Peter Preston: When Misery is a Legacy
[Peter Preston is a columnist for the Guardian and the Observer.]
Ece Temelkuran is brilliant and beautiful – but, above all, brave. You have to be brave if you're a Turkish journalist covering Armenia, with genocide, cynicism, and truth shredded over 95 years. Temelkuran writes about Yerevan and Ankara and mutual incomprehension, but she could be writing about Cyprus, Kashmir, Korea, Israel; anywhere that is locked in a timewarp of malign remembrance.
In 1915 Ottoman Turkey systematically killed or deported Armenians; an act of genocide in which up to a million and a half people died. But why does 1915 matter in 2010? It was the question that Temelkuran's murdered friend, the Armenian editor, Hrant Dink, asked, and the question Temelkuran set out to answer. To those who live just over the ludicrously sealed border from Turkey, it matters because that was when the killing began and Armenians became another giant diaspora, scattered from Los Angeles to Paris. It matters because Turkey's still unacknowledged responsibility for those mass murders binds the new, utterly impoverished Armenian state together. It matters because the French part of the diaspora has built an entire emotional theory of nationhood on Ankara's refusal to confront its past and just say "sorry". It matters in LA because genocide means reparations and lawyers and zillions of dollars.
And it matters to us because understanding this distant but strangely potent fury helps us understand something far beyond Ararat, the Deep Mountain of Temelkuran's recently published analysis. She's explaining something that the English in particular can barely comprehend. History for us is a moribund, inert business. It doesn't bring out boiling passions. We've "moved on" so comprehensively that we don't quite recall where we came from.
The world in the shadow of Armenia's deep mountain is different. Sometimes it feels as though the slaughter was yesterday, not sealed in the tales of grandmothers. Why are the stories that survive always filled with pain, Temelkuran asks...
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
Ece Temelkuran is brilliant and beautiful – but, above all, brave. You have to be brave if you're a Turkish journalist covering Armenia, with genocide, cynicism, and truth shredded over 95 years. Temelkuran writes about Yerevan and Ankara and mutual incomprehension, but she could be writing about Cyprus, Kashmir, Korea, Israel; anywhere that is locked in a timewarp of malign remembrance.
In 1915 Ottoman Turkey systematically killed or deported Armenians; an act of genocide in which up to a million and a half people died. But why does 1915 matter in 2010? It was the question that Temelkuran's murdered friend, the Armenian editor, Hrant Dink, asked, and the question Temelkuran set out to answer. To those who live just over the ludicrously sealed border from Turkey, it matters because that was when the killing began and Armenians became another giant diaspora, scattered from Los Angeles to Paris. It matters because Turkey's still unacknowledged responsibility for those mass murders binds the new, utterly impoverished Armenian state together. It matters because the French part of the diaspora has built an entire emotional theory of nationhood on Ankara's refusal to confront its past and just say "sorry". It matters in LA because genocide means reparations and lawyers and zillions of dollars.
And it matters to us because understanding this distant but strangely potent fury helps us understand something far beyond Ararat, the Deep Mountain of Temelkuran's recently published analysis. She's explaining something that the English in particular can barely comprehend. History for us is a moribund, inert business. It doesn't bring out boiling passions. We've "moved on" so comprehensively that we don't quite recall where we came from.
The world in the shadow of Armenia's deep mountain is different. Sometimes it feels as though the slaughter was yesterday, not sealed in the tales of grandmothers. Why are the stories that survive always filled with pain, Temelkuran asks...