Ethnic-Armenian Turkish diaspora ?

[MosJan]

hmmm - HAgarag /???/ should this be your #2 warning ??? or are you going to apologies

 

choice is yours

 

MOvses

[Sip]

Real ping pong sounds good. I'll take on Hovsep, while MJ and TB go at it for a best two out of three. Winners play for the ultimate title while losers provide the BBQ and drinks. How's that?

 

In case of a tie (you never know, it IS hye forum and someone may actually find a way to evenly split 3) we'll toss a fair coin ... In the unlikely event that the coin lands sideways on it's edge (hey, it is hyeforum), I'll treat you all to the xhorovats and be done with it. But then, I would retain the right to call myself the ultimate ping pong champ around here.

 

Having said that, I thought the whole methaphor and the symbolism behind "the mother" was pretty cool. At first I thought it was an insult of some sort but I eventually figured it out.

 

[ January 23, 2003, 03:01 PM: Message edited by: Sip ]

[MJ]

That must be Thoth.

[khodja]

Mos Jan,

 

Please remind me of first warning.

[MosJan]

i dnot see a apologie - so i guess it's an warning.

 

MOvses

[khodja]

OK,

 

I apologize for referring to MJ as the transportation vehicle of Nasraddin Khodja. He has the right to express his views here as does Twilight Bark. You allow me to rant here about my views about Armenian traditional culture and my hatred for conservative religious wing of American Republican Party. I should afford MJ the same right to freely express his views.

[Stormig]

Oh my gob, I hadn't seen this!

[Stormig]

Well, elaborate.

[Stormig]

Where is Boghos?

[Munzur]

Hi guys. I was scrolling over the other forum parts and I saw this interesting discussion. To me, it’s quite surprising to see that there is a hot debate among Armenians about identity. Being multicultural (Armenian, Kurdish, Kizilbash) from descent, I would like to say some things that struck me.

 

It was stated:

 

This is not so incredible as it may seem. From my Oral History research, I can conclude that the genocide lives in the collective memory of the “East Anatolian” population – “East Anatolia” is actually a wrong index, Anatolia being strictly the peninsula; western historic Armenia, or North Kurdistan, the Upper Euphrates basin, or Vilayet-i Şarkiye (The ‘Eastern Provinces’), call it whatever you want to, the region needs a name exlucing the term ‘Anatolia’. In the summer of 2002 I was all over the place and conducted about 70 interviews with elderly Turks, Kurds, Kurdish-Alevis, Gypsies, Lazes, muslim Georgians, Arabs, Dersimlis, crypto-Armenians. Out of these 70 people, of whom only 4 were literate, 61 recognized the genocide as it happened. There were some interesting mostly eye-witnesses accounts, containing much (new) information.

 

Perhaps I can post some transcriptions of interesting parts of these interviews. The point being, collective memory includes the historicity of the genocide and all that needs to be done now is to bring this wealth of information above the surface. This also means that denialists can seldom be the indigenous ‘Easterners’ (as they are usually Ankara-based Kemalist bureaucrats) and erosion of collective memory is in Turkey’s interest; also, time is on Turkey’s side. There is a huge population that knows what happened but has never gotten a chance to speak out.

 

THOTH has written:

 

This is, of course, absolutely true. The cultural difference between Armenians and Turks is minimal and mostly restricted to religion. Armenian culture influenced Ottoman and vice versa; the genocide meant the excision of Armenians and Armenian culture from Anatolia and the ‘East’ but this doesn’t change the reality of cultural proximity. Personally, I was pretty amazed that Nasreddin Khoja is an element in Armenian culture. This raises questions that are important for both Armenians and Kurds: how useful is it to hate a cultural entity or legacy of which we are actually a part ourselves?

 

This cultural difference is even less with Kurdish culture, and sometimes so minimal that it’s difficult to discern who’s an Armenian and who’s a Kurd – especially in Dersim, where I’m from, practically the only place where relative harmony between the various peoples was omnipresent throughout time. If you ever wonder how the bulk of Armenian peasants must have been living, before the genocide, I suggest you take a look in villages around Muş, Erzincan, Harput, Diyarbekir, Van. It’s Kurds now that live there but especially in old Armenian villages, for example Khinzori or Khachikian in Erzincan, you’ll see that the Kurds (both muslim and Kizilbash) have adapted to agriculture, which was essentially an exclusively Armenian practice. Socio-economically, this meant that they ‘Armenianized.’ There’s an excellent study of this phenomenon by a German ethnologist:

 

Helmut Christoff, Kurden und Armenier: eine Untersuchung über die Abhängigkeit ihrer Lebensformen und Charakterentwicklung von der Landschaft (Kurds and Armenians: A Study on the Dependance of their Lifestyles and Character-developments of the Landscape), doctoral dissertation, University of Hamburg, 1935.

 

Personally, I think that Christoff is right and that economy plays a significant role in shaping interpersonal manners, mentality, thought pattern, etc.. He uses examples to demonstrate that an Armenian merchant from Istanbul had little in common with an Armenian smith from Diyarbakir. This might seem like stating the obvious, but even Mark Sykes wrote that urban Armenians were totally different from rural Armenians – he even claims they’d never intermarry and that the rural Armenians would rather intermarry with Kizilbashes. This is confirmed by Hagop Mintzuri, who, in his memoires writes that in the entire valley of Erzincan, the Armenians were so intertwined with the environment, that in 1915 Turkish gendarmes, upon entering villages without churches, they couldn’t discern Armenian from Kurd or Kizilbash from Armenian (it even happened that non-Armenians were deported). Because, with respect to language, most Armenians spoke Turkish, Kurdish or Zaza fluently. I even know a small village in the valley of Erzincan where 50 Armenian families escaped deportation by simply stating that they were Kizilbash – a branch of my family belongs to one of these families (by the way, I found a large khachkar in a ruin there, I took a picture, I’ll upload it some time). So in disputable cases, it was only religion that did the selecting: churches in the squares, uncircumcised men...

 

Also, I think that a genocide survivor family living in, e.g. the US, is an anachronism. The Armenians were brutally ripped out of their historic homeland while, from every aspect, these people belong in their villages or cities in western Armenia. So when Peter Balakian describes his afternoons baking ‘choeregh’ (çörek) with his grandmother in an east coast American city, I feel like he’s talking about my own grandmother and my afternoons. The difference, especially between the ‘East-Anatolian’ Armenians and their then neighbours, is (was?) minimal. The only thing that I find difficult to accept is the present animosity, or at least lack of solidarity, between these peoples. I’d like to see this changed.

[khodja]

Munzur,

 

The way to reconciliation is for the truth to be acknowledged. The Turkish miliary leadership to stop obuscating the facts. Creating a Turkish nation that gives religious and ethnic minorities TRUE equality.

 

Also, all Armenians today are not alike. We are scattered around the globe and have acquired the cultural mores of our adopted lands. I was married to the daughter of Lebanese-Armenian immigrants, who had arrived in the USA beteen 1955 and 1975. I am the son of Turkish-Armenian immigrants who arrived in the USA shortly after the Genocide. Even though we were both raised in the USA, our outlooks could not have been much more different.

[Stormig]

Hi, Munzur.

 

How were you able to carry out this work without official interference?

[Munzur]

hagarag:

 

Of course, I realize that not all Armenians are alike, just like Turkomans from Iran are different from Bosnian 'Turks' or Chechens. I'm just trying to make sense out of this genocide thing and how it worked out for 1) the region in question, 2) the survivors that inhabited it, 3) the present population.

 

Stormy:

 

I'm one of the second generation of those millions of people that emigrated from rural Turkey to Western Europe during the 1960s and 70s. Since 90% of my relatives still lives there, every summer we spend two months in the Eastern provinces. Upon reading the vast amount of academic genocide literature, I realized that having access to the region's population is a prerogative that most Armenian genocide scholars don't have. Moreover, there is NO objective Oral History research on the bystander and perpetrator descendants (the few subjective interviews that the government did are full of omissions and distortions; they just pay people to demonize Armenians).

 

So I started interviewing grandparents of friends and travelling from village to village, socializing and sampling the collective memory, interviewing every senior I met. I have a pretty good picture how the various people in the region think about Armenians and the genocide (highly interesting for having people acknowledge the facts). For me, the crucial element was having the people accept you within the confines of their "we"-group. Since I have more identities than one, this was easy: I just posed as a Kurd, Turk, Kizilbash, whenever convenient. You just need to strike the right nerve.

 

The dark side of this research is that I don't know whether the Turkish secret service opened a file on me. As you know, the Eastern provinces have been the scene of death, destruction, genocide and carnage from 1890 until today. Kurdish nationalism was and is a horrible taboo so I was lucky that the PKK war ended. Frankly, I don't think they watched me, not only for the simple fact that I "infiltrated" those communities with the help of friends and relatives. I also didn't talk much, I wasn't busy getting people to acknowledge the genocide; I just let them talk. But there's a lot more work to do, and FAST.

[Azat]

Welcome back Munzur,

 

If I may ask, are you planning to publish your research in any format or is it just to find out what has happened?

[Stormig]

Thank you, Munzur. It was especially the "asking" part in your interviews that I was curious about. I'm thinking that, had you not been in circles where you were accepted as one of the "we," you would have had to prompt people to get what you wanted, which is what would have drawn the attention of the police by some crack-arse "informer" - "Someone's asking about Armenians!" which I am sure is not bound to be a good experience. I don't think the secret service would be interested in you.

[Munzur]

Stormy, don't underestimate government heterophobia in Turkey. Any mention of ethnicity (let alone Armenianism) in connection with the 'East' is potentially deadly. They wouldn't harm American citizens, but I have a Turkish passport so I need to watch out. If I had walked into a village square or city cafe, one where no one knew me, and bluntly asked "Excuse me, I'm a genocide scholar and I would like to know if the Armenians were really horribly slaughtered by our government... and oh yeah, did your grandfather participate in the killing?", I would be lynched (the incident where a Turkish TV crew went to a Hemshinli village, said "you guys are actually Armenian" and got beat up is infamous). No, my M.O. was all about stealth. In some villages I didn't utter the word "genocide" or "Armenians" for weeks, letting the people get used to "this European kid who studies history." Then, once they trusted me, I'd do the interviewing.

 

Parev Azat, thank you, I was quite busy for a while. The Oral History material will be published. I conferred with Ara Sarafian (Gomidas Institute) and we agreed on publishing the results, only if there's enough material. So it'll be a couple of a years before I can publish all of it in the form of a decent book. I want it to be an eye-opener for both the genocide survivors and the Turkish government. Because we can peck fights in European archives and American Congresses but... the event happened in the Eastern provinces and affected those people a lot.

 

[ February 22, 2003, 03:15 PM: Message edited by: Munzur ]

[THOTH]

Munzur -

 

Such as refreshing post. I am very impressed. You are so right - what you are doing must be done - before it is too late. Already too many are gone and soon the oral history will fade. So get back there - but, of course, be careful - though it seems that you have worked out a very good approach. I find what you are doing to be very thrilling and worthwhile.

 

Its funny - in 1992 - when I first visited Turkey (right after the 1st Gulf war) - I made a point to tell nearly everyone I met that I was Armenian. (We were in Istanbul and along the Aegean and Med coasts primarily...plus a bit inland - for nearly 3 weeks). Sometimes I would just come out and say it - but ussually I worked it inot conversation - easy since most Turks always at some point would ask - "why are you visirting Turkey?) etc. Even after my revelation I was nearly always treated very warmly. I never initiated any discussion of the Genocide - but a decent percentage of folks (maybe half or slightly more) expressed sympathy concerning the plight of the Armenians/what had been done to them, etc. Only a few folks became openly hostile (once I had to be pulled apart from a rather big, drunk Turk as we got into it a bit...). Quite a few others would look around nervously, size me up, and then whisper to me that they were Kurdish and begin telling of their (then) current woes...

 

In contrast, on my most recent visit to Turkey (last year) I was more discrete (well somewhat...). But one evening I was at a bar and struck up a nice conversation with a very cute/young (blond!) Turkish bartendress. The place wasn't busy and we spoke together for quite some time - concerning her interest in visiting the States and some discussion of nice places to visit in Turkey - etc. I slowly worked into the conversation that my Grandparents were from Anatolia and we talked about where from etc. Then of course she asked me "Are you Turkish?" or something of the sort. "Well no - I am Armenian" I replied. She had me repeat it....I even said "Ermani" - she still had no idea what I was talking about (her blondness truly fit her well)...then she asked another (older) bartender. I could see him explaining and they both cast glances at me. Well - she never came back over and was suddenly busy cleaning glasswere at the back of the bar...needless to say her tip suffered greatly!

[Stormig]

I did not state otherwise.

 

Sounds great. Keep in touch and us in the loop!

[Munzur]

I know a lot needs to be done still, not only because it's intrinsically interesting to conduct Oral History research in the region, but also to write down accounts and views of the local bystander and perpetrator communities (e.g. Alevi Kurds, Yezidi Kurds, Lazes, etc.), a highly neglected area of study.

 

Luckily the Armenian diaspora has loads of oral history documentation, especially in the US. I'm equally interested in how Armenian seniors in the diaspora perceive the present East-Anatolian population, such as the Kurds or Kizilbashes. I guess I need to dive into the oral history archives in Glendale, Berkeley, Boston.

 

P.S.: Thoth, it really shows that you're by no means an abstracted xenophobe, hating people you've never seen. Big up to your nuances concerning ethnodiversity and sense of reality.

[Johannes]

http://www.dersimsite.org/english.html