Facing Turkey's Past: Struma and 1915
Posted: 09/18/2012 12:02
pm
Apology, in my opinion, is secondary. First and foremost, the emphasis
should be on this society's courage to face the sins of the past. We
were deprived of it until today. This is a frightened society. I am not
ashamed to say this: We were fed this fear, we were scared throughout
all our lives. Our ruling system has been based on fear. We have to
change that. The only way is to confront our past.
These are the words of
İshak Alaton, a prominent octogenarian Turkish
businessman of Jewish origin.
After releasing his memoirs not so long
ago, Alaton has become more and more
vocal, calling endlessly for an
end to the bloody Kurdish conflict as one of
the "wise men" ready to be
part of a dialogue on reconciliation, asking for
the courage to face
the crimes that were committed during the collapse of
Ottoman rule and
asking citizens to speak out.
When a ship called the
Struma was dragged to the port of Old İstanbul
in 1941, Alaton was a
15-year-old witness to the agony onboard. The
60-year-old vessel was the
last hope of 769 Romanian Jews fleeing the
Nazis, but its engines had
stopped at the Black Sea end of the
Bosporus. The issue led to pressure on
Ankara from Adolf Hitler's
regime, and after 72 days of despair, the Struma
was sent by Turkish
authorities back into the Black Sea, where it was
torpedoed by the
Soviet navy. Only one person survived.
"Those
responsible for this in Ankara are, to my mind, murderers. This
society, of
which I am a part, has a problem with hiding from its past.
We pretend that
if we lock them away the problems will be gone. But the
corpses that rot in
there poison the air that we breathe. Is any
serenity possible without
confrontation? Let us do it, so that we can
make peace with the
past."
The Struma disaster, a hidden episode in the republic's history,
is the
subject of a new book written by Halit Kakınç, and its preface is
written by, yes, Alaton himself.
It is not for nothing the subject of
"genies out of the bottle." is to
persist on the agenda of Turkey, opened up
in a sort of "Turkish
perestroika" by the ruling Justice and Development
Party (AKP) in the
past decade.
And, only days after the release of
the Struma book, another hit the
shelves -- a potential intellectual
bombshell.
"1915: Armenian Genocide" is its title and, not only due to
its cover
but also its groundbreaking content, it overwhelms many others on
the
subject that have been published. What makes the book outstanding and
unique is that it was written by Hasan Cemal, an internationally
renowned editor and columnist who is the grandson of Cemal
Pasha.
This kinship is key to understanding the book's historic
significance:
Cemal Pasha was a member of the triumvirate, whose other parts
were
Talat and Enver Pasha, responsible for the Great Armenian Tragedy,
which started with a mass deportation of Ottoman Armenians from their
homelands and ended with their annihilation between 1915 through
1916.
In his account, Hasan Cemal concludes it was genocide. He does not
intend, or pretend, to argue his case like a historian would. His is a
painful intellectual journey that takes us through his own evolution, a
rather ruthless self-scrutiny of his intellectual past that amounts to
an invaluable piece of private archeology.
He has done this before.
In other books, he questioned his "militarist
revolutionary" past (in the
'60s and'70s), confronting boldly his own
mistakes -- his deep disbelief in
democracy, plotting coups, his
experience as newspaper editor,
etc.
But this one is even more personal.
"It was the pain of Hrant
Dink which made me write this book," he told
the press. Dink was a dear
Turkish-Armenian colleague to many of us, as
he was to Cemal. He was
assassinated in broad daylight on a street of
Istanbul by a lone gunman in
January 2007, sending shockwaves around
the world.
"Look at my age;
it's been years and years that I have defended the
freedom of expression.
But should I keep secret some of my opinions,
only for myself? Should I
still have some taboos of my own? Should I
still remain unliberated? Is it
not a shame on me, Hasan Cemal?"
In the preface, he writes: "We cannot
remain silent before the bitter
truths of the past. We cannot let the past
hold the present captive.
Also, the pain of 1915 does not belong to the
past, it is an issue of
today. We can only make peace with history, but not
an 'invented' or
'distorted' history like ours, and reach
liberty."
The pain of Dink's memory -- which scarred many of us so
eternally --
may have been a crucial point for it, but by turning a
"personal
taboo-breaking" into a public one, Cemal opened a huge hole in the
wall
of denial of the state. It broke another mental dam.
This bold
exercise in freedom of speech will, in time, pave the way for
the correct
path. It is up to the individuals of Turkey to do the same,
and bow before
their consciences. Perhaps this is why there has been
such silence over this
book in the days since its publication. It is
also very difficult to find in
bookstores. There are rumors that some
chains are refusing to sell it. This
may be true, but it cannot now be
unpublished.
The genie is out of
the bottle but the ghosts of the past are also very
much alive. The "silent
treatment" is proof of that. If anything, it
shows how frightened people
are. Not only does the state owe an apology
for the past, but an even bigger
apology is necessary for enforcing,
decade after decade, a mass
internalization of denialism in this
country.
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