The 1915 Armenian massacres marked the history of Turkey, moving across communities, families, international courts, parliaments, states and supra-national organizations. In the official and public discourse, the 1915 massacres were interpreted as a defensive yet legitimate counter action by the Ottoman to protect its sovereignty against destructive and separatist acts in a time of war, During recent negotiations with the European Union, the Armenian issue was reframed under the rubric of ‘human rights ‘, particularly with reference to the themes of minority rights and the Kurdish problem. Acknowledgement of the true nature of the crisis was called for by international agents as a necessary condition for actualising the democratisation of Turkey before its entry into EU.
Despite, the multiple interpretations of the 1915 events, “genocide” remained a meta-narrative dominating the significations of events, perpetuating feelings of victimization, fear, oblivion and anger in Turkish society. The state officials perpetuated its taboo-like version of the events and thereby reinforced the proscription on any attempts to question or deconstruct the Turkish official discourse. These sanctions around the events set the morals of the nation which in turn affected the public discourses and imagination around the category of outsider and traitor, and led to the Turkish people becoming complicit with the government about the official sanctions on the discussion about genocide.
Based on the ethnographic work in Mardin, South-eastern Turkey, this paper attempts to convey the images, tropes and idioms that were used to express the collective memory of the 1915 massacres by the descendants of the victims, the perpetrators and witnesses. It analyses fragments of intimate knowledge about the 1915 massacres from the perspective of people from different ethnic and religious backgrounds, Kurds, Arabs, and Syriac Christians. The paper tries to show how the knowledge about the 1915 massacres is narrated in the form of “public secrecy”(Taussig 1999) which reveals the memory of the unresolved issues of the past and bring up the issue of accountability for the events while at the same time, subjecting it to a different form of concealment. In so doing, the paper aims to open up space to analyse the historical reasons which underlie the construction and articulation of the personal and collective memories and on the basis of that, to discuss the relationship between memory, history and accountability in contemporary Turkey.
Workshop:
28 | Re-thinking History, Memory and Accountability in the Anthropology of Middle EastTermin:
Donnerstag, 04.10.2007, 14:00-18:00 UhrOrt:
Melanchthonianum, Hörsaal XIX