The Way Back: An Armenian Perspective

At times, Ara Sarafian, an exiled Armenian historian, could be something of a Jeremiah. “They might as well have danced on their graves,” he sulked, when he caught the descendants of the victims and perpetrators of the Armenian genocide dancing together on the centennial of the slaughter. For a week, he had led a mix of Turks, Kurds, Assyrian Christians, and Armenians on a pilgrimage through Anatolia—or, as he called it, Western Armenia—mapping the communities annihilated 100 years earlier. On the dry riverbed where Turkish soldiers handed over shackled Armenians to Kurdish tribesmen to dispose of, he lectured on the possibilities of reconciliation, once Turkey acknowledged its past. On the green hillside above, an elderly Kurd sung dirges for the dead. Turkish participants gathered poppies and forget-me-nots that grew in the killing fields and handed them to Armenians. On the road back to their hotel his exhausted party fell asleep on each other’s shoulders. But dancing together on such a sober occasion seemed altogether a little too glib.

It had been a difficult week. To avoid global hectoring, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had cynically shifted the victory celebrations for the Gallipoli Campaign, the battle where Ottoman forces repelled an Allied invasion a century earlier, to coincide with the centennial of the Armenian genocide. Armenian ministers had upped the ante, demanding that Turkey restore the vast tracts of land they took from them. “They want confrontation,” said Sarafian of Armenian officials. “They want to destabilize Turkey by demanding territory. They want Turkey to implode.” Far from coming to terms with the past, officials on both sides regurgitated tired historical narratives and manipulated historical memories to pick at old wounds.

Sarafian, by contrast, was on a mission to recover the regional pluralism that Armenia’s genocide had shattered. Sometimes, like the bones of the mass graves he exposed, the values lay surprisingly close to the surface. At 3 p.m. on April 24, 2015, Genocide Remembrance Day, he began marching to St. Sarkis, an Armenian church in the southeastern city of Diyarbakır, which had been wrecked in the genocide and was now given over to weeds.

When he set off from the city’s old black basalt walls, there were more riot police than mourners. But with each step the numbers grew. By the time Sarafian reached the church, hundreds of townsfolk marched in solidarity to commemorate the anniversary. Many wore T-shirts printed in Armenia’s national color, purple, some inscribed with the words Beni Unutma (Armenian for never forget). And amidst the ruins, one politician after another took to a makeshift stage at the foot of the church to declare their contrition for their Kurdish forefathers complicity in the killing. “How can we look Armenians in the eye?” asked Gültan Kışanak, Diyarbakır’s co-mayor. “We share a collective shame.” None of the speakers in a town considered a bastion of Kurdish nationalism offered the excuse of wartime, which might have mitigated the crime, or recalled the “righteous Kurds” who had rescued Armenians and had their homes burned as a result. “To deny the genocide is to commit the genocide afresh,” said Selahattin Demirtaş, a former presidential candidate and leader of Turkey’s main pro-Kurdish party, the Peoples’ Democratic Party.

In the process of exposing the past, many of Turkey’s Kurds are discovering Armenian roots. I have an Armenian grandmother, Kurds used to say, innocently sidestepping the details of how she was acquired; more commonly today they describe themselves as part Armenian and acknowledge the less savory reality. Many Kurds “rescued” Armenian children from the death marches and took them as slave girls and concubines.

Perhaps remorse is easier for Kurds than for Ankara’s Turkish leaders. The Kurds were the lowly implementing agents, not the masterminds. As fellow victims of Turkish nationalism, they can also empathize with Armenian pain. After breakfasting on Christians, a Kurdish lawyer in Diyarbakır told me, Turks lunched on Kurds. Three generations after eliminating Armenians, who once comprised a third of Eastern Anatolia’s population, Turkish nationalists torched 3,000 Kurdish villages in the 1980s. In both the intent was the same: to eradicate difference and impose a uniform identity.

A more cynical analyst might have deconstructed the event as a Kurdish political ploy to foment anti-Turkish sentiment. Sarafian, who has a knack for delivering dramatic sentences in a disarmingly deadpan expression, saw it as an act of “catharsis.” A growing caucus across Turkey, he said, was struggling to overcome sectarian and ethnic chauvinism and restore the kinship Turks, Armenians, Kurds, and Assyrians once shared. “I don’t want to sever my Turkish connections,” he said. “I want a country that gives Armenians the choice to live here not as foreigners but as people with a special status who belong here.”

As Sarafian sees it, such a policy shift would constitute a vital guarantor of stability. “Ottoman values” would equip Turkey with the flexibility to accommodate its disparate identities, and transform an unstable monoculture into a sustainable melting pot. Sarafian argues that only Ottomanism, underpinned by democracy, would ensure Turkey’s survival as a modern state.

When Sarafian first arrived in Turkey in the 1980s, the country was emerging from military rule. Diyarbakır remained under de facto military occupation. Even whispers in Kurdish were banned, and he was expelled for photographing a ruined church. Thirty years on, Turkey was again a polyglot society. The country has all but legalized Kurdish, and despite the flare-up of fighting in Diyarbakir at the time of writing, the country had licensed Kurdish political parties. For two successive elections in 2015, the Peoples’ Democratic Party surpassed the 10 percent threshold designed to prevent it entering parliament.

For the first time since the abolition of the caliphate in 1924, Turkey has permitted the construction of a new church in 2015. Near the Greek border at Edirne, it has restored and reopened the city’s imposing synagogue. Turkish universities puncture taboos by hosting conferences exploring the Young Turks’ expulsion of Greeks—in tandem, of course, with studies of the Greek expulsion of Turks.

Turkey’s recovery of pluralism remains far from guaranteed. Erdoğan has called for the restoration of church property, but has authorized the reopening of only a handful of the thousands of churches whose bells once pealed across Anatolia. He entered into peace talks with the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party, and then resumed fighting. The appeal to a pluralist past often seems little more than a political tool by Erdoğan and his fellow Islamist politicians to overturn Kemalism, whose anti-religious zeal smothered Islam almost as comprehensively as other faiths. In his embrace of Ottomanism detractors and supporters alike detect a covert ambition to convert his presidency into a caliphate.

Yet even on the issue of genocide, observers sense the government is shifting. After four generations of indoctrination and governments that refused even to debate the matter, ministers now accept the suffering but argue over the degree. Some 500,000 Armenians had died of hunger and disease in a forcible relocation to the Syrian Desert in 1915, argued a senior official a century on, but the deportations were justified on the grounds that Armenian revolutionaries were helping Russian forces invade. Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç spoke of “an unintentional genocide”; Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu called it “a tragedy of innocents.” Though Erdoğan escaped to Gallipoli on the centennial, he sent a minister to the Armenian Orthodox Church’s commemoration in his stead, and the speech given in Erdoğan’s name publicly offered his condolences. The country’s leading newspapers gave more coverage to the genocide’s centennial than Gallipoli’s. “Never again,” declared Cumhuriyet across its front page in heavy black font—in Armenian as well as Turkish.

Armenian nationalists take little comfort from Erdoğan, and many survivors and their scattered descendants refuse to engage until Turkey admits culpability for a genocide that killed 1.5 million of their kin—intentionally, not as a regrettable side effect of war. But across Eastern Anatolia local mayors solicit Sarafian’s help in encouraging Armenians and Assyrian Christians to visit their lost homeland. Assyrian Christians from Australia came with apps on their mobile phones mapping their churches that had once dotted Diyarbakır. Some discuss the prospects of a proper return and ask about applying for Turkish citizenship on the basis of their ancestors’ Ottoman citizenship. A French Armenian lawyer even lodged a case in the Turkish courts seeking the return of the land on which Batman Airport was built. “Politically,” says Sarafian, “the shift has already happened.”

We were standing by the Monument of Common Conscience, a temporary sculpture Diyarbakır’s Kurdish-led municipality had erected two years earlier at the base of the Old City’s walls. Beneath a tear drop was an inscription in Turkish, Kurdish, English, Armenian, Syriac, Hebrew, and Zaza, promising an end to religious and ethnic persecution. Sarafian was still brooding about the dance of the descendants of soldier, executioner and victim the night before. Perhaps, he retracted, it might have been the right way to commemorate: “We don’t want to divorce,” he said. “We want to reconcile.”