The Testimonies of Azmi and Hrant

"One of the difficulties in discussing violence in the 1948 war is that “Palestine,” the site of violence, both persists and has ceased to exist. Its simultaneous presence and erasure occurs in part through the survival of Palestinians from the 1948 war in what has ceased to be Palestine. Their scattered yet persistent presence constitutes a thread with which one can return to that moment when Palestine was ruined. They embody the survival of Palestine, yet also stand for its death. This death continues both to impede their memory of what has happened in 1948 and to structure it. The memories of the Palestinian survivors constitute a challenge to another kind of thread (mis)leading us back to 1948. The war also resulted in a birth—of a new Jewish state attempting to deny the simultaneous death that gave rise to its creation."
"1948: Law, History, Memory" by Samera Esmeir

I cannot help but make the connection here between Azmi and Hrant Dink, as survivors who pose a challenge by naming this connection, and really the necessity of the connection, between the death and birth. They do so in such a way that exposes as ridiculous those who try to blur the connection in order to maintain current (dis)order.

I was brought to this by c-blok’s writings, and by reading through pages and pages of writings on the Armenian genocide, some of them replete with so many forms of denial that resonate intensely with the Zionist denials of the Nakba. In his The Ottoman Empire, 1700-1922, economic historian Donald Quataert writes that one of the main reasons why this is said to be genocide is that Armenians “died because of their identity, not because of their actions and beliefs” (185). He says this by way of introducing why he does not think it can be called genocide, why it was different than the Nazi genocide of Jews. I wonder, in what ways? How is it possible to divorce identity from actions and beliefs?

He locates the beginning of the problems, where “the story begins,” in 1914 with Russian Armenians who come along with other Russian invaders through the eastern Anatolian front. This follows an entire book which actually quite carefully and thoroughly maps the various ways in which Ottoman identities were formed over centuries, and changed and disrupted suddenly with the Tanzimat. In this way, we can see how the story begins much earlier in fact, in the way that Armenian identity, not just as a national identity but as an identity of the second largest millet in the Ottoman Empire, made them the exact targets for actions focused on cleansing and consolidating, incidental only insofar as the people killed were bodies that incidentally belonged to that identity. This is the same with Jews in the Nazi holocaust and Hannah Arendt does a very nice job showing this in The Origins of Totalitarianism by looking at how the Jew (rather than the Jews) played a very specific and very complex role in commerce and in social relations in Europe, and that it is not a coincidence that the “liberation” of the Jew ultimately led to the destruction of the Jew.

Quataert reports that in Istanbul and Izmir the Armenian communities “remained intact and in place, going about their business” (186) while the massacres were conducted in the East, i.e. that the absence of large-scale massacres in Istanbul and Izmir cancel out the massacres in the East. This is a position also taken by Zionist denialists, saying that some Arabs (Palestinians) did not leave (weren’t expelled from) their homes in 1948, and that some were even saved by Jews! This ugly rhetoric asserts that the exceptions prove the rule, and that if there was no killing of bodies, or rather, if all bodies were not killed, then a genocide did not take place.

What is similar in both situations, and why the term genocide is apt, is that the mass killing was not just the murder of people, but an effort to eradicate Armenian or Palestinian identity as such, so that those who remained would not be Armenian or Palestinian. The presence of Armenians in Turkey or the presence of Palestinians in Israel highlights this: as identities which experienced the genocide through survival, that is, a survival which became an extension of the genocide, their presence becomes a testimony. But a testimony to what?

The presence and the testimony of Hrant Dink and of Azmi Bishara stand both for survival and death, and this is precisely how genocide functions. It is not just the killing of people, as though that would not be enough, but more so, the structuring of that killing, not because it is premeditated or it uses modern technology, but because it is designed to kill an identity in order to make way for another. We are supposed to believe in the compassion of Zionism and/or Kemalism because it “allowed” for some Palestinians or Armenians to live, and even to stay in their home territories, but even those few who got to stay in the same house, were de-territorialized in a way that was just as violent. The process was to expel some out of their homes, and for the others, to expel their homes out of them, to make them strangers in themselves(as Azmi writes in his recent LA Times editorial: “When Israel was established in 1948, more than 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled in fear. My family was among the minority that escaped that fate, remaining instead on the land where we had long lived. The Israeli state, established exclusively for Jews, embarked immediately on transforming us into foreigners in our own country.”), to disorient them in such a way that it is not clear what home or identity even mean, and then to have them serve as the proof that genocide did not occur.

The power and the threat of Hrant Dink and of Azmi Bishara, and of all of the Armenians in Turkey and Palestinians in Israel, is that they refuse to be that proof, that they transform that survival from an individual bodily survival to a collective resistance.

Hrant Dink's solitude

Hrant Dink, an Armenian editor, columnist, journalist, thinker from Turkey is assassinated yesterday. Within left progressive and pro-democratic forces in Turkey, Dink occupied a unique place. His perseverance, especially, in the face of the travesty of unending court trials and delusory accusations he was subjected to, more recently under the infamous Article 301, evokes an admiring and a guilty puzzlement. Unfortunately, it is Dink's loss that compels this state of puzzlement into a deliberation of the immense significance and singularity his position embodied.

Dink struggled against the nationalist denialism around the Armenian genocide and discrimination of Armenian community in Turkey (whose numbers dwindled to something between 50.000-80.000). However, he refrained from simply advocating "positive rights" for the Armenians, an approach that he argued to have led to the isolation of the Armenian community as a minority that needs (international) protection. Rather, he assumed a "negative rights" approach, meaning, he revealed the exclusions of Turkish citizenship at the same time that he engaged in practices of constituting the excluded Armenian community as citizens of Turkey. By remarking on the general precariousness of rights in Turkey, he also pointed to the shakiness of the majority/minority distinction. I think such interventions universalized Dink's position beyond the defense of Armenian rights to addressing more broadly the important issue of rethinking of citizenship in Turkey.

With equal commitment, Dink critiqued the politics of ressentiment that continues to structure the Armenian identity. He was at times critiqued by certain tendencies within the Armenian community, the religious institution of Patriarchy in Turkey as well as by the Armenian state and segments of diaspora. His nuanced stances were regarded too controversial or wrongly equated to the assimilation of the Armenian identity. Thus, on the one hand, his position was not quite fully embraced and remained inarticulate. On the other hand, he was tortured at the hands of Turkish nationalism for "denigrating and insulting Turkishness," and, eventually, eliminated. This solitude of Hrant Dink attests to the fact that he was the voice and living practice of some truth, which was hard to assume and digest, but all the more necessary not to be lost.

In the aftermath of the killing, the politico-legal-military state apparatus in Turkey circulates the memorized narratives of condemnation and condolence. Military general Yaşar Büyükanıt's awaited statement, "today's bullets were targeted to Turkey," finds its reflection in the familiar rhetoric of the prime minister, Tayyip Erdoğan, "the dark hands that killed him will be found and punished." These soulless declarations shoulder each other to reduce Dink's murder to an affair of national security, at the same time, repressing and subtracting the responsibilities of the establishment from its eventuating. They forestall the acute need to understand why this event happened. Performing a feigned remorse, they try to suppress the obscene fact that it was only a few days ago that Dink himself was ruthlessly attacked as being part of those dark forces, for allegedly threatening national unity and solidarity.

Clearly, the "Turkey" that the nationalist state ideology imagines to be targeted by yesterday's bullets has nothing in common with Dink's understanding of "Turkey." This is the reason why he is murdered. This is the reason why he walked the courts for three years before his first acquittal from the charges of insulting "Turkishness," because he defined himself in some conference in 2002 as being "not a Turk, but from Turkey and Armenian."

Dink's claim inspires a notion of citizenship, whose attachment is to a certain place and geography, rather than to a pure identity. Yet, there is also a certain understanding of historical attachment that flows through such a material space, which Dink did not want let go of. This history, though, does not correspond to a recuperation and keeping alive some lost (Armenian) ideal. Indeed, while Dink claimed that he was an Armenian and from Turkey, and while he fervently criticized the Turkish official history, he also repeated the need to detach the Armenian identity from the weight of historical memory, the "residues of the past," and, instead, refocus on the living Armenian community.

Reading Dink's claim "being from Turkey and an Armenian" might also call forth another historico-spatial imagination of Turkey, more properly, of Anatolia, as 'the mosaic of cultures,' a prevalent multiculturalist idea of citizenship that both progressive and conservative thinking at times embrace as an alternative to the ethnocentricism of Turkish nationalism. In this ideology, Turkish citizenship encompasses many different cultures, and identities, Turkish, Kurd, Armenian, Greek, Cherkes, Abkhaz, and so on. I think that Dink's position was far from such an ideal of reinserting into contemporary context previously defined and bounded identities that were presumed to once coexist harmoniously in Anatolia. It rather seems to me that what Dink's unique and dangerous project embodied was reclaiming and redefining an Armenian identity as an intimate condition of redefining what it means to be a citizen of Turkey and vise versa. Agos, the bilingual newspaper that Hrant Dink established is perhaps one such new space, one of the main institutions for such a reconstruction and reclaiming. While Agos will continue its life, it is not so certain that Hrant Dink's place will be filled.