Turkey Book Talk #192 – Tezcan Gümüş of the University of Melbourne on “Turkey’s Political Leaders: Authoritarian Tendencies in a Democratic State” (Edinburgh University Press).
The book shows how almost all major political leaders throughout Turkey’s multi-party history have demonstrated authoritarian and undemocratic traits, reflecting and fostering the various failings of Turkey’s democratic system.
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Turkey Book Talk #191 – Paul Levin, director of Stockholm University’s Institute for Turkish Studies, on “Migration from Turkey to Sweden: Integration, Belonging and Transnational Community” (IB Tauris/Bloomsbury), co-authored with Bahar Baser.
The conversation looks at the demographic profile of the Turkey-origin migrants in Sweden, the power dynamics of Turkish and Kurdish communities in the country, and the imbroglio over Ankara’s continued non-ratification of Stockholm’s Nato membership bid.
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Suat Kınıklıoğlu on Eurasianism in Turkey
April 26, 2022
Turkey Book Talk episode 166 – Suat Kınıklıoğlu on his report “Eurasianism in Turkey”, published by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs’ Centre for Applied Turkey Studies.
The report examines the influence and scope of Turkish-style Eurasianism, a worldview favouring the country’s departure from Nato in favour of closer strategic alignment with Russia and/or China.
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[Hürriyet Daily News (15th June 2012): http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/ataturk-an-intellectual-biography.aspx?pageID=500&eid=101]
M. Şükrü Hanioğlu – Atatürk: An Intellectual Biography, Princeton University Press, 2011, 280pp
One of the first things guaranteed to strike any newcomer to Turkey is the inescapability of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk – the statues, the portraits in every shop, the street names, the fact that every bookshop has an “Atatürk section,” the fact that every classroom has an “Atatürk Corner.” Whatever truth there is in the concern amongst secular Turks that the founder of the Turkish Republic’s memory is being eroded by a new religious order, it certainly – at least superficially – doesn’t feel that way to the Turkey neophyte.
Of course though, if that neophyte is going to stay for a longer stretch of time, he or she will sooner or later have to get a firmer handle on the Atatürk fundamentals, and Professor M. Şükrü Hanioğlu of Princeton University is the latest to take on the daunting task of producing a biography on the man. As Hanioğlu himself says in the preface to the book, it’s daunting because in Turkey: “For many years, the scholar who aspired to portray Atatürk as he really was resembled the pre-modern historian rash enough to attempt a depiction of the historical Jesus.” Though restricted in scope to the influences that shaped the “intellectual” character of its subject, (rather than filling in details of the personal life story), “Atatürk: An Intellectual Biography” is a sane, fair-minded primer to the ideological forces that shaped the “Father of the Turks.” Unlike so many titles in that “Atatürk section” of the local bookshops, it is resolutely a biography – not a hagiography.
The first step to challenging any holy text is to read it as a product of its historical context. The major objective of this book is to do the same with Atatürk, presenting him as an intellectual and social product of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Ottoman Empire. The influences affecting the elites of the late Ottoman period are thus given ample space, demonstrating the essential continuity that Mustafa Kemal represented. Even though politically he was to become the symbolic figurehead of the sudden rupture between the old imperial order and the new republic, in crucial respects Atatürk was simply the inheritor of the late Ottoman reformist legacy. This historical continuity is one of the central themes that emerges from almost all serious contemporary historical writing on the period. Hanioğlu summarises:
“it is imperative to realize that Mustafa Kemal emerged from within a specific social milieu … many of the radical ideas destined to become central planks in his reform program were widely held in intellectual circles at the turn of the century … Despite the radical changes that it brought about, the Turkish transformation led by Atatürk was not a rupture with the Late Ottoman past but, in important respects, its continuation.”
While official Turkish historiography considers the founder of the TurkishRepublica kind of omniscient leader for all times, untrammelled by the age in which he emerged, this book paints a convincing alternative picture.
In this respect, the discussion of nineteenth century German military theorist Colmar van der Goltz’s idea of “the Nation in Arms” is particularly illuminating. Goltz held that a state’s military elite should be afforded an exalted role as the ultimate guide of society, a “superior position” being “the natural due of officers as a class.” Such ideas found fertile ground in the lateOttoman Empire, and Goltz was chosen to lead a restructuring of the Ottoman Royal Military in 1883-84. His theories had an obvious effect on the Committee of Union and Progress, (the group of military officers later known as the Young Turks), which swept to power in 1908, and were clearly significant in justifying the military’s later elite position in the Turkish Republic. Equally important to Ottoman thinking of the time – and consequently to Atatürk – was another German import, the concept of Vulgarmaterialismus:
“a vulgarized version of the doctrine of materialism, fusing popular notions of materialism, scientism, and Darwinism into a simplistic creed that upheld the role of science in society. The late Ottoman version of this materialism was a further simplification of the German original and a medley of highly disparate ideas.”
Hanioğlu remarks on the inherent irony of the self-contradictory, one-dimensional worship of scientific materialism by the era’s elites, a secular creed held on to with as much unquestioning zeal as the most pious of religious believers. The early republican fetish for the all-encompassing power of science was clearly a direct inheritance from this late Ottoman tendency.
Such oversimplification also gave rise to some of the more eccentric, often troubling republican intellectual predilections. The scientistic cult logically led to scientific racism and theories of exclusivist Turkish racial superiority, (the body of 16th century imperial Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan was exhumed in 1925 to confirm the brachycephalic shape of his skull, in order to prove beyond all doubt that he was, indeed, an ethnic Turk). It also fed into the aberration of the various Turkist language theories – which resulted in the brutal purging of all “foreign elements” in order to form a new “purified” Turkish language, with artificial replacements dredged up from ancient Turkic languages. In the words of Geoffrey Lewis, the reforms were a “catastrophic success,” and meant that Atatürk’s famous 36-hour speech of 1926 had already become unintelligible and had to be rendered into modern usage by 1963. There was also the new Turkish history thesis that found its way into official Turkish textbooks, which involved a comprehensive effort to prove that all ancient civilisations, including Greece and Rome, came from a central Asian Turkish wellspring. Despite obviously being nonsense, this revisionist interpretation of human history was seductive because it served a number of practical purposes. Firstly, it helped bypass the awkwardly religious Ottoman past; secondly, it helped pre-empt claims by rival nationalisms that Turks were latecomers to Anatolia; and thirdly, in the Turks’ mission civilisatrice, it also sought to solidify Turkey’s position as an integral part of the West, (although even this may have been a step down for some, with one contemporary text claiming that “Turks lived clothed during the stone age in 12000 BC, while Europeans reached that stage 5,000 years later.”) Atatürk never feels further from the figure of the high Enlightenment – and closer to his own, authoritarian age – than when we read of these quixotic social engineering projects. (I was struck recently when my neighbourhood plumber, Ali, while repairing some piping in my bathroom, began expounding something that sounded suspiciously close to the “Sun Language Theory.” I used to think of such things as being not much more than an eccentric footnote, representing the lunatic fringe of the early republican age, but perhaps I was being too generous.)
Nevertheless, despite the fact that it was personally one of his central intellectual pillars, Atatürk tended not to emphasise the more esoteric expressions of his Turkism until the future of the republic had been properly secured. Until this time, Hanioğlu stresses, Atatürk displayed an often underappreciated pragmatism as a politician. This is especially the case with regard to religion, which is far from the black and white picture that is often assumed. Atatürk was never averse to invoking Islam, particularly early on, when seeking to mobilise the masses in the struggle against the Allies and the non-Muslim populations, which were seen as a mortal threat to the very independence of the nation. Despite his contempt for communism, he also made use of a “purely rhetorical Socialism,” largely aiming to maintain the young republic’s alliance of convenience with theSoviet Union. “This pattern of dissimulation,” Hanioğlu writes:
“was undoubtedly part of a deliberate strategy to align the nationalists with the most powerful and broad-based ideologies of resistance, while obfuscating the exclusionary objectives of the movement. This ideological mishmash was crucial to Mustafa Kemal as he performed his difficult role as political leader, diplomat, and supreme military commander.”
Although he was the leading figure behind the abolition of the Ottoman Sultanate and, soon after, the Islamic Caliphate, this too was achieved in an extremely careful, gradualist way. As is often the case, what seems now like a sudden jolt and break with the past can, in many senses, be seen as merely the logical culmination of tendencies that had been developing for decades.
Westerners tend to view the Turkish adoration of Atatürk in rather narrow, technocratic terms, without understanding that the emotional resonance his image has across Turkish society couldn’t possibly be accounted for by his intellectual convictions alone. Like all icons, his image is still powerful in today’s Turkey because it has been effectively divested of all meaning, and the viewer can invest it with whatever symbolism he or she wishes to. As in any personality cult, Atatürk’s image must necessarily mean different things to different people. Depending on the context, Hanioğlu says, Atatürk “may be invoked in support of ideas that are étatist or liberal, nationalist or socialist, religious or scientistic, elitist or populist.” A westernised Turk on the Aegean coast might revere him for his secularizing, modernising vision, whilst a religious conservative in Central Anatolia can selectively ignore this, and instead place the emphasis elsewhere – perhaps instead respecting the strongman who successfully defended his homeland and gave the West a bloody nose. He probably sees no contradiction at all in praying five times a day while also passionately admiring Atatürk.
Shared by both caricatures is a veneration for the redeemer of the nation, and it is this aspect more than anything else that lends Atatürk the emotional impact needed to endure. This is the reason why detached and technical books like this, while welcome, can really only ever have a minor impact. The majority are guided by impulses rather less rational and rather more emotional. Atatürk himself understood that, even though it is this paradox that perhaps ultimately illustrates the limits of his ultra-rational, positivist intellectual convictions.
[I’ve started writing book reviews for the Hürriyet Daily News blog. I’ll be able to post them here a couple of weeks after they first appear on there (contractual yawn). This one went up on May 5, and can be found in original form here: http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/literary-reflections-on-the-armenian-issue.aspx?pageID=500&eid=16]
Ece Temelkuran – Deep Mountain: Across the Turkish-Armenian Divide, Verso, 2010, 288pp
Fethiye Çetin – My Grandmother, Verso, 2008, 144pp
There’s a book, quite easily found in any reasonably-sized Istanbul bookshop, its name written in block capitals along the spine: ‘Ermeni Dosyası’ (The Armenian Dossier). Written by former Turkish diplomat Kamuran Gurun, and ominously subtitled ‘The Myth of Innocence Exposed’, it has been popular amongst Turkish readers ever since first being published in1983. Packed with imposing-looking graphs and statistics, its main thesis can be summarised thus: The numbers claimed by the Armenians as killed in the ‘events’ of 1915 is far too high and, in fact, Ottoman soldiers were themselves also killed in large numbers at the same time. In any case, the Armenian population was far from innocent, with large numbers rebelling against the empire and often colluding with the advancing Russian forces on the eastern Anatolian frontier. Essentially, the book implies, the Armenians got what they had coming to them. If you’re interested, a new English-language print run of the book came out only two months ago. I haven’t read it, nor do I ever intend to make that sacrifice, but – however questionable its scholarship – ‘The Armenian Dossier’ is unquestionably significant, if only because it represents what has been the official Turkish narrative for almost 100 years.
Encouragingly however, this isn’t the only story on the shelves any more. While they still may not attract the sales figures of more flattering histories, voices dissenting from the official line are being increasingly heard in today’s Turkey. Ece Temelkuran was once a columnist with daily newspaper Habertürk (ironically enough one of the mouthpieces of the nationalist establishment) and her ‘Deep Mountain’, published in English in 2010, is part of this new, questioning tendency.
Temelkuran set herself the ostensibly simple task of meeting Armenians, talking to them, listening to them, and reporting back for the Turkish audience. Eschewing the directly political, she preferred ‘to write about Armenians, not necessarily what happened in 1915’, and while this may seem like a modest undertaking to an outsider, in Turkey it was a brave and taboo-shaking exercise. Quite how perilous the path was can be judgedfrom the example ofthe Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, to whom Temelkuran dedicates the book. Dink decried the politics of megaphone slogans and foreign parliamentary writs on the issue, and instead spent years trying to get the two sides talking to each other honestly about their shared history and common trauma. He was assassinated for his troubles in 2007 by an ultra-nationalist Turkish gang, outside the Istanbul office of his newspaper. Dink’s killing could have acted as either a spur to writing, or a warning against it, so – first and foremost – ‘Deep Mountain’ should be applauded as an act of bravery.
The book is divided into three parts, the first detailing Temelkuran’s encounters with the Armenians of Armenia itself, and the other two her meetings with the Armenian Diaspora communities in Franceand the United States. The picture painted of Armenian capital Yerevan is of a cultured but impoverished city of feeble opportunities and feeble ambitions, still yet to recover from the end of the Soviet Union and now crippled by the closed (since 1993) border with Turkey. Whilst bitter enmity for Turks exists, the Armenian Armenians are perhaps most concerned with the practical matter of getting the border open again, and with it securing an economic lifeline. The French and American Armenians, however, have come to adopt the genocide as the essential, irreducible feature of what it means to be ‘Armenian’. Meeting numerous community leaders, academics, artists, and businesspeople, Temelkuran describes the trajectory that emerges again and again in the Diaspora: How the first generation of Armenian migrants to Europe and America were most concerned with ‘getting on’ and fitting into the adopted culture, and how it is only with the second and third generation – threatened by the identity-engulfing vortex of a new homeland – that the genocide has been revisited and latched on to as an unshakable, almost pathological core.
As one of the Los Angeles Armenians revealingly says: ‘you need to create an identity, something to hold on to both culturally and individually. Turkey’s refusal to recognise the genocide is what binds those of us in the Diaspora. Were the genocide to be recognized, it would probably be the end of us’. Pain has become ‘the pillar propping up the home’, and to release that pillar means oblivion. Similarly, many Turks – afraid of losing their country and seeing recognition as threatening their own oblivion – cling just as fast to their own selective amnesia. In a striking phrase, the author at one point describes it as a ‘huge industry. Not just politics and money; a psychological industry too, for both sides. An industry of anguish’. The most sympathetic portraits in the book are thus reserved for those who are able to understand this identity paralysis and rise above such acrimony, recognising the absurdity of an official political ‘debate’ that doesn’t go much deeper than one side screaming ‘It was genocide!’ while the other responds ‘No it wasn’t!’
Perhaps inevitably, the book occasionally lapses into worthiness,though not nearly as often as you fear when you read the following meaningless fluff early on: ‘If an Armenian were to lose their way one day anywhere in the world, they’d be able to locate the capital of Armenia by consulting the map of their heart. They would navigate toward it by reference to the coordinates of pride and fear, of mourning and loss’. Worse, when she moves on to Los Angeles, Temelkuran can’t help butoffer a steady stream of unhelpful anti-American swipes. These come off as stale, predictable, and not a little immature (constant sneering about cigars and McDonalds, really?!) But these are minor criticisms, and should not detract from the more important qualities of a book that is sensitive, honest and ‘engaged’ in the best sense of the word.
Another modern voice with little time for the official Turkish narrative is Fethiye Çetin, a human rights lawyer currently representing the deceased’s family in the grimly ongoing Hrant Dink case. Çetin spent her whole youth believing she was of ‘pure’ Turkish stock, until one day her aging grandmother, Seher, took her aside. Seher revealed that she had been born an Armenian Christian, originally named Heranuş, and was plucked from a death march in 1915 by a Turkish gendarme commander, who went on to raise her with his wife as a Muslim Turk. Translated into English in 2008, ‘My Grandmother’ is Çetin’s elegiac description of this story.
The first section of the book contents itself with gentle, sepia-tinged descriptions of a rural upbringing with her family in the eastern Turkish province of Elazığ: her beautiful sisters; her grandfather, whose mood always depended on how full his stomach was; her grandmother, the charismatic matriarch of the family, powerful but taciturn, somehow never able to bring herself to sing, as if always harbouring the secret that would one day be revealed to Fethiye. The central revelation doesn’t come until midway through the book, but when it does Çetin writes that what she heard ‘did not fit with anything I knew. It turned the known world on its head, smashing my values into a thousand pieces’. Seher, or Heranuş, was one of the kılıç artığı, the ‘leftovers of the sword’ of that traumatic period; only one of her sisters was also spared, while the rest of the family – including uncles, aunts, cousins, and her mother – was killed. The second part of the novel consists of Çetin trying to digest this heritage, and also trying to forge a reunion of the two sides of a family which now – like so many Armenian families – is ‘scattered like pomegranate seeds’ across the world.
It’s a quietly powerful book, modest but courageous. There are no unnecessary fireworks or forced emotions. In a way, it could be seen as a manifestation of the very thing Temelkuran advocates in ‘Deep Mountain’, a kind of picking up of the baton. There’s little in the way of direct politics and no recriminations: I don’t think the word ‘genocide’ is mentioned once in the entire book (and that’s not because of Turkish laws against these things). It’s simply a human story, told in an unshowy, humane way.
Both Temelkuran and Çetin manage to address the vexed Armenian issue with admirable clarity, concerning themselves with the personal and the human as a kind of riposte to the debilitating rancour of the official, political dispute. Both try to chart a precipitous course between two entrenched sides that long ago stopped listening to each another; neither condemn anything other than this wilful deafness. In the years to come, one can only hope there are more books published like these two, and less like ‘The Armenian Dossier’.
Norman Stone – Turkey: A Short History (book review)
April 18, 2012
[A slightly shorter version of this review is published in the latest issue of ‘Insight Turkey’ (Vol. 14 No. 2): http://www.insightturkey.com/insight-turkey-volume-14-no-2/issues/168]
Norman Stone – Turkey: A Short History, Thames & Hudson, pp 192
A new title seems to be landing on the “Ottoman and Turkish History” shelves of Istanbul’s book shops every week. Norman Stone, formerly Professor of History at Oxford and Cambridge, is the latest heavyweight to step into the ring with this volume, an almost recklessly slim account of 1300 years’ history. The Turks’ nomadic central Asian origins, their 10th century arrival in Anatolia, the rise and fall of the Seljuk and Ottoman Empires, and the establishment of the modern Turkish Republic are all covered in just 165 pages. Though obviously thin on real detail in most places, the book nevertheless represents both a decent primer for the interested novice (with some important provisos), and an entertaining, elegantly-written frisk for the more jaded expert.
Early on, Stone suggests: “If you are Turkish you have to ask what you owe to: (1) the ancient native Turkish tradition; (2) Persia; (3) Byzantium; (4) Islam; (5) what sort of Islam; and (6) conscious westernization”. Of course, it would be far-fetched to imagine that every modern Turk self-consciously ratiocinates these things and comes up with their own credit-debit account of historical heritage. It’s this book’s major strength, however, to demonstrate the lesser-appreciated continuities – as well as sudden changes – that do make up so much of Turkish history. The Ottoman Empire, Stone tells us, initially saw itself as an inheritor of both the Seljuk Turk and Byzantine Greek traditions. Until the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, for example, the Ottomans had thrived as a cavalry-based nomadic “military empire” in the Seljuk tradition; indeed, the plan of the Topkapı Palace they built soon after the conquest – with its modest, low-rise pavilions and courtyards – deliberately imitates the tented headquarters of a nomadic Turkish chieftain. On the other hand, Mehmet II (the conqueror of Constantinople) spoke fluent Greek and was “in effect set upon retaking the eastern Roman Empire that Justinian had made great in the sixth century”. Sultans often made dynastic marriages of convenience with Byzantine princesses; and even the harem eunuch, an idea so beloved of the orientalist western European, was originally a Byzantine phenomenon, originating in the early Christian understanding that sex was the work of the Devil. There’s also the little-appreciated fact that, at the time of the conquest of Constantinople, the population of the Ottoman lands was still 75% Christian.
A more self-confidently “Ottoman” identity developed in the 15th century, particularly under Selim I (known to us rather unflatteringly as “the Grim”, though a more accurate translation of the Turkish “Yavuz” is “stern” or “tough”). His capture of much of the Arab peninsula – in particular the Holy Places of Mecca and Medina – inevitably made the Ottoman Empire more overtly Islamic, and it was during his reign that the Ottomans claimed the Islamic Caliphate from the withering Mameluke state in Egypt, (the Mamelukes themselves descended from Turks, brought to Egypt as slaves by the Ayyubid dynasty). It was also around this time that the Ottoman sultans would begin to emphasise splendour and grandiosity as their distinctive characteristic, adopting titles such as – amongst many others – “Marcher Lord of the Horizon” and “Shadow of God on Earth”. We associate this grandiosity with the apogee of Ottoman power, especially the long rule of Süleyman I (the Magnificent), which stretched from 1520-66. During Süleyman’s reign the empire won a series of blistering military victories, and the Ottoman territories reached their largest extent: it could be argued that the Ottomans were, for a time, the most powerful force on the globe. Süleyman wasn’t just a charismatic general of genius, however, but also a formidable organiser of the state machine, and he is known in Turkey to this day as “Kanuni”, or “law-maker”. “Süleyman’s reign”, Stone writes admiringly, “mark[s] a synthesis of empire: Rome for the law and organization, Islam for the inspiration, Central Asia for the military”. Nevertheless, things were set to change. It’s true that a light burns brightest in the moments before it becomes extinguished, but what happened to the Ottoman Empire after the age of Süleyman wasn’t so much a swift extinguishing, but rather an extraordinarily drawn-out decline, lasting until the 20th century. This decline is usually claimed to start at the disastrous siege of Vienna in 1683, which not only resulted in defeat but also prompted an enormous Christian counter-offensive in the European Ottoman territories. Symbolic though the siege may be, in reality the rot had started long before.
Stone poses a central question at the beginning of the book, which any historian of the Ottoman Empire must take seriously: “To what extent was the success of the Ottomans based on Islam, or would you read this the other way round, and just say that the Ottomans were successful when their Islam was not taken too seriously?” You needn’t necessarily answer this question entirely one way or the other. It is true, however, that hand in hand with the long decline of the Ottoman Empire went an Islamic intellectual retrogression, symbolised by the 18th century closure of mathematics and engineering schools and the broader atrophying of scientific enquiry. It’s also true that, throughout its existence, the Ottoman Empire depended not only on taxes levied on non-Muslim minorities to maintain its impressive bureaucratic machine, but also on minorities for the bulk of those conscripted into the elite Janissary guards, and even for Grand Viziers (who often held the real power, as opposed to their often ineffective sultans). The tolerance that the Ottoman Empire extended to its religious minorities, however imperfect, was truly remarkable, and certainly compares favourably with the record of contemporary European regimes. Indeed, when the Jews were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in the early 16th century as part of the Inquisition in Spain, most were welcomed and resettled on Ottoman lands by then-sultan, Bayezid II, who dryly reflected: “You venture to call Ferdinand a wise ruler, he who has impoverished his own country and enriched mine!” It’s a good thing that he did too, as Christians and Jews increasingly kept the Ottoman economy going over the 18th and 19th centuries, inevitable when Islam forbade the earning of interest on debts. The “capitulations” – favourable terms offered to foreigners (enterprising Europeans) to do business in Ottoman territory – also gradually came to symbolise the increasing stranglehold in which the western European powers began to hold the Ottomans. Initially intended as a sensible method to stimulate trade with outsiders (the product of a self-confident and outward-looking state machine), they eventually came to be seen as humiliating terms which the Europeans exploited to gain further leverage over the declining eastern power. The Ottomans didn’t feel able to abolish the capitulations until the First World War, when their empire became as reckless and destructive as great empires tend to do when staring down the barrel of extinction. (As an interesting footnote, Stone describes the abolition of the capitulations as coming from the same impulse that led to the notorious Wealth Tax on minorities of 1942, and the anti-Greek pogroms of 1955: the necessity of creating a “national bourgeoisie”, or functioning “Muslim commercial class”.)
Before publishing this book, Stone had already gained some notoriety for his contrarian views on the Armenian “incidents” of 1915-17, and there is no Damascene moment to report here. He characterises what happened to the Armenians as just one strand of a theme that was common throughout the Ottoman lands in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. At around the same time as the Turks were massacring Armenians, for example, Muslims were themselves being forcibly expelled and subject to atrocities in the Balkans and the Caucasus. For their part, Greeks and Armenians were each also committing their own crimes against Muslim Turks. Framing the matter this way, and puzzling over how the Christian minorities have so monopolised historical sympathy, Stone seems think that the Turks’ only problem is one of PR. It was the same story, he argues, during the 19th century, when Greeks and Turks traded barbarities on the Aegean and liberal British sympathy – dazzled by the fashionable romantic Hellenism of the time – sided with the Greeks. “Genocide” is an unsuitable word for something that was, in reality, a far more ambiguous shade of grey. If what happened to the Armenians is genocide – Stone says – then so too is what was visited upon the Muslim population of the Balkans and in the territories of the Russian Empire.
It’s true that crimes against the Muslims of the Ottoman Empire receive comparatively little attention from western historians, and Stone is right to highlight them. But what happened to the Armenians really was something altogether different, and of an altogether different magnitude. Comparisons with Nazi Germany won’t do, but it’s an indisputable fact that hundreds of thousands of Armenians did die. “Deportations” is a suitably vague term to describe the deliberate massacre of many, the accidental death of some, and the forced resettlement of many others. The debate will continue (perhaps “rage on” is a more suitable term) as to the motives and effects of Ottoman policy in eastern Anatolia. There’s surely no doubt, however, that the emptying of all significant Christian minorities from Turkish lands was indeed considered convenient by the Young Turk regime – whether all the killings were deliberate or not – and it set about achieving this by whatever means necessary. Does Stone honestly believe that what happened was a legitimate response to Armenian terrorist activity, as he suggests here? Nationalism gripped all sections of Ottoman society during the 19th and 20th centuries. Perhaps the greatest mistake of the Armenians was in embracing their own with such enthusiasm, despite the fact that in no Ottoman province did the Armenian population ever constitute a majority.
Stone, in his enthusiasm to testify as witness for the Turkish defence against the genocide allegations, no doubt goes much too far; and he does the same elsewhere. In the preface he makes the bizarre assertion that it’s “not really for an outsider to comment” on the state of contemporary Turkish politics. Perhaps this argument makes more sense when you’re Professor in the History department of Ankara’s Bilkent University, as Stone currently is. Would he say the same about the United States, I wonder? If not, would he not then be guilty of the same kind of relativism that he’s doubtless (correctly) critical of elsewhere? The claim seems doubly odd, when – despite professing to “resolutely refrain from doing so” – Stone does, in fact, go on to make a number of extremely contentious pronouncements about modern Turkey. Shorn of the Kurds, we’re blithely told, the country would become “a Greece and perhaps even a sort of late Byzantium”, whatever that means. Almost as bafflingly, the military coup of 1980 – as a result of which 650,000 were arrested, countless tortured or killed, and the seeds sown for the future bloody Kurdish conflict – is limply presented to us as “the most interesting of all Turkey’s coups” in which “the casualties were very few in number”.
The chapters on the modern Turkish Republic thus make for a curiously hollow read. Perhaps what Stone meant when suggesting that “it’s not for an outsider to comment” was really “it’s not really for an outsider to criticise”. In which case, more’s the pity. As Kant rightly observed, you show a friend most respect by adopting a policy of sensitive but unswerving honesty, trusting that they are mature enough to respond to such honesty with dignity and equanimity. If Stone had recognised this, his observations on Turkish history – particularly the more recent – would have carried more weight.
Turkish Islam & Turkish Nationalism: A New Balance (Turkish Policy Quarterly, Winter 2012)
March 2, 2012
[This is an extended and elaborated version of a piece I posted on here some time ago. It is published in the latest, Winter 2012 edition of Turkish Policy Quarterly, which is available for purchase now. You can read the piece below or, along with a slightly anaemic abstract, in its original habitat here: http://www.turkishpolicy.com/article/674/turkish-nationalism-and-turkish-islam-a-new-balance/ ]
Since the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, received wisdom has tended to consider nationalism and Islam as mutually incompatible forces in the Turkish context. Turkish nationalism – so this narrative goes – is defined by the secularizing, modernizing example of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, a positivist, military man with an almost religious faith in the ability of science to reshape society. Islam, with its appeals to multinational, multiracial unity, inevitably stood in the way of the “pure”, homogenous nation-state. Such an understanding was propagated by those early secularizing elites within Turkey itself, and largely accepted by observers outside the country for the better part of the past hundred years. However, the fact is that religion has always been a crucial motivating force behind popular expressions of nationalism in Turkey. What makes the current Justice and Development Party (AKP) government’s position unique is its wedding of a popular religious nationalism to real political power. Recent developments – in particular the ongoing recent spat between Turkey and Israel – demonstrate to outsiders what has been observable within Turkey for a long time: that Islam and Turkish nationalism are far from irreconcilable on the political, as well as social, level.
Popular Religion
A singular irony of the founding of the Turkish republic is the fact that for all the talk of institutional secularism, the new nation was, in fact, fundamentally defined on religious grounds. Significant numbers of those resettled on Turkish land during the Greek-Turkish population exchanges, for example, were Greek-speaking Muslims, who, in many cases, could not even speak the Turkish language. The Kurds (and other non-Turkish Muslim minorities) were also included on religious – rather than linguistic – grounds. Whether you spoke a dialect of Laz, Kurdish, Zazaki, or Turkish, religion was the most important category to fulfill in order to be included in the new Turkish state. Even Atatürk himself recognized the increased importance of religious sentiment, and was not averse – particularly in the early years of his leadership – to appealing to the emotional religious feelings of the people when seeking to unite the nation behind his resistance forces. He led the War of Independence as a Gazi, (meaning “Warrior of the Faith” in it’s original Arabic form), repeatedly invoked the name of God and the spiritual dimension of the liberation struggle in public pronouncements, and established Sunni Islam as the state religion in 1924.
Such an approach was seen as necessary following the religious retrenchment experienced by the Ottoman Empire during the late -19th and early -20th century. The loss of almost all Ottoman territory in the Balkans prior to the First World War resulted in the flight of around 400,000 Muslim migrants from hostile regions, to re-settle in Istanbul and Anatolia. Similarly, around the same number of Circassian Muslims from the north coast of the Black Sea also migrated to Ottoman territories in the 1860s, escaping from the increasingly aggressive practices of the Russian Empire. These migrants, or muhajir, had learnt to wear their religion as the singular mark of identity, and saw in the Ottoman Empire (and subsequently the Turkish Republic) a protective confessional motherland. Anatolia went through enormous demographic changes during the later years of the Ottoman Empire. Erik J. Zürcher estimates that immediately prior to the First World War, Anatolia was 80 percent Muslim, whilst ten years later, this figure had risen to 98 percent.[1] This more narrowly Muslim composition inevitably had a large impact on the policies and attitudes of the late-Ottoman and early republican eras. The decision to empty Anatolia of Christian Greeks, Armenians, and Syriacs – both before and after the establishment of the Republic – clearly illustrates how the new nation’s identity had become inseparable from its Muslim identity.
Elite Secularist Nationalism
This religious definition was emphasized even as Turkey’s new elites were preparing to systematically cleanse Islam from state institutions. The newly independent Turkish republic was not just neutral to religion; it actively subordinated it to the state, establishing a rigid and doctrinaire form of laicite in a country that until recently had been the seat of the Islamic Caliphate. All expression of Islam was to be tightly regulated by the new Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı (Department of Religious Affairs) to ensure compliance with the new secular order. The Caliphate was abolished; independent religious establishments were closed down; imams were appointed and their Friday sermons were written by the state; women were discouraged from wearing the veil. Myriad other cultural and political reforms were initiated, aiming at faster and more effective Westernization. All of this was imposed from above, and all was done in the name of modernization, secularization and – crucially – nationalism: to oppose the changes or the way they were implemented was to risk vilification as an irtıcacı (reactionary), against the modern, independent Turkish nation. The military became the symbol of the secular order, and the four (if we include the “post-modern” coup of 1997) coup d’états that the country experienced during the 20th century were all – at least in part – military responses to perceived religious incursions into political and social life.
Thus, it is clear that there was a tension – even predating the declaration of the Republic – between the technocratic, secular nationalism of the reforming elites and the religious character that was essentially the defining feature of the new nation. In his fine assessment of modern Turkish history, Perry Anderson has described Kemalism as an “ideological code in two registers. One was secular and applied to the elite. The other was crypto-religious and accessible to the masses. Common to both was the integrity of the nation, as supreme political value.”[2] Atatürk’s secularizing reforms have too often been accepted as the defining features of Turkish nationalism but it is clear that such dry, technocratic reforms could not possibly constitute the sole emotional appeal influencing such an aggressive and deeply-felt nationalism. It is significant, for example, that the extreme nationalists of the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) – which won 13 percent of the votes in the parliamentary election of June 2011 – responded to the reopening of the historic Armenian Surp Haç Church in Ani with reactiveFriday prayers, which they organized two weeks later in the same location.[3] Likewise, it is striking that Turkish soldiers, felled in counter-insurgency conflict with the PKK, are uniformly referred to as şehitler, or “martyrs”, by the Turkish media.
The AKP and Post-nationalism?
The spectacular electoral successes of the AKP, an Islamically-oriented party, starting in 2002, seemed to challenge the assumptions of the secular-nationalist paradigm even further. Here at last, it was thought, was a way out of the monocultural impasse, a tonic to divisive and destructive Turkish nationalism. Many optimistically hoped that the AKP would take the country to a post-nationalist state of peace, respect for human rights, and economic prosperity, and a series of symbolic ‘openings’ helped warm up relations with minority communities within the Turkish borders. In particular, the government was expected to attempt a solution to the “Kurdish Question” by re-emphasizing common religious bonds between Turks and Kurds. More progress was made in the European Union accession process by the AKP than any previous government. It also defanged the Turkish military – that bastion of unreconstructed secular nationalism – which it accuses of plotting a coup to overthrow the elected government in the Balyoz, or “Sledgehammer”, case.
The AKP’s Marriage of Nationalism and Religion
It is becoming clear, however, that the government’s struggle against the generals was in fact only a strike against one, narrowly defined, type of nationalism. Another has become evident, and this form can be said to constitute the new ideological bedrock of the AKP government. Campaigning during the parliamentary election of June 2011, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan adopted a much harder note on the Kurdish question than ever before, and – the AKP having won almost 50 percent of the popular vote – he has continued this tendency since. In response to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) attacks on Turkish forces stationed near the Iraqi border in October, the government retreated back into the full scale military solution that has failed to solve the problem thus far. The feeble “apology on behalf of the state” that Erdoğan offered in November for the Dersim Massacres of 1937-39 can be summarily disregarded, representing nothing more than the government’s latest attempt to score cheap political points against the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP). The EU process is effectively dead, and the government has wasted no time laying the blame squarely at the door of the EU itself. The United States – and “the West” more generally – comes in for increasingly strident criticism, sanctioned by rising anti-American sentiments in Turkish society (a recent poll found that 64.8 percent of Turks have a “negative” opinion of Americans).[4] Despite evident deficiencies in the “Turkish model”, Erdoğan obviously relishes being idolized across the Arab world and, emboldened by a booming economy, he flexes his muscles on the world stage as no Turkish leader has before. Appealing to the collective libido dominandi, such behavior wins him ever more support back home. Boorish populism is prosecuted in the name of greater and deeper democracy.
The equation of Turkish with Muslim identity was always tacitly understood; now it is explicit. Whilst previous Turkish administrations have, at times, won support by appealing to both nationalist and religious sentiments as well, none have done so as successfully as the AKP. Erdoğan differs from Turgut Özal in degree, organization and success, having become the first leader in Turkish history to win three consecutive elections, with a consistently rising share of the vote. The AKP’s real innovation lies in its ability to achieve what no other government has before: wedding populist religious nationalism to the levers of government and remaining in power whilst doing so.
The New Paradigm and the Turkey-Israel Dispute
As with all nationalist movements, the AKP’s needs outside foes against which to define itself, and perhaps the most significant of these today is Israel. The raid by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) on the Turkish “Mavi Marmara” aid ship bound for Gaza in 2010 caused widespread public and political outrage, and the Turkish-Israeli diplomatic relationship has since deteriorated to such a degree that Turkey has almost entirely suspended political, military and economic ties with Israel. Owing to the widespread popular support for the government on this issue, the AKP has no motivation to desist; indeed one could argue that it may even have an interest in prolonging, even escalating the dispute. The spat brings into sharp focus the elision that has occurred between nationalism and religion: a hitherto unheard-of instance of secular nationalism and emotional religious indignation uniting in a common cause.
Nationalism and religion have been the two primary energizing forces in Turkish society for almost a hundred years, even if one has always dictated to the other. The current Turkish government’s rhetoric manages to appeal to both impulses, and that is why it is such a powerful brew.
[1] Erik J. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), p.164.
[2] Perry Anderson, “Kemalism: After the Ottomans,” London Review of Books, 11 September 2008, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n17/perry-anderson/kemalism
[3] “Turkish nationalist party holds Friday prayers at Ani ruins,” Hürriyet Daily News, 1 October 2010, http://web.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=mhp-prayed-at-ani-ruins-2010-10-01
[4] Talip Küçükcan, “Arab Image in Turkey,” Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research (SETA) Research Report, June 2010, p.25, http://www.setav.org/ups/dosya/35086.pdf
Travel notes – Ayvalık
November 3, 2011
[Published by Today’s Zaman (28th Nov 2011): http://www.todayszaman.com/news-264185-a-town-attesting-to-history-along-the-aegean-ayvalik.html]
Not many trips can be traced back to the reading of one book, but that is the case with my recent hop down the Aegean coast of Turkey. I’ve always taken a passive interest in the near-history of this part of the world, and upon reading Bruce Clark’s Twice a Stranger – a fine account of the human effects of the Greek-Turkish population exchanges of the 1920s – I couldn’t resist visiting some of the areas described. Whilst one book inspired me to embark on the trip, one was also nearly responsible for making me pack up my bags to return home. I was accompanied most of the way by Robert Byron’s thrilling The Road to Oxiana, in which he describes marauding around the Persia and Afghanistan of the 1930s: wild horse chases across the central Asian steppe, the discovery of little-known ancient architectural treasures, dodging the Persian secret police, dysentry – it all rather put me to shame. Whilst I had nothing to rival these adventures, described below are my own peregrinations around a different, no less fascinating part of the world.
I arrived in Ayvalık exhausted after a day-long bus journey from Istanbul, which included an unexpected ferry crossing of a choppy Marmara Sea. The town is situated on the craggy north-western Aegean coast of Turkey, and for hundreds of years it was overwhelmingly home to Greeks, at the time subjects of the Ottoman Empire. After the First World War, the Greek armed forces used this western coast – with Izmir as unofficial capital – as a base to push as far into Asia Minor as possible. The reconquest by Turkish national resistance forces became one of the central, triumphant narratives of the Turkish War of Independence, and after the declaration of the Turkish Republic in 1923 the Greeks of Turkey and the Turks of Greece were swapped wholesale and sent to their ‘natural’ homelands. In Ayvalık, the entire Greek population was resettled on the nearby Greek island of Lesvos, and the many Turks of Lesvos went in the opposite direction. I have fond memories of childhood holidays in the small towns of Petra and Mytilene on Lesvos, which were favourite summer spots of my family. Of course, I knew little of this turbulent history at the time; all I really remember is the faint outline of the Anatolian coast high above the horizon on clear days, and the Sunday afternoon military parades on the waterfront, which I now realize carried far more significance than I could have understood then.
Two large mosques command Ayvalık, and – despite the minarets that have been put up alongside them – it’s impossible not to recognise them as Orthodox churches, as indeed they were originally intended. When the Greeks disappeared and the Turkish population swelled it was decided to simply convert these two churches (and many elsewhere) into mosques, like miniature Hagia Sophias. From the inside it’s difficult to imagine the now whitewashed walls covered in iconography, but from the outside (aside from the minaret) they obviously follow all the typical architectural conventions of a large Greek Orthodox church. They’re a magnificent sight, silently commanding the town, unavoidable once you rise to any kind of elevation. Evidence of Greek heritage is hard to miss elsewhere too, and most immediately obvious in the enigmatic backstreets behind the harbour. Roads evidently not designed for the modern vehicle wind past old wooden houses in various stages of disrepair. At night
they become even more deserted than in the day, and seem to suggest even more
secrets. Occasionally you come across a house with carved Greek lettering dating back to the 19th century, as often as not practically caving in on itself. Life goes on furtively above your head: muffled sounds behind open windows and closed curtains, from protruding bay windows that lean out and seem to touch each other across the street.
The island of Cunda is a siren call audible from the Ayvalık waterfront, and I yielded to it, postponing my onward journey by a day. Cunda has a refined air about it: the harbour is smarter than Ayvalık’s, people give the impression of being even more horizontally relaxed. On arrival I followed the instinct that I always try to satisfy upon landing on a new island: walk back and upwards as high as possible to get an idea of the place from above. Following the winding old streets, I came across the derelict old Greek cathedral on the hillside, forgotten in a kind of scrubland, unused for almost a century. Disappointingly, (but unsurprisingly), I couldn’t get in as I’d hoped, but I did manage to peer inside through the now-empty windows. It’s been so badly damaged over time – by earthquakes and neglect – that it now looks as though the whole thing is only held up by the wood scaffolding that now fills the interior: to what end one can only guess. Nearby, another old church has almost entirely collapsed into rubble, only a crumbling apse remaining – battered and open to the elements, apparently waiting to be put out of its misery. I left it forgotten and forlorn, and climbed the rest of the short way up to the top, from which, looking west, I could make out the faint outline of Lesvos.
One of the paradoxes in this corner of the world is the contrast between its surface picturesqueness and its bloody, conflicted history. The residue of the latter is evident in the thundering nationalism of the politics, a taste of which I got as I was waiting to catch the boat to take me back from Cunda to Ayvalık. It was late afternoon and I was sitting in a café by the harbour, when a loud and apparently stirring recording of the Istiklal Marşı (the Turkish national anthem) struck up entirely unannounced from somewhere nearby. Exactly who was playing it, and why, I’ve no idea, but those around me weren’t splitting any hairs. All conversation immediately stopped; I looked around and within seconds only one person (apart from me) wasn’t standing silently, hand clutching breast, eyes staring grimly into the middle distance. I thought this lone sitter must have been a Greek, but he spotted me from across the restaurant and gestured for me to stand and do the same as everyone else: puzzling as he himself remained sitting. When it had finished everybody sat back down and returned to their tea or games of tavla; I looked back and realised that the only reason the man hadn’t stood was because he was disabled.
Cunda is about as secular as you get in Turkey (the two churches here weren’t even converted symbolically – just left to go to seed), the call to prayer from the single, isolated, mosque on the peninsula doesn’t even make it to the harbour. If you measure by the nauseatingly quaint image of old men playing tavla outside backstreet tea houses, or the loquacious women holding court on the steps in front of their houses, the Greeks and Turks on either side of the Aegean are irrefutably similar. The Turks of the Aegean wave the flag as enthusiastically as anywhere, and whilst elsewhere in Turkey these days you can easily forget that the Greeks were once bitter enemies, (there are others to point the finger at now), here the older enmity is still tangible – the narcissism of small differences.
Gentrification in Tarlabaşı, Istanbul
September 28, 2011
The noise of Tarlabaşı never stops. Street cats cry incessantly during the day and fight each other at night; street hawkers struggle with creaky wooden carts around the winding alleyways, crying out their wares of breakfast poğaças or carrying wooden boards full of fresh simits on their head; housewives call out of windows to the nearest greengrocer and lower baskets on string for goods, in summer groups of them in floral headscarves sit out all day gossiping on the pavement; children don’t sleep until the early hours, screaming as they play hop-scotch or kick footballs around; during Ramadan traditional drummers and singers pass every building, waking everyone up to break the fast before sunrise; for me, the chaotic street market each Sunday is one of the most colourful parades of human activity Istanbul has to offer. Taksim Square – with its shiny malls, modern cinemas, and thronging restaurants and bars – is considered the commercial and cultural “heart” of the city, but it takes just two minutes to pass down from the smart pedestrian boulevard of Istiklal Caddesi, cross the six-lane duel-carriageway Tarlabaşı Boulevard, and arrive in the impoverished backstreets of Tarlabaşı itself. In two minutes it feels like you’ve crossed into a different world. With the Turkish economy booming and Istanbul developing at such a rapid pace, it’s a world coming under serious threat.
Tracing the history of Tarlabaşı illustrates the fluctuating fortunes of Istanbul’s minorities over the past 200 years. Situated on the European side of the city, across the Golden Horn from the old town, the area was originally home to prosperous non-Muslims. The sturdy stone houses were built for Greeks and Armenians – lower-middle class artisans, small tradesmen, and merchants – whose economic prospects waxed even as the Ottoman Empire’s waned over the course of the nineteenth century. Istanbul’s Armenians were largely untouched by the tragedy engulfing their eastern Anatolian kin during the First World War, and its Greeks were exempt from the wholesale population exchanges that took place between the states of Greece and Turkey during the 1920s, but the situation of minorities became increasingly precarious during the republican years of the twentieth century. Official discouragement found expression in the punitive “Varlık Vergisi” (Wealth Tax) aimed at Turkey’s minority groups in 1942, and in the 1950s pogroms were organised against the Greeks of Istanbul, after which the vast majority moved swiftly away. Many of Tarlabaşı’s grand buildings were left empty and unaccounted for, and an area that was already going to seed went into accelerated decline. At the same time, rapid industrialization meant that significant numbers of Turks were moving into urban areas, and many found homes in the unoccupied but decaying townhouses of Tarlabaşı. In 1990, further waves of migration took place, this time of Kurds from eastern Anatolia – fleeing economic deprivation and the intensifying civil war in Turkey’s south-east. Thus, right in the centre of Istanbul, something of the atmosphere of an Anatolian village has been recreated in Tarlabaşı. But that isn’t the whole of it – alongside Kurdish migrants can be found Arab and African refugees, Roma (gypsies), Zaza-speaking Kurds, itinerant foreign language teachers living on the cheap, and even pockets of transsexuals (many of whom ply a trade in the seedy brothels along Tarlabaşı Boulevard). At a time when most of Turkey has become a state-sponsored monoculture, Tarlabaşı seems to reclaim something of the anarchically multicultural heritage of Anatolia.
“Gentrification” has taken place in all major cities striving to modernise, (it seems as inevitable as the carbon-copy Starbucks cafes popping up everywhere), and it’s already happened in many areas of Istanbul. Hard to believe now, but thirty years ago Istiklal Caddesi itself was a down-at-heel backwater; only relatively recently has it been pedestrianised, tidied up, reintroduced to its picturesque “nostalgic” tram line, and lined with the gleaming chain stores. There have been murmurings of tension in nearby Tophane, where the traditional inhabitants find themselves surrounded by growing numbers of small art gallerys, boutiques, and fashionable bars. Cihangir, on the opposite side of Istiklal, has become a chic enclave for expats and young professionals. Such examples follow a more typical, ‘organic’ process of gentrification; that planned for Tarlabaşı, however, is exactly that – planned. In 2005, an ‘Urban Renewal Act’ (Law 5366) passed through the Turkish parliament authorizing municipalities to work with private building companies to ‘regenerate’ areas of Istanbul. The historic Roma district of Sulukule, also on the European side, was one of the first declared an ‘Urban Renewal Area’. Eventually almost 1000 families were evicted from their homes and given new – unaffordable for most – apartments 45km away. The majority of these people have since become homeless and the area’s historic fabric has been ripped out, gradually replaced by more faceless modern apartment blocks. In 2006 Tarlabaşı was also chosen as a renewal area, and the contract for the project was awarded to GAP Inşaat, a subsidiary of Çalık Holding, the CEO of which is the son-in-law of the Turkish Prime Minister. Plans were soon released for the redevelopment of a 20,000 m2 area, a total of nine “building islands”. The website for the project (www.tarlabasiyenileniyor.com) is full of “before” and “after” pictures: photos of out-at-elbows back streets teeming with scruffy children and shady-looking men (the present Tarlabaşı), are contrasted with digitally-generated images of urbane, be-suited couples strolling down spotless, wholesome avenues (the projected Tarlabaşı). It must all look rather seductive to the prospective flat-buyer, but two major concerns persist: will the area’s historical character be preserved? and – perhaps more pressingly – will current residents go the way of Sulukule’s?
Tarlabaşı is an incredibly charismatic place. Its buildings are unique examples of late nineteenth century Ottoman Levantine architecture, elegant four and five storey stone townhouses with slim bay windows jutting out above the street. Clearly most haven’t been touched since being built – the majority are filthy, stained black with dirt, and some are now nothing more than shells, thick carpets of weeds and stumps of struggling trees behind a crumbling façade. Sanitary conditions in many places are primitive. It’s obvious that the area desperately needs improvement, but GAP Inşaat’s project goes beyond simple renovation, to what looks like a radical reimagining of the entire area’s fabric. A four-storey underground car park is planned, and whilst the developers insist that most buildings will be preserved, questions remain about what form this preservation will take. Many fear that Tarlabaşı’s unique historical character will be irredeemably destroyed by the changes. Mücella Yapıcı, from the Union of Chambers of Turkish Engineers and Architects, claims that “the cultural and historical heritages of Tarlabaşı are going to be sacrificed to financial benefits of some people or companies.” Appeals have been made to UNESCO and the European Court of Human Rights, but look unlikely to halt developments that are, ultimately, in the hands of the elected municipality. Whatever happens, current residents will undoubtedly be priced out by the new plans. In August 2010 the holding company claimed that agreements for purchase had been reached with 70% of the owners of houses in the area, and that apartments are being offered in a brand new suburban development to those evicted from Tarlabaşı. This development is almost two hours away by public transport in a little–known satellite city, Kayabaşı. Aside from the cultural jolt of having to move from Tarlabaşı to alien high-rise apartment blocks, miles away from where some have worked for years, it’s unlikely that many could afford the 1000TL upfront price and 309TL monthly mortgage payments for the cheapest apartments anyway, (let alone commuter costs).
It’s easy to sentimentalise from a distance. The fact is that amongst Istanbullus, Tarlabaşı is a no-go area, notorious for crime, poverty, violence, illiteracy, and overcrowding. At night the women leave their spots on the pavement and organized gangs move in. These problems won’t be solved by the municipality’s plans, but they will be moved elsewhere, which is probably what is wanted. My neighbour, Ozan, has lived with his family in the same building (which he owns) for 40 years and is under no illusions, “you have to be careful,” he says, “there are thieves all around here at night, life isn’t perfect.” But he’s tied to the area, working twelve hours a day, six days a week in a cheap restaurant just a five minute walk away, “our life is here, where else could we go?” Many people have already left, and a lot of the seedy bars, shops and brothels along Tarlabaşı Bulvarı have already closed down, making it look even more forlorn than before. Significant numbers have decided to stay on anyway, despite their houses being sold and expropriation procedures being threatened. The municipality has given no clear updates since last year, and a project that was due to be completed in 2010 rolls on without any end in sight. Threat of eviction hangs over the area like the sword of Damocles, but right now it’s difficult to see how it could be entirely vacated without the use of force, as – make no mistake – Tarlabaşı still teems. I’ve lived there for over a year, and if anything the population has increased in that time. I write this on a sultry weekday afternoon and the street outside my flat is as raucous as it has ever been. As Ozan says simply: “we don’t want to go anywhere.” Whether they want to or not, the decision may well be out of their hands, but – for the time being at least – Tarlabaşı remains stubbornly defiant.
Turkey Book Talk 