cosmopolitan and progressive sense of Turkish identity. But for every sign of progress, there's also been retrenchment and opposition from the reactionary nationalist camp, and sometimes the backlash looks bigger than the step taken forward
This past weekend, though, the people on the side of justice and an honest reckoning with the past won a major victory.
Last year, a group of outspoken and courageous Turkish and Armenian academics, journalists, and intellectuals began to make plans for a conference to be held in Istanbul at which, for the first time in Turkey, scholars would openly discuss the history of the Armenian genocide during the Ottoman Empire's penumbral years. The conference was to be jointly hosted by two of Istanbul's major universities, Bogazici and Sabanci. It was initially planned for last May, but had been postponed due to nationalist threats and intimidation--including a comment from the Justice Minister calling it "a stab in the back of the Turkish nation"--and was set to begin on Friday 23 September.
Last Thursday, an administrative court in Istanbul tried to put a stop to the conference. On the eve of its opening, the court issued an order postponing it for a month and demanding that the heads of the universities in question supply answerrs to a long and tedious list of questions about the academic credentials of the attendees, the administrative procedures of the conference, and so forth. The organizers were aghast--it looked like their attempt to challenge a deep national taboo would be come to nothing.
Yet on Saturday, they opened the conference regardless, in bold defiance of the court order. The rector of another university--Bilgi--offered his campus to the organizers, allowing them to circumvent the court's hamhanded attempt at censorship and hold a condensed but no less groundbreaking conference. In a country where people have faced jail terms for using the word "genocide" openly to describe what happened to the Armenians, the successful holding of an honest, public scholarly conference facing up to this history is an incredibly important event.
Every victory of this sort emboldens the people fighting to make this a place where people can speak freely. The court's actions now look not menacing, but (in the words of Dr. Halil Berktay, a conference organizer) "laughable"--especially as it was so fearlessly defied, its nationalist-chauvinist supporters reduced to protesting impotently outside for the TV cameras, waving flags and throwing eggs and rotten tomatoes.
I just want to add that there are two things I find massively hopeful about all this, in addition to the simple fact that the conference was held at all. The first was the resounding support of the Turkish press for the victory of freedom of expression that the conference represented. The headline of the daily Radikal (which is not actually all that radical, it's sort of the Guardian of Turkey) proclaimed yesterday morning: "The word genocide was even spoken---and yet the world still turns, and Turkey is still in place." The second thing is that the Prime Minister of Turkey, the Foreign Minister, and the leader of the largest opposition party all criticized the court's attempt to stop the conference, although they didn't necessarily endorse its contents. Erdogan called the decision"impossible" to approve of "in a democratic Turkey," and Gül (the Foreign Minister, who I met with his wife in Oxford last year and was quite impressed by) shook his head and made a rueful statement along the lines of "No one is better than us at shooting ourselves in the foot.'' Both were well aware that this was an attempt to embarrass them before the opening of membership negotiations with the EU next week, but in contrast to similar provocations and challenges over the last year (such as the Pamuk prosection) this time they rose to the occasion and took sides.
(You can read an article I wrote about the conference on the website of the human rights/progressive media NGO I am currently working for. I didn't actually attend the conference, alas--due to high security, only pre-screened participants were allowed in--but I've spoken to people who did and followed the news coverage pretty closely.)
This past weekend, though, the people on the side of justice and an honest reckoning with the past won a major victory.
Last year, a group of outspoken and courageous Turkish and Armenian academics, journalists, and intellectuals began to make plans for a conference to be held in Istanbul at which, for the first time in Turkey, scholars would openly discuss the history of the Armenian genocide during the Ottoman Empire's penumbral years. The conference was to be jointly hosted by two of Istanbul's major universities, Bogazici and Sabanci. It was initially planned for last May, but had been postponed due to nationalist threats and intimidation--including a comment from the Justice Minister calling it "a stab in the back of the Turkish nation"--and was set to begin on Friday 23 September.
Last Thursday, an administrative court in Istanbul tried to put a stop to the conference. On the eve of its opening, the court issued an order postponing it for a month and demanding that the heads of the universities in question supply answerrs to a long and tedious list of questions about the academic credentials of the attendees, the administrative procedures of the conference, and so forth. The organizers were aghast--it looked like their attempt to challenge a deep national taboo would be come to nothing.
Yet on Saturday, they opened the conference regardless, in bold defiance of the court order. The rector of another university--Bilgi--offered his campus to the organizers, allowing them to circumvent the court's hamhanded attempt at censorship and hold a condensed but no less groundbreaking conference. In a country where people have faced jail terms for using the word "genocide" openly to describe what happened to the Armenians, the successful holding of an honest, public scholarly conference facing up to this history is an incredibly important event.
Every victory of this sort emboldens the people fighting to make this a place where people can speak freely. The court's actions now look not menacing, but (in the words of Dr. Halil Berktay, a conference organizer) "laughable"--especially as it was so fearlessly defied, its nationalist-chauvinist supporters reduced to protesting impotently outside for the TV cameras, waving flags and throwing eggs and rotten tomatoes.
I just want to add that there are two things I find massively hopeful about all this, in addition to the simple fact that the conference was held at all. The first was the resounding support of the Turkish press for the victory of freedom of expression that the conference represented. The headline of the daily Radikal (which is not actually all that radical, it's sort of the Guardian of Turkey) proclaimed yesterday morning: "The word genocide was even spoken---and yet the world still turns, and Turkey is still in place." The second thing is that the Prime Minister of Turkey, the Foreign Minister, and the leader of the largest opposition party all criticized the court's attempt to stop the conference, although they didn't necessarily endorse its contents. Erdogan called the decision"impossible" to approve of "in a democratic Turkey," and Gül (the Foreign Minister, who I met with his wife in Oxford last year and was quite impressed by) shook his head and made a rueful statement along the lines of "No one is better than us at shooting ourselves in the foot.'' Both were well aware that this was an attempt to embarrass them before the opening of membership negotiations with the EU next week, but in contrast to similar provocations and challenges over the last year (such as the Pamuk prosection) this time they rose to the occasion and took sides.
(You can read an article I wrote about the conference on the website of the human rights/progressive media NGO I am currently working for. I didn't actually attend the conference, alas--due to high security, only pre-screened participants were allowed in--but I've spoken to people who did and followed the news coverage pretty closely.)
posted by kitabet at 2:16 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home