Good to be home..

I dedicate this post to a friend who I met shortly before I left Qatar... but has recently reminded me that we share time with those who challenge us. Yes, you are right, which is why I returned to Turkey - to challenge the train of thought that exists here without belittling it or generalising it. To contribute to the continuing debate that challenges the state and support the internal democratisation, and be a sounding board for those who wish to discuss where Turkey is heading and how we can get there together.





Last weekend, I attended a two-day conference organised by the Heinrich Boll Stifling Dernegi. It was an enlightening two days in Turkey. A forum where the words "attrocities against Kurds".. "vicitimisation of Turks by the state".. "systematic forgetfulness".. were banded about freely. What a refreshing change to see Turks speaking like this openly. Only ten years ago, it would have been impossible to hold such a gathering.

A journalist friend also attending the conference, spoke of her ups and downs with regards to optimism and pesimism in Turkey. It's an easy one to fall into when you live here. Just when you think Turkey is making some ground, it seems to loose more than it has gained. Two steps forward, one step back is how I would characterise it. It's the uneasy kind of emotional attachment you can fall into when you live in a place that is as complex as Turkey. It swings from east to west regularly. With a secular political system which is very much built on the "nation state", somewhat democratic to the outside world with regards to civil society [although a military state, it is by no means a dictatorhip, there is a somewhat free press], and yet a Muslim majority, one may wonder how on earth did all of these elements ever come together. By the military elite, that's how, who are still very much in control of the modern republic. Woe behold the politician that tries to tame the Security Council (MGK), who protect Turkey from becoming an Islamic republic or at least that's the mandate. The generals are revered to be the most educated peoples in the land, so it would be difficult for the peasants to pull the wool over their eyes.

The push between east and west can also been seen by Turkey's ambitions to join the EU, which date back to Ataturk times, the founding father of the republic in 1923. He changed the alphabet to that of western script from Arabic. Although hailed a hero and quite rightly so as Ataturk saved Anatolia and gave women rights long before the Europeans did, this basically left a generation of Turks "illiterate overnight", according to a friend. At this time there was a separation from the past - a severence that Turkey never really mourned. The Ottoman empire was less Turk than any other ethnicty, it was Armenian, Jewish, Christian and so on. The republic did away with this and brought Islam to be the state religion to raise the status of Anatolian Turks who really made up a small proportion of the empire and what better way to unify a society than with religion. This is why there is a real separation from the Ottoman past in some areas [such as the Armenian genocide -'we didn't do it, it was the Ottomans'], and the associations are presented only when necessary - tales of victory.

At the same time, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, traveled to Pakistan last week, and invited the Iraqi VP to Ankara on his private plane. He also suggested sending a team of experts to inspect the Al-Aqsa mosqe in Jerusalem, placing Turkey in the heart of a sensitive issue - the Arab-Israeli conflict. Last week, a headline in a news body I am affiliated with read "Turkish prime minister denies anti-Shia bloc".. It seems that everyone is confused about Turkey. Anyone that knows Turkey and its history with Iran, knows that the two share a history that is fraught but one of mutual respect. The two have shared a border for hundresd of years have common interests in fighting the PKK and also have trade relations. Why on earth would Turkey turn against Iran. No, Turkey's dream is to be the BRIDGE. Seen as the occupying force by the Arabs for hundreds of years... [funny that as the Turkish republic seems to have no association to the Ottoman empire] the feeling generally is that Turkey does not have the credibility to achieve such an ambition.

Anyway, I digress. Back to the conference. I will simply list a few ideas that were discussed without going through everything and hope that those who are at all interested in Turkey and its complex identity may look for more information into the debate of Turkey's human rights.

The conference was called "From the Burden of the Past to Societal Peace and Democracy", and I know it sounds a bit wishy washy, but it was actually well worth sitting for hours and listening to the crammed programme of speakers.

The reason I believe that the organisation held such a conference in Istanbul was to get Turks talking about its forgotten history of human rights violations and present suggestions for ways of dealing with it. This was in the wake of the recent tragic killing of Hrant Dink, a prominent Turkish-Armenian editor, who was gunned down on the street in Istanbul in late January for his outspoken words on Turkish identity and the Armenian genocide.

The conference was useful as it was a place where Turks could interact with international experts who were experienced in areas of Truth and Reconciliation to international law. Guests varied from Marrianne Birthler, from the Federal Commission for the records of the National Security Service of the former German democratic Republic of Germany, to Ronit Lentin, of Trinity College Ireland, a political sociologist who was born in Haifa Israel but lobbies for the freedom of the Palestinians. Also there was Alex Borraine, International Centre for Transitional Justice from South Africa and Sezgin Tanrikulu, Bar association of Diyarbakir, who set up the Diyarbakir branch of human rights and has been persecuted for cases he has fought for in Turkey.

As there was so much covered I think in order to keep it short I will simply list some key quotes and allow you to ponder them as to whether or not you agree. I was able to ask two questions in a forum of 400 people, which opened up a debate on superpowers and the inequality that countries like Turkey constantly use as a tool for overlooking past human rights violations. Because surely if the US won't sign up to the International Criminal Court, well I think that in itself demonstrates the hyprocracy of the world we live in.

The topic of discussion was how and where do we start to look at Turkey's violations of human rights.

Mithat Sancar, professor of faculty of law at Ankara University and brains behind the conference: "In the last two decades the world has been discussing the issue of coming to terms with its past. During the same time, in Turkey the conspiracy theory was dominent. As we are uninformed we are going ahead in a stumbling manner. After 1945, the world started to comes to terms with its past. Turkey has still not come to terms with its violent past."

Murat Belge, columnist for Radikal daily and lecturer on English literature at Bilgi University Istanbul: "Turkey has suffered from a systematic forgetfulness. If we say that the killing of Hrant Dink did not happen, then we are distorting the point from the beginning. The reality that we are establishing between truths creates a pathology in our mind. Who did it? A group? Organisation? Individual? The instinct of self survival condemns us to a pathology that is the basis of this structure. How can a community be saved by denial or acceptance. On the Armenian genocide, a student doctor once asked me: 'do you believe in the genocide?' When I answered him positively, he told me that as I am not a historian I couldn't say such things. I responded I was not involved in the French Revolution, but I know it happened. I can read. This type of academic pathology exists in Turkey. So there is a man who has been killed [Hrant Dink] and there are people who say they can die the same and others that empathise with the killer. If we start from mentality of pathology it is a dangerous beginning. This is an artificial surrounding, having empathy for a killer or killed. We have to setp out of it. The values that are defended as nationalist are inhumane. Hrant Dink was the victim of this pathology that is being reflected on the outside."

Murat Paker, clinical psychologist and assistant professor at the psychology department at Bilgi university Istanbul: "We are at a critical point in our history. We have a political framework, we have not lost any wars [suh as we can see in Africa], no one is pushing us to set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. So we are trying to solve things on our own. It is happening slowly, which is why the national identity is being upset. We are starting to realise what lies we have been fed. The problem is that those of us who have lived through these lies, won't have a basis for our lives. We need a more systematic way of coming to terms with it. On the Armenian-Turkey issue of 1915, both sides are in tangent with each other. 'You have a loss of 1 million but we have a bigger loss in the Balakn wars fro example'. People talk like there is emotional baggage involved I put this down to the loss of the Ottoman empire. This paranoia can be easliy mobilised and activated in Turkey. To understand the nationalist we must come down to their level. So where do we start to mourn our pain. Do we go back to the oldest problem? Or go from the new traumas to the old. We haven't come to terms with Semdinli, Susurluk, 12 September. So I don't think we can explain to the masses that 1915 is the priority. If we are looking for social transformation we must take up issues that impact our lives today. This is striving towards democracy. The EU deadlines are creating difficulties for us and we have to explain this to our foreign partners. We should talk to the victims of the 1980 coup and document it. We need to be organised and persistent in our collection of data to make it available for younger generations."

Ayse Hur, columnist: "We have a perculiar type of truth because of our pathological relationship with it. Forgetfulness is occupying key positions that mobilise our nationality. We severed our relationship with the Ottoman empire, so we have had to build our identity. This identity design has some problems. The approach of the intellegencia should be one of self criticism for having such a mentality. The intelligencia have been the managing elite in Turkey for the past 90 years. This has continued to play a negative role. The intelligencia should question themselves 'why did September 12 happen?'. The ideas of forgetfulness and forgiveness have been taken from the west from Christian values, the public does not take this on board. They are perceiving this from an Islamic keyhole and culture they have taken on. The public while looking back do this from one of Islamic and Turkic culture. The past is the past. Pathology is something that concerns the intelligencia not the masses. The public from elementary school are not exposed to critical thinking. We have an inheritance from the Kemalist movement, we have survied on forgetfulness. Disturbingly there is a xenophobic intellectual group to whom everything on a foreign level looks like a conspiracy. There is external interest on the Kurdish issue and we must stand up and beg for forgiveness in the Christian sense, while we are leaping over the faces of natoinalism. Turkey is disturbed because there "can not be a Kurdish state", we have reached this critical point late. Perhaps we need to think quiet inside from the beginning. We can't keep rediscovering the wheel we must open the archives and besides other archives are now open."

I will add more tomorrow - there were some scarily old school comments also. I'll add two more speakers tomorrow. Tired of typing. I hope that the statements give some insight into the debate in Turkey presently. This is why I did not give any analysis, I wanted the statements to stand alone, as I think they say enough by themselves.