When Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s best-known novelist, made the unremarkable observation last year that one million Armenians were killed in Turkey, his words provoked a protest demonstration in the streets. Under Turkey’s new penal code, it is not clear that referring to Armenian genocide constitutes “antinational activity”—a crime that is punishable by ten years’ imprisonment. (The law’s original footnote, which suggests that it does, has officially been erased, but this may not have much effect in practice; many copies of the new penal code that have been circulated contain the offending footnote, raising fears that lawyers and judges will apply it.) If saying the Turks committed genocide is a crime, this is surely as flagrant an affront to intellectual freedom as the recent decision by the Swiss judiciary to launch an inquiry into Yusuf Halacoglu, the head of the Turkish History Organization, on the grounds that his denial of the genocide during a speech he gave in Switzerland may amount to illegal racism. That court decision was denounced not only by members of the Turkish establishment, but also by pro-Armenian Turkish historians such as Sabanci University’s Halil Berktay, who says that the events of 1915 constitute a “proto-genocide.” Etyen Mahcupyan, a prominent Turkish Armenian writer and journalist, also criticized the Swiss decision, saying that he agreed with “none of Professor Halacoglu’s views,” although he defended his right to express them.
In the offices of the weekly Agos, a paper published for Istanbul’s roughly 60,000 Armenians, Karin Karakasli, the newspaper’s general coordinator, told me that despite the controversy over official recognition of the killings as genocide, the conditions that Turkey’s Armenians live under are getting better. Only a few years ago, Karakasli recalled, the Armenian community was being accused of cooperating with the PKK; what the government calls “minority affairs,” including relations with Armenians, were supervised by the police. Until the cancellation of the Bosporus University conference, it had seemed as though Erdogan and his government were showing a softer and more tolerant attitude. The picture is now less clear—and members of the Turkish establishment, including top army commanders, have yet to show any sign that they would endorse such a softening. All the same, Agos has benefited from a relaxation in laws and attitudes concerning freedom of expression. Minority affairs are now supervised by the Interior Ministry. Karakasli told me that dozens of Armenian memoirs, novels, and history books are now being published in Turkish, part of a trend toward greater pluralism in publishing.9 For the first time that she can remember, there is no general desire among Istanbul’s Armenians to emigrate.
Although Istanbul’s Armenians agree that the events of 1915 amounted to genocide, more immediate practical matters, such as Turkey’s continuing refusal to reopen its land border with Armenia, seem more important to many of them than the issue of whether genocide is officially recognized. Justifying its decision to keep the border closed, Turkey cites Armenia’s occupation of territory belonging to Azerbaijan, a Turkish ally, and Armenia’s claim to parts of eastern Anatolia. But Erdogan has said that he wants improved relations with Armenia and he recently called for a joint commission of Turkish and Armenian historians to review the events of 1915. Etyen Mahcupyan has advised the Turkish parliament that Turkey should reopen relations with Armenia; if it does, Turkish acknowledgment of the genocide will, he believes, become less important. He, Karakasli, and other prominent Turkish Armenians criticize the efforts of diaspora Armenians to persuade foreign parliaments to pass resolutions denouncing the genocide. “They seek to protect their identity by generating hatred,” Karakasli said, “and they end up poisoning themselves.… They have no contact with the Turks. We live among them.”
Of all Turkey’s minorities, recognized or not, Armenians have the most tragic past. They may also have the brightest future, since most of them live in Turkey’s only cosmopolitan city. In more remote and conservative parts of the country, such as Erzurum, it is harder to envisage a smooth accommodation of minority demands, still less the sharing of ideas that would help facilitate the transition. This is why a recent work on Turkey’s minorities, by Baskin Oran, a political scientist at Ankara University, is so important.10
In his scholarly and exhaustive book, Oran examines the Treaty of Lausanne, the consequences of Atatürk’s exclusive conception of Turkishness, and the repressive laws that have been enacted in the name of both. He contends that Turkey’s foundations could be strengthened, and many inconsistencies resolved, simply by changing the official designation of the Turkish citizen from Turk, or Turk, to Turkiyeli, which means “of Turkey.” It is an ingenious answer both to Turkish nationalists and also to demands by Kurds that their special status be recognized, for it convincingly assumes that no one should have special status. In Oran’s Turkey, everyone is a Turkiyeli. Of course, Oran’s ideas amount to more than semantic invention. They challenge the way that the state regards its citizens. In the words of an EU diplomat based in Ankara, the state has hitherto organized itself in order to “protect itself from its citizens, rather than the other way around.”
Last November, a condensed version of Oran’s book was issued by a panel—of which Oran was a member—that had been asked by the government to examine minority questions. The result was an uproar of objections. To show his opposition to Oran’s views, another member of the panel snatched it from the jurist who was reading it aloud, and ripped it up. Later on, Oran’s suggestion was attacked by Turkey’s second most senior general, and denounced by Turkish nationalists. Startled by the reaction, the government disowned Oran’s ideas.
At least Oran was not charged with any crime or fired from his job at the university, as he might have been a few years ago. He and other progressives realize that attempts to change Turkey will set off reactions, not least from a reactionary and ultra-cautious establishment. Still, a transformation is underway in Turkey, and a central part of it involves Turkey’s still troubled relations with its minorities.
—July 14, 2005
1. Turk Ulusal Kimligi ve Ermeni Sorunu (The Turkish National Identity and the Armenian Problem) (Istanbul: Iletisim Yayinlari, 1994).
2. In May, the ECHR ruled that Ocalan’s trial “was not tried by an independent and impartial tribunal,” and called for a retrial.
3. That decline is bound to be accelerated by the crisis that was precipitated by the rejection by French and Dutch voters of the new EU constitution. Now Turks have even less of an idea than they did of what sort of EU they might eventually join—or, indeed, whether rising anti-Turk sentiment in member states might keep them out.
4. Yahudi Turkler, yahut Sabetaycilar (Jewish Turks, or Sabbataians) (Zvi-Geyik Yayinlari, 2000), a collection of articles on the subject by Mehmed Sevket Eygi, a prominent Islamist columnist, contains the assertion that “a few thousand Sabbataians control the country’s affairs,” but provides no evidence that this is the case. He says that Istanbul contains “secret synagogues” where Sabbataians worship, but does not say where they are. Like other writers on the subject, Eygi makes no attempt to distinguish between sincere converts to Islam and Sabbataians, which further weakens his assertion that Sabbataiism is a thriving sect. It seems no more than a scurrilous anti-Semitic label.
5. Efendi: Beyaz Turklerin Buyuk Sirri (Dogan Kitap, 2004). With fifty-six reprints to date, Efendi is one of Turkey’s most successful nonfiction books of recent years.
6. Birikim, June 2004.
7. In his statement on April 24, Bush referred to the “mass killings of as many as 1.5 million Armenians during the last days of the Ottoman Empire.” This contradicts Turkish claims that there were no mass killings and that only a fraction of that number died. Although Bush was accusing the Ottomans of an appalling crime, the fact that he did not use the word “genocide” was presented in Turkey as cause for celebration.
8. Some people contend that, unless Turkey recognizes that a genocide took place, no appraisal of the past can be considered complete. I am not so sure. It is unlikely that Turkey’s justice minister would have reacted so a
ggressively to the proposed conference at Bosporus University if he did not fear that the event would be useful to those who advocate recognition of genocide. His reaction, naturally, was strongly attacked by such advocates, including a group called the Campaign for Recognition of the Armenian Genocide. It is hard to imagine that the experience of Bosporus University will encourage other Turkish institutions, especially ones that value academic integrity, to stage conferences of their own. They would inevitably get caught up in the dispute between proponents and opponents of genocide recognition—a dispute that often has the result of drawing a semantic veil over the Armenian tragedy of 1915.
9. In Turkey, it is now possible to buy books arguing that genocide took place in 1915, as well as memoirs, written by Armenians who survived the deportations, that describe appalling behavior by the Ottomans. The success now being enjoyed by Fetiye Cetin’s story of her Armenian grandmother, who was rescued by Turks, has prompted others to admit that they, too, have Armenian antecedents. In fashionable Istanbul bookshops, it is possible to find, on the same shelf as Soner Yalcin’s Efendi, novels that celebrate the Ottoman cosmopolitanism that Yalcin finds so objectionable. Such books sell less than the chauvinist ones, Karakasli concedes, but that they are largely available is new and important. “In the past, you only heard one view.”
10. Turkiye’de Azinliklar: Kavramlar, Teori Lozan, ic Mevzuat, Ictihat, Uygulama (Minorities in Turkey: Notions, Theory, Lausanne, Internal Regulations, Interpretation, Implementation) (Iletsim Yayinlari, 2004).
24
The Battle for Egypt’s Future
Yasmine El Rashidi
It was still springtime in Cairo. The people had spoken in Tahrir Square. They had defied the intimidation of a panicked police state. They had booed and hissed the wooden, uncomprehending, patronizing words of the man who ruled them for thirty years. Mubarak’s dictatorship was over.
But what then? Political transitions from authoritarian rule are never easy and always messy. Elections, even if free and fair, are not enough. Democracy needs institutions to safeguard the liberty of its citizens; it needs independent judges, trade unions, political parties, mass media.
Without such institutions, conflicts of interest and struggles for power cannot be resolved in peace. Liberal democrats are seldom the winners in the aftermath of revolutions. Still, Egypt might be lucky. Too much optimism would be foolish, but so would giving up on hope.
—I.B.
TO JUDGE BY the streets of Cairo on the morning of March 19, it seemed that a good chunk of my city’s 19 million residents were taking part in the constitutional referendum. The roaring old school buses that rattle my windows when they pass in the morning were not to be heard, there were hardly any cars on the usually clogged streets, and the daily flood of people making their way through the dense web of thoroughfares and alleyways was absent. The only signs of traffic or crowds were around the hundreds of designated polling stations. It had been nearly five weeks since protesters in Tahrir Square had brought down President Hosni Mubarak, and Egyptians throughout the country were voting on an all-or-nothing package of nine constitutional amendments. A win for the yes votes promised to lead to parliamentary elections as early as June, returning power to a civilian government following the military’s temporary takeover. If the no votes prevailed, it might start the process of political reform over again, or it might cause the military to pursue a different strategy.
After decades of oppressive rule, in which elections had been pro forma exercises marked by violence and fraud, Egyptians were elated that their ballots would finally count. Many were voting for the first time in their lives. When the results were announced the next day, they seemed unambiguous: 77.2 percent had voted for the amendments—ostensibly an endorsement for reform—and just 22.8 percent had voted against them. The reality, as I had discovered in the days leading up to March 19, was far more complicated. Only 18 million of Egypt’s eligible 45 million voters participated (though, as many have reported, this was the country’s highest turnout on record). In fact, most of the activists who had had a leading part in the revolution dismissed the referendum as cosmetic, when what was needed, they felt, was an entirely new constitution. Moreover, many who voted yes had little sense how these amendments were going to change the country’s political life.
The referendum had been conceived by the Egyptian armed forces as part of its response to the youth protesters, who were pressing for sweeping reforms to the political system that had sustained Mubarak in power. After it formally assumed power on February 11, the day Mubarak stepped down, the military had suspended the 1971 constitution and appointed a constitutional committee to address these demands. Instructed by the military to “get this over with” as soon as possible, the eight members of the committee—among them a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, two professors of law, and a respected judge—had been given a free hand to redraft any of the constitution’s 211 articles and select a referendum date. Key priorities for the protesters were the abolishment of the emergency law, the revision of all articles concerning presidential elections and executive power, and a redrafting of Article Two concerning the state and religion, as well as of other articles concerning the rights of citizens.
Despite pressure by activists for a complete overhaul of the constitution, however, the commission’s recommendations—arrived at seemingly in a matter of days—were far narrower: on February 26, the military announced only nine proposed amendments, to be voted on three weeks later. From the start it was clear where the emphasis lay. While leaving many of the protesters’ demands—such as the electoral process—unaddressed, the proposed changes revealed some of the recurring concerns of the military, such as the fear of “foreign” interference in the country’s affairs.
The most significant of the amendments would limit presidents to two four-year terms, allow independent candidates to campaign, and bar from office anyone who holds a foreign passport or, oddly, has a “foreign” spouse (Mubarak’s wife, and President Anwar Sadat’s wife before her, both had British mothers). It also would establish new legislative powers, providing for a subsequent revision of the constitution by a committee chosen by the new parliament.
Although military leaders had met privately with activists before the announcement of the referendum, protest leaders were quick to denounce the amendments as inadequate. “To us, the regime was a failed one, which means that its constitution too is failed,” the activist Esraa Abdel Fattah told me. Esraa, who had been jailed under Mubarak’s regime for organizing a nationwide protest on April 6, 2008, in solidarity with striking laborers, was one of the planners of the January 25 protest that started the revolution. She had been meeting with the military and the interim cabinet on a regular basis, and was among those who proposed appointing Essam Sharaf, a civil engineer and former transport minister who had participated in the Tahrir uprising, as interim prime minster, which the military leadership did following the resignation of old-regime holdover Ahmed Shafiq on March 3.
Esraa was also one of the handful of activists and policymakers who were invited to meet US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during her visit to Cairo on March 15. The weekend before, I found Esraa in her office at the Egyptian Democratic Academy, an organization that uses social media to promote democracy and human rights, flipping through her recently recovered state security file. She told me that Clinton
has to understand the proposed amendments are completely inadequate. We are not ready for elections. We need a transitional three-person presidential council, comprised of two civilian leaders and an army one. We need at least a year to raise awareness and prepare the people for elections. Political awareness and engagement is currently lacking. If the United States wants to help, there needs to be a balance between military aid and that to civil society. We need help with this coming phase. Talk is not enough.
After the meeting, Esraa called me. “Hillary responded positively to what I had to say,” she said. “Although she didn’
t have firm responses, she took general criticism well.”
In the weeks leading up to the referendum, there had been a few further moments of victory for the revolution. On March 5, crowds of activists overran state security bureaus across the country, including the state security headquarters in Cairo. For many, the Amn al-Dawla, or State Security Investigation Service, had been one of the darkest forces behind the Mubarak regime—known for its random arrests and the torture of activists, and for keeping surveillance files on millions of people—and its sacking seemed to consummate the defeat of the old order.
Yet at the same time, the protest movement had fragmented. There were widespread reports of robberies and lawlessness; tensions between Muslims and Copts had reignited; the army had released Islamist political prisoners, including those accused of assassinating Sadat in 1981; and stories of detentions and torture were continuing to surface. At a women’s rights demonstration on March 8, thugs stormed the crowd in an attack reminiscent of the pro-Mubarak violence against the Tahrir uprising a month earlier. The police, meanwhile, were still largely absent from the streets, while the army and its tanks seemed to be just standing by. Amid this growing sense of unease, many who had taken part in the uprising thought the referendum was hasty and ill-conceived, and activists like Esraa drew on all their political connections to try to pressure the military to postpone it.
Meanwhile, the debate on how to vote in the referendum intensified on social network sites and TV talk shows. Even the popular youth radio channel 104.2 Nile FM—whose young hosts spin popular Western tunes and invite guests to talk about dating, love, and movies—was discussing the constitution. Yes and no camps swiftly took shape. Activists and the members of the upper-middle class were calling for no; they wanted a new constitution and more time to raise political awareness among the nation’s 80 million people. Those who felt the referendum was taking place too soon—a group of reformists that included presidential hopeful Mohamed ElBaradei—hinged their argument on readiness. None of the opposition coalitions and movements had secured the resources or organization to mobilize large numbers in an effective way, and their supporters worried that a yes victory would result in a parliament divided between the Muslim Brotherhood and members of Mubarak’s old patronage network. Moreover, such a parliament would then be free to redraft the constitution to its liking. “Bad news,” one activist told me. “We’ll all be dead.”
The New York Review Abroad Page 43