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Erasure at Home, Erasure in the World: Armenian History in Turkey (and Beyond) and Non-Discourses on Modern Political Conflict

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2022

Rachel Goshgarian Open the ORCID record for Rachel Goshgarian [Opens in a new window]
Rachel Goshgarian*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Lafayette College, Easton, PA, USA
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Email: goshgarr@lafayette.edu
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Extract

On October 16, 2020, the Los Angeles Review of Books published a powerful letter about the war on Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabagh) that was signed by scholars who are considered to be among those most actively engaged in postcolonial theory and political activism, including Tariq Ali, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Noam Chomsky, Amitav Ghosh, and Cornel West. This letter read:

Before the ravages brought in by World War I and the 20th century, Azeris and Armenians in the area lived in the kind of conflictual coexistence with which we are acquainted in the multiethnic parts of the world. We are asking now not only for an agreement to a ceasefire but an insistence on the preservation of that ceasefire and protection for the Armenian minority in its efforts toward self-determination. We hope, in the long run, with the participation of all international institutions of justice, that the democratic will of the ethnic Armenians of the area can be acknowledged.2

Yet scholars who specialize in the history of Turkey, the Ottoman Empire, and the Middle East were remarkably silent about this war that will have long-term effects on the small Republic of Armenia (population three million) and the relationships it will be able to maintain with its neighbors, in particular the Republic of Azerbaijan (population ten million) and the Republic of Turkey (population eighty-four million). The latter two countries’ militaries jointly attacked the unilaterally recognized, independent Armenian enclave of Artsakh (population 150,000) during a global pandemic, with help from paid Syrian mercenaries and Turkish military technology.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 54 , Issue 3 , August 2022 , pp. 571 - 575
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

1

This title is a play on the famous quotation yurtta sulh cihanda sulh (peace at home, peace in the world), originally pronounced by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in his speeches and tours of Anatolia in April 1931. See Hamza Eroğlu, “Yurtta Sulh, Cihanda Sulh,” Atatürk Araştırma Merkezi Dergisi, Sayı 2, Cilt: I, Mart 1985, http://www.atam.gov.tr/index.php?Page=DergiIcerik&IcerikNo=72.

References

2 “A Call for Lasting Peace in Nagorno-Karabakh,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 16 October 2020, https://lareviewofbooks.org/short-takes/lasting-peace-nagorno-karabakh.

3 For a brief attempt at thinking through the complexities of the identity of a 13th-century Armenian mover and shaker from Gandzasar (Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabagh), for example, see Rachel Goshgarian, “The Complexity of Medieval Identities in the Caucasus,” Hyperallergic, 28 February 2021, https://hyperallergic.com/619788/the-complexity-of-medieval-identities-in-the-caucasus.

4 Agos (website), https://www.agos.com.tr/en/home (accessed 26 August 2022); Hrant Dink Foundation (website), https://hrantdink.org/tr/ (accessed 26 August 2022); Aras Publishing House (website), https://www.arasyayincilik.com (accessed 26 August 2022); Anadolu Kültür (website), https://www.anadolukultur.org (accessed 26 August 2022).

5 The talk was organized through a speaker series supported by the Asian Centennial Program at the College of William and Mary (“Asian Centennial Events,” College of William and Mary, April 2022, https://www.wm.edu/sites/asiancentennial/events/index.php).

6 The HDP was established in Turkey in 2012 and is a political party that styles itself: “the democratic and peaceful forces of Turkey; representatives of labor, ecology and women's rights associations, artists, writers, intellectuals, independent individuals, workers, representatives of different ethnic and religious groups, the unemployed, the retired, farmers, the handicapped, scientists and those whose cities are being destroyed have united here” (“Who Are We?” Peoples’ Democratic Party, https://hdp.org.tr/en/peoples-democratic-party/8760 [accessed 26 August 2022]). Founded as the political wing of the Peoples’ Democratic Congress, a union of various left-wing movements, the HDP is in alliance with the Kurdish Democratic Regions Party (DBP) and a member of the Party of European Socialists (PES). Former coleader of the HDP, Selahettin Demirtaş, had been in jail for four and a half years already when he was sentenced to three and a half years (more) in prison in March 2021 for “insulting the president.” In June 2022 Turkey's constitutional court accepted an indictment filed by a top prosecutor that seeks to ban the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) for alleged ties to militants. Although HDP is the third largest political party in the Turkish parliament, thousands of its members have been charged in past years with terrorism charges (“Turkey's Pro-Kurdish Party Says Closure Case is ‘Political Operation,’” Reuters, 8 June 2021, https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/turkish-prosecutor-refiles-case-close-pro-kurdish-party-anadolu-2021-06-08).

7 There do exist two recently-established Armenian language and literature programs in Turkish universities, one at the University of Ankara and the other at Erciyes University in Kayseri. The faculty in both departments seem to be focused on the Eastern Armenian language, the modern history of the Armenian press in Turkey, 19th-century Armenian literature, Armenian nationalism, and the diaspora. Although Erciyes University does list one course on “Armenian History,” their website does not list an instructor for said course or provide any other information (“Department of Armenian Language and Culture,” Ankara University Faculty of Languages and History–Geography, http://www.dtcf.ankara.edu.tr/en/department-of-caucasian-languages-and-cultures-3/department-of-armenian-language-and-culture (accessed 26 August 2022); “Course Information Package, Armenian Language and Culture,” Erciyes University, https://dbp.erciyes.edu.tr/Program/P3.aspx?Fak=112&lang=1&Pro=112101 [accessed 26 August 2022]). In 2019, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation launched a new program in collaboration with Boğaziçi University (Bosphorus University, Istanbul) called the “Calouste Gulbenkian Fellowship in Medieval or Early Modern Armenian History at Boğaziçi University.” Since 2019 (with a pause due to the COVID-19 pandemic), the program has hosted two scholars in medieval Armenian history at Boğaziçi University, Emilio Bonfiglio and the author. Initially envisioned as a teaching fellowship, it has since been transformed into a research fellowship within which the fellow offers public lectures and organizes lecture series, workshops, and symposia, while participating in the activities of the Department of History at Boğaziçi University (“Calouste Gulbenkian Fellowship,” Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 25 February 2022, https://gulbenkian.pt/armenian-communities/2022/02/25/calouste-gulbenkian-fellowship).

8 For more on the situation of Armenian history teaching in Armenian schools in Turkey, see the recent PhD thesis by Linda Barış, “The Effects of the Armenian Schools on the Ethnic Identity Formation of Armenians in Turkey” (Middle East Technical University, Ankara, 2017), https://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12621723/index.pdf. Her book of the same title was published by Libra Yayınları (Istanbul) in 2019 and was most recently published in Turkish as Türkiye'de Ermeni Okulları ve Ermeni Kimliği (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2021).

9 Gür, Aslı, “Stories in Three Dimensions: Narratives of Nation and the Anatolian Civilizations Museum,” in The Politics of Public Memory in Turkey, ed. Özyürek, Esra (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 40–69Google Scholar.

10 See Ara Sarafian, “Hacking History I: Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara,” Turkishnews.com, 22 November 2008, https://www.turkishnews.com/en/content/2009/02/05/hacking-history-i-museum-of-anatolian-civilizations-ankara.