Six on History: Turkey
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Avedis Hadjian, author of “Secret Nation: The Hidden Armenians of Turkey”, sometimes appears out of breath, exhausted by his attempts to find his people’s ancestors and descendants
"Following journalist and writer Avedis Hadjian across the mountains of eastern Turkey, through the snows and winds and those high villages which clasp to the rock of what was western Armenia before the Armenian genocide, is a bit like roaming the lands of Ninevah if Isis had won. Imagine the converted Christians clinging to their land under the clothes of Islam if Isis had not been destroyed, the Yezidi sex slaves sold into marriage but still passing on to their future children and grandchildren the fragments of a past life and an ancient language. For what was discovered by Hadjian in the fastness of Mush and Bitlis and Urfa and Erzerum and Marash was the bottom of the pond of history: the very last Armenians to survive in the land of massacre.
RecommendedSo deep is the pond that the author of this newly published book – “Secret Nation: The Hidden Armenians of Turkey” – sometimes appears out of breath, exhausted by his attempts to find his people’s ancestors and descendants, sometimes bravely failing because they will not talk or because they have just died. Perhaps it is because the light in the depths of the pond is of such cathedral-like gloom that historians have largely ignored Hadjian’s work; scarcely a review of this book has been published in Europe or America. Like the Armenia of the killing fields, it is as if it has never been.
In truth, we in the West have known of these “secret Armenians” for at least a decade, ever since Fethiye Cetin wrote of her Armenian-Turkish grandmother – inevitably the old lady was given a Muslim funeral for she was, as a Turk, a Muslim – and we all remember Hrant Dink, assassinated outside his newspaper office in Istanbul in 2007 because he remembered the Armenian genocide rather too much. But what Hadjian has done is to climb the tired old roads to the ancient villages of an unknown Turkey – to Garin, Van and Cilicia, where the survivors of the survivors, so to speak, of the first genocide of the twentieth century still exist.
They speak a kind of Armenian, those who remember the language of their race, and one of them even writes down the sounds of Arabic in Armenian script – he is quoting the Koran – which he does not understand. There may be up to two million of these souls, their identity as complex as their nationality; for who knows what identity is. Your religion? Your race? Your customs? Geography? A Turkish girl climbing a Christian Armenian holy mountain, Mount Maruta, frightened because her bag has flipped open to reveal an embroidered Armenian cross? Hadjian includes a coloured photograph of the girl in her long skirt, but with her light brown hair uncovered, the ghost of a lost people.
I’m still not quite sure why Hadjian, an Aleppo-born Armenian who has been an Argentinian Armenian since the age of two, traipsed up so many mountainsides. The Palestinians may dream of returning to lost lands, but the comparatively wealthy, cosmopolitan Armenian diaspora – most of the 11 million Armenians who are alive, descendants of those who survived the genocide of one and a half million of their people at the hands of the Turks (and of the Kurds, let us remember) – have no desire to re-settle in the old killing fields. For the places of massacre are well known to those forlorn people who still live there but who sometimes have only the memory of grandparents speaking in “a strange language” to hint at their family history.
RecommendedIn most cases, of course, it was the women who survived. And we know why. They were raped by Turks or Kurds or sold into marriage to Turks or Kurds or Arabs. The men were butchered with knives, roped together and thrown into rivers, tossed into gorges. So there is the mist of ancient dishonour over womanhood, although Hadjian does not speak of this in so many words. He finds a Muslim Imam of Armenian origin whose grandfather was killed in the genocide but whose uncle, a seminarian, converted to Islam. The imam speaks Kurdish, Turkish and Arabic but no Armenian, although he knows his history and claims he was not forcibly converted.
“The descendants of the people who massacred our family are still around,” he tells Hadjian. “We know them. We know the descendants of the people who murdered our grandfather Sahin. We lived among them. I would see them every day. We would see a dishonourable man like the one who killed Sahin every day. And yet, there was nothing we could do.”
Yet although he understood no Armenian, the imam knew the name of Sahin’s killer: Divan Erat.
RecommendedAt Argat, Hadjian visits the Ermeni Deresi, the “Armenians Gorge”, which is what it sounds like: the crevasse in which Armenians had been thrown to their deaths in 1915. There are no bones left. But there are memories of the dead, and Ibrahim, as he walks up the gorge, recalls what his parents said of his great-grandmother Zara, who was five when “she saw bandits decapitate her parents and her seven siblings”. Zara then fled through the mountains – a five-year old child, remember – to the village of Bahro, “seeing huge piles of corpses along the way.” Yet the descendants of the dead are kaleidoscopic. One family Hadjian meets are Armenian by ethnicity, Assyrian Orthodox Christians or Sunni Muslims by religion, Turkish by citizenship. Like the onion, he says, “peeling it to the end leaves you with nothing, for it is the aggregate of layers that makes the whole.”
Hadjian even finds one village, high in the sierras, where the enmity between Armenian-origin villagers and their neighbours continued into the 1960s with occasional shooting battles, even killings, completing a genocide that lasted – for them – half a century.
Hadjian has no final conclusions for his readers in this book, save for the observation that the survivors – including the frightened young Armenian girl on Mount Maruta – are not alone.
"In Turkey, a video of a truck driver went viral this week, as he voiced the feelings of millions of working-class Turkish citizens too poor to observe the government’s stay-home advice.
“Now you are telling me to self-quarantine at home. Man, how can I?” he asked. “I don’t have a pension. Am not a state employee. Am not rich. I am a worker, a truck driver. If I don’t work, I have no bread. I cannot pay the rent, the electricity or water bill. That’s worse than dying. Before you ask us to stay home … stop making a fool of yourself. Take measures for us so we can take precautions for ourselves. Either I stay at home at your word and die from hunger or I die from the virus. In the end, it’s not the virus but your system that will kill me.”
Within days, he was detained.
Of course, the pandemic is presenting all types of challenges for governments across the globe. In the Turkish case, with early measures and a vigorous stay-home policy, there is reason to be hopeful that “the curve” will not be as steep as in Italy or the United States. The streets of Istanbul have been empty for two weeks, and the compulsive in-house hygiene of Turkish households may prove to be a good thing after all. Schools, restaurants, malls, offices and mosques have been shut down, and the country is in a virtual lockdown.
But not for everyone. Factories and construction sites are still running, and the meager $15 billion stimulus Erdogan announced last week is among the lowest in the Group of 20 countries. Only $300 million is earmarked in the government stimulus bill as a one-time direct payment to families in need (2 million families are to receive roughly $150) and the stimulus for companies is deferred debt payment or more lending from state banks. Instead of offering more support to citizens in need, Erdogan was on air this week announcing a bank account number for donations.
As the sole decision-maker in the economy, Erdogan has been insistent on high government spending and created a classical developing world construction bubble, with projects that span from one of the world’s biggest airports to a bridge across the Dardanelles or another bridge across Bosporus going to cronies. (The government even had a tender last week to start the construction on Canal Istanbul, another one of Erdogan’s pet projects to build a costly sea channel in Istanbul parallel to the Bosporus.)
With dangerously low reserves in the central bank, Turkey cannot tell its citizens “It’s all right. I’ll take care of you if you stay home.”
The state of our democracy is far worse. For authorities, controlling the flow of information and suppressing dissent seems to be just as important as stopping the spread of the virus. Official figures on the coronavirus are announced by the minister of Health only, with no location or geographical detail. A doctor who digressed from the official figures in an in-house workshop was made to publicly apologize, and a woman who posted a video on social media showing a newly dug graveyard was called in for questioning.
"Trump’s contribution is particularly disgusting. The Kurds lost 11,000 soldiers, men and women, leading the war against ISIS for which Trump claims credit, helped by some U.S. special forces (5 casualties are reported) and air support. Erdoğan demanded that Kurds eliminate defensive fortifications (filling in trenches, etc.) near the border, and at the request of the U.S. command, they complied, trusting Washington’s promise that it would protect them from a further Turkish assault. Trump’s tweet broke that promise, leaving Kurds exposed to the invasion by Turkish-backed forces, most it seems jihadis and criminals. For years, Turkey has been helping tens of thousands of jihadis to flood into Syria for its anti-Assad war and to establish a Turkish presence. No surprises in how the extended Turkish assault has been carried out.
Former prosecutor and UN investigator Carla del Ponte said Erdoğan should be investigated and indicted for war crimes. What about Trump? After all, isn’t he the one who gave Erdogan the green light to launch an invasion into the Kurdish semi-autonomous region in Syria?
Turkey had already invaded and occupied Kurdish-controlled regions of northern Syria, killing hundreds and displacing hundreds of thousands, with credible charges of serious war crimes. Trump’s green light was for extending the operation with [the] alleged goal of ending a terrorist threat, in reality in order to put an end to the highly promising social and political achievements in Kurdish-led Rojava by violence and terror, ethnic cleansing, and resettling the region with Syrians of Turkey’s choosing.
On war crimes, it is well to remember the stirring words of Justice Robert Jackson, chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunal where Nazi war criminals were judged and hanged: “We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well. We must summon such detachment and intellectual integrity to our task that this Trial will commend itself to posterity as fulfilling humanity’s aspirations to do justice.”
Then there is whatever is happening off the coast of Turkey—a downright “mucilage calamity,” in the words of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan. The sea snot there has surfaced and turned monstrous, gelling into a thick layer of yellowing slime atop the water. For months, this foul mucus has blanketed the Sea of Marmara, which connects the Black Sea and the Aegean Sea in the Mediterranean. It’s smothering shellfish, clogging nets, and destroying the fishing industry.
Photos: Turkey’s sea snot disaster
The slime is, in short, a national crisis. Turkey is now trying to vacuum up its embarrassment of sea snot, dispatching workers with hoses to collect mucus by the tons for incineration. But scientists say that much more is probably lurking under the water. And even worse, the floating mucus is a sign of much larger disruptions in the sea. As unsightly as sea snot might be, its most devastating effects happen far away from human eyes, deep below the surface.
But pollution alone doesn’t explain the appearance of so much sea snot—or marine mucilage, to use the scientific term. This much slime buildup also requires specific weather conditions: hot and calm. In spring and summer, the sun heats up the top layer of seawater, leaving a layer of cool, denser water underneath. (Salinity also plays a role in the density gradient: Saltier water will sink beneath fresher water.) Because of this gradient, the mucus will sink until it starts to float; then it lingers. The longer it stays, the more it accumulates. And without strong winds or storms, nothing creates turbulence to churn the water and rip the mucus apart.
Bacteria trapped in the mucus will eventually start to eat and digest it, creating air bubbles that ultimately float the whole sheet of sea snot up to the surface. In the Adriatic Sea, the arm of the Mediterranean just east of the Italian peninsula, the floating mucus can dry and toughen in the sun. Seagulls are known to walk on it.
Read: No one is prepared for hagfish slime
Mass outbreaks of sea snot have appeared dozens of times in the Adriatic over the past three centuries, probably because its geography and calm winds create the perfect conditions for large sheets to form. Sea snot has had big economic consequences there. “The main problems are fisheries and tourism,” Michele Giani, an oceanographer at the National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics, in Italy, told me. Boats cannot go to sea at all because mucus clogs up the seawater intake that cools the motor. “A motor can have a meltdown within a minute,” Stachowitsch said. Fishing nets become slimy and heavy. And tourists, of course, want nothing to do with the mess. It doesn’t help that as sea snot degrades on the surface, its smell can turn quite nasty too.
The first description of mare sporco, or “dirty sea,” in Italian dates back to 1729. But in the early 2000s, marine mucilage started breaking out pretty much every year, which scientists, in a 2009 paper, linked to climate change. (Huge swaths of marine mucilage have also turned up near Turkey at least once before, in 2007.) You might think of the snot as a symptom of “ocean flu,” says Antonio Pusceddu, a marine ecologist at the University of Cagliari, in Italy, who co-authored that paper: The snot’s appearance is a sign of deeper sickness in the sea, caused by climate change and pollution.
The link between marine mucilage on the surface and the clouds and stringers underwater became clear during the 1980s, when researchers diving in the Adriatic first observed the unusual masses. Scientists had missed this phenomenon earlier, Stachowitsch said, “because the instruments that were used to bring up water samples from the ocean were quite brutal, so they shook up the water,” destroying the mucus. Humans could see it only if they went down themselves, either with scuba gear or in submersibles. Gerhard Herndl, an oceanographer now at the University of Vienna, told me that while diving in the ’80s, he mistook the first cloud of mucus he ever saw for a shark. Until that moment, he had not known that sea snot could grow to such behemoth proportions.
The mucus floating underwater was fascinating—even beautiful—but what scientists saw on the seafloor was disturbing. They already knew that unsightly layers of the mucus could float to the surface. Now they discovered that they could also sink, covering corals, sponges, brittle stars, mollusks, and any other unlucky creatures on the seafloor, cutting them off from oxygen. “They’re literally smothered,” says Alice Alldredge, an oceanographer at UC Santa Barbara. “Sure, it’s uncomfortable for us as human beings to have all this gunk at the surface. But the bottom-dwelling organisms are going to die.” An ecosystem takes years to fully recover from such a mass mortality.
Read: A foreboding similarity in today’s oceans and a 94-million-year-old catastrophe
For this reason, vacuuming up sea snot on the surface in Turkey is too little, too late for the local ocean ecosystem. To deal with the root of the problem, Turkey will have to prevent untreated wastewater and runoff from entering the Sea of Marmara in the first place. That certainly won’t clear up the sea this summer. But evidence from Italy suggests that such efforts might quell Turkey’s ocean flu in the long run. In the Adriatic, Pusceddu says, mucilage outbreaks have died down since Italy began cleaning up the wastewater that flows into it. The sea has returned to what looks like a healthier, less slimy normal."
Istanbul, Turkey (CNN) "A Turkish court sentenced four Amnesty International activists to between two and six years in prison on terrorism charges in a high-profile trial Friday, which the human rights group described as a "travesty of justice of spectacular proportions."
The Baykar Makina company even advertises in an advertising clip that the Turkish army is using its product on campaigns in Syria and Iraq. The videos are always underlaid with dramatic music; in addition to test flights, recordings of explosions and bomb drops are shown. A key figure in drone development is Selcuk Bayraktar.
Ankara wants to become militarily independent from abroad and has systematically expanded the domestic armaments industry in particular in recent years. The country started with 20 percent of its own armaments, now it has reached about 70 percent, Erdogan said a few months ago. "One day we will get to the point where we will no longer be dependent on others."
Erdogan is not only concerned with the independence of arms imports from abroad, he also wants to establish his country as a supplier on the arms market - and thus expand its status as a regional power. The Stockholm Peace Research Institute Sipri has already put Turkey in 14th place among the world's largest arms exporters. The main customers are smaller countries such as Turkmenistan and Oman, but Pakistan, Qatar and Ukraine have also already bought weapons from Turkish production.
By the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 2023, arms exports are expected to increase from the current figure of around 2.8 billion euros to more than 9.3 billion a year. To this end, the country is working on the further development of drones - only recently has Baykar Makina completed the second prototype of the new "Akinici", a successor to the "Bayraktar TB2". The country also pursues ambitious goals in other arms sectors.
The first Turkish main battle tank is to be completed next year. In addition, the army is to be equipped with a Turkish assault rifle instead of the German G3. The "TCG Anadolu" is the first Turkish helicopter carrier to strengthen the fleet within the next three years and by 2030 the Air Force hopes for a fighter aircraft developed in Turkey."
