Orhan Pamuk’s Nobel Prize

Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist who has won this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, is not an overtly political writer. But like every serious artist, Mr. Pamuk lives in a world where the freedom to speak the truth has to be reasserted every day against political forces that would rather not hear it.

Mr. Pamuk’s prize is richly deserved. It was awarded for a body of work, fiction and nonfiction, that is driven by the conscience of imagination as well as the conscience of memory. In books like “Snow,” “My Name Is Red” and “Istanbul,” he has made Turkey, past and present, a vital part of the modern reader’s literary atlas. And in turn, it is Turkey that has given Mr. Pamuk his political edge.

Islamists and Turkish nationalists tend to think of Mr. Pamuk as a literary provocateur, especially for his brief but candid remarks about the Armenian genocide quoted in a Swiss magazine last year. But we think Mr. Pamuk was speaking the truth. For the sake of art and conscience, he has resisted any effort to quiet his literary voice.

Some of those efforts, like the offer to become a Turkish “state artist,” which he declined, were flattering. Others, like the recent prosecution against him, since dropped, for anti-Turkish remarks, were not so flattering.

Mr. Pamuk’s Nobel will be a popular one, except, of course, among people who believe that artists should be allowed to work only under political or religious supervision. His prize is also a reminder of how often the Nobel has been given to a writer whose work exposes the tension between the state and the artist.

We read Mr. Pamuk’s books as they should be read ­ for the imaginative and linguistic pleasure in them ­ seldom remembering that every artist’s freedom to speak is our freedom, too. This prize helps us remember that.

First Turkish Nobelist Orhan Pamuk’s mother has commented to Sabah newspaper about her son’s remarks on the Armenian massacres.

She said, “I myself have no idea about this issue,” yet ended up calling her son’s remark “false,” according to Sabah’s October 16, 2006 Online edition.

Şekure Basman said, “Orhan probably knew false things about history. I think he doesn't have much information about the subject. No one teaches these things in school. I myself have no idea about this issue. Orhan told something false to a reporter from a small Swedish newspaper. But the Turkish press has over exaggerated his statements. Although the government tried to veil it, Turkish press has raked it up and took great pleasure for doing it.”

She also noted the media should be blamed for making noise about her son’s Armenian comments.

The old Mummy tried to appease the Turkish public but also noted important things: the Armenian Genocide is not taught at school; she has no idea about it; yet she thinks her son knows false things about history.

I think Sabah should have left the old lady to celebrate her son’s achievement and don’t attack her with questions about the Armenian Genocide. The poor thing has no idea about the issue; she wisely made it clear.

The complete article is available at http://english.sabah.com.tr/3105A05C05A84A…FFD0468E8A.html.

First I thought this was a joke. Turkish chauvinist lawyer Kemal Kerincsiz has announced of his decision to take the Nobel Academy to court for awarding Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist who was taken to the court with Kerincsiz’s efforts for “insulting Turkishness” (talking about the Armenian Genocide), with the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The Turkish lawyer is not kidding, neither is the Turkish media. Below is the English translation of a Turkish article from ANF:

Turkey is opening a case against the Nobel Academy

Famous Turkish lawyer Kemal Kerincsiz announced that he would take the
Academy of Nobel in Sweden to a court because of the Orhan Pamuk's winning
of the Nobel in Literature. Kerincsiz previously opened a case against the
Orhan Pamuk and Elif Safak both were accused of "insulting the great Turkish
nation"

Kerincsiz talked to Turkish NTV channel as saying the Nobel price should
have criteria for objectiveness. He said, "We think the price Orhan Pamuk
got was a controversial and this reward is completely political. This is
Armenian Diaspora's hard work"

Kerincsiz said, Turks will open a case against the Nobel Academy and this
will be a first such a case in its kind. He says the case will be open
against the Nobel Academy in Sweden and this will comply with Swedish laws.
He also said the reward Orhan Pamuk got from this academy is in their eyes
is controversial and they will make sure it will stay as this. Insulting the
Turkish people's values has its price and punishment.

Many Turkish nationalists (mostly members of the fascist Grey Wolves group) are continuing to protest outside the French consulate in Istanbul for passing a French bill that criminalizes Armenian Genocide denial.

One of them carried a poster in Turkish saying, “Nobel for the person who says there was genocide, prison for the person who says no genocide.” Orhan Pamuk, as most of us already know, has received the Nobel Prize in Literature (and most people think that had a lot to do with his involvement in Armenian Genocide awareness) and France’s Lower House has passed a bill that would make it a crime to say, “there was no Armenian Genocide.”

Idiotism of Denial: Protesters laugh as one of them throws an egg at the French consulate in Istanbul, October 15, 2006. French leader Jacques Chirac has told Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan he is sorry French lawmakers approved a bill making it a crime to deny Armenians were victims of genocide at the hands of Ottoman Turks. REUTERS/Stringer (TURKEY)

As you can see from the above pictures, some Turkish nationalists have been out on the streets for such a long time they have forgotten the “seriousness” of their denialist cause (unlike the vandalizers in France whose barbarized Armenian genocide memorial’s initial value is 60,000 dollars).

Myrthe at The Armenian Odar has [finally] posted a very detailed report about the removal of Turkish candidates from Dutch political parties for denying the Armenian Genocide.

The Dutch lady, who now lives in Armenia, also invites the readers’ attention to Nebahat Albayrak, whom I called “First Turkish Politician Acknowledges The Genocide.”

After reading Myrthe’s post I realized one thing for two reasons: I was wrong to call Albayrak “First Turkish Politician Acknowledges The Genocide.” First, there have been other Turkish politicians in Netherlands who have recognized the Armenian Genocide; second, Albayrak, in essence, denies the Armenian Genocide although she calls it “genocide.”

Myrthe has summarized statements and news items from Dutch sources, which makes the entry very valuable. There isn’t such a detailed and well-written report on the removal of the Turkish candidates and the adventures of Albayrak in English. “The Armenian genocide stirs up Dutch politics” is a must-read.
Her post is available at http://armenianodar.blogspot.com/2006/10/a…s-up-dutch.html.

All in all, I was not too impressed with Albayrak's statements, she doesn't take a clear position. Besides, her statements come rather close to what denialists keep repeating. This was also the gist of several reactions to Albayrak's statements, most notably that of Ton Zwaan of the University of Amsterdam, an expert in genocide-studies. Although his essay was written as a reaction to Nebahat Albayrak's essay, Zwaan's text touches on many of the standard arguments used by denialists.

Apparently, turkey is not in American culture for Thanksgiving purposes only; it has also entered Halloween celebrations.

A Turkish smoker, made of traditional American pumpkins, decorates Littleton’s Historic Main Street in Colorado, next door to where I live. Took the photo today, October 14, 2006.

p.s. I am going to a “haunted” tour in a few hours! Halloween is a few weeks away, but it is already all over Littleton… with Turks.

Some newspapers report that Turkey has always denied the Armenian Genocide. This is not the case. Well-known British war correspondent Robert Fisk’s “Let me denounce genocide from the dock” (Oct 14, 2006, Independent) article includes new evidence, unearthed by Prof. Vahakn Dadrian, regarding Turkish confessions of the Armenian massacres.

Here are a few.

[In] an affidavit to the Turkish court martial that briefly pursued the Turkish mass murderers after the First World War General Mehmet Vehip Pasha, commander of the Turkish Third Army, … testified that, when he visited the Armenian village of Chourig (it means "little water" in Armenian), he found all the houses packed with burned human skeletons, so tightly packed that all were standing upright. ‘In all the history of Islam,’ General Vehip wrote, ‘it is not possible to find any parallel to such savagery.'

[…]

[O]n 19 October 1918, Ahmed Riza, the elected president of the Turkish senate and a former supporter of the Young Turk leaders who committed the genocide, stated in his inaugural speech: "Let's face it, we Turks savagely ( vahshiane in Turkish) killed off the Armenians."

Since the entire article is available upon subscription or purchase only, I am posting the complete commentary below (with the hope that Independent will not sue me for copyright violation). Thanks to Artin Boghossian for sharing the complete version.

The Independent (London)
October 14, 2006 Saturday
First Edition

Let me denounce genocide from the dock

ROBERT FISK

This has been a bad week for Holocaust deniers. I'm talking about those who wilfully lie about the 1915 genocide of 1.5 million Armenian Christians by the Ottoman Turks. On Thursday, France's lower house of parliament approved a Bill making it a crime to deny that Armenians suffered genocide. And, within an hour, Turkey's most celebrated writer, Orhan Pamuk – only recently cleared by a Turkish court for insulting "Turkishness" (sic) by telling a Swiss newspaper
that nobody in Turkey dared mention the Armenian massacres – won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the mass graves below the deserts of Syria and beneath the soil of southern Turkey, a few souls may have been comforted.

While Turkey continues to blather on about its innocence – the systematic killing of hundreds of thousands of male Armenians and of their gang-raped women is supposed to be the sad result of "civil war" – Armenian historians such as Vahakn Dadrian continue to unearth new evidence of the premeditated Holocaust (and, yes, it will deserve its capital H since it was the direct precursor of the Jewish Holocaust, some of whose Nazi architects were in Turkey in 1915) with all the energy of a gravedigger.

Armenian victims were killed with daggers, swords, hammers and axes to save ammunition. Massive drowning operations were carried out in the Black Sea and the Euphrates rivers – mostly of women and children, so many that the Euphrates became clogged with corpses and changed its course for up to half a mile. But Dadrian, who speaks and reads Turkish fluently, has now discovered that tens of thousands of Armenians were also burned alive in haylofts.

He has produced an affidavit to the Turkish court martial that briefly pursued the Turkish mass murderers after the First World War, a document written by General Mehmet Vehip Pasha, commander of the Turkish Third Army. He testified that, when he visited the Armenian village of Chourig (it means "little water" in Armenian), he found all the houses packed with burned human skeletons, so tightly packed that all were standing upright. "In all the history of Islam," General Vehip wrote, "it is not possible to find any parallel to such savagery."

The Armenian Holocaust, now so "unmentionable" in Turkey, was no secret to the country's population in 1918. Millions of Muslim Turks had witnessed the mass deportation of Armenians three years earlier – a few, with infinite courage, protected Armenian neighbours and friends at the risk of the lives of their own Muslim families – and, on 19 October 1918, Ahmed Riza, the elected president of the Turkish senate and a former supporter of the Young Turk leaders who committed the genocide, stated in his inaugural speech: "Let's face it, we Turks savagely ( vahshiane in Turkish) killed off the Armenians."

Dadrian has detailed how two parallel sets of orders were issued, Nazi-style, by Turkish interior minister Talat Pasha. One set
solicitously ordered the provision of bread, olives and protection for Armenian deportees but a parallel set instructed Turkish
officials to "proceed with your mission" as soon as the deportee convoys were far enough away from population centres for there to be few witnesses to murder. As Turkish senator Reshid Akif Pasha testified on 19 November 1918: "The 'mission' in the circular was: to attack the convoys and massacre the population??? I am ashamed as a Muslim, I am ashamed as an Ottoman statesman. What a stain on the reputation of the Ottoman Empire, these criminal people???"

How extraordinary that Turkish dignitaries could speak such truths in 1918, could fully admit in their own parliament to the genocide of the Armenians and could read editorials in Turkish newspapers of the great crimes committed against this Christian people. Yet how much more extraordinary that their successors today maintain that all of this is a myth, that anyone who says in presentday Istanbul what the men of 1918 admitted can find themselves facing prosecution under the notorious Law 301 for "defaming" Turkey.

I'm not sure that Holocaust deniers – of the anti-Armenian or anti-Semitic variety – should be taken to court for their rantings.
David Irving is a particularly unpleasant "martyr" for freedom of speech and I am not at all certain that Bernard Lewis's one-franc fine by a French court for denying the Armenian genocide in a November 1993 Le Monde article did anything more than give publicity to an elderly historian whose work deteriorates with the years.

But it's gratifying to find French President Jacques Chirac and his interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy have both announced that Turkey will have to recognise the Armenian death as genocide before it is allowed to join the European Union. True, France has a powerful half-million-strong Armenian community.

But, typically, no such courage has been demonstrated by Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara, nor by the EU itself, which gutlessly and childishly commented that the new French Bill, if passed by the senate in Paris, will "prohibit dialogue" which is necessary for reconciliation between Turkey and modern-day Armenia. What is the subtext of this, I wonder. No more talk of the Jewish Holocaust lest we hinder "reconciliation" between Germany and the Jews of Europe?

But, suddenly, last week, those Armenian mass graves opened up before my own eyes. Next month, my Turkish publishers are producing my book, The Great War for Civilisation, in the Turkish language, complete with its long chapter on the Armenian genocide entitled "The First Holocaust". On Thursday, I received a fax from Agora Books in Istanbul. Their lawyers, it said, believed it "very likely that they will be sued under Law 301" – which forbids the defaming of Turkey
and which right-wing lawyers tried to use against Pamuk – but that, as a foreigner, I would be "out of reach". However, if I wished, I could apply to the court to be included in any Turkish trial.

Personally, I doubt if the Holocaust deniers of Turkey will dare to touch us. But, if they try, it will be an honour to stand in the dock with my Turkish publishers, to denounce a genocide which even Mustafa Kamel Ataturk, founder of the modern Turkish state, condemned.

The Armenian Genocide monument in France’s Chaville town has been wiped out (guess by whom), Reuters informs on October 14, 2006.

The monument, according to the photographical evidence posted at Collectif Van’s website and below, was a bronze cross modeled after traditional Armenian cross-stones (khachkars). It was inaugurated in Chaville on October 5, 2002.

The Armenian Genocide monument before and after the vandalism

I am not particularly surprised with this new Turkish vandalism.

In the midst of Turkish hysteria and rage against the French bill that criminalizes Armenian Genocide denial, Turkey, for the first time since Armenia’s independence, is accusing the Armenian Republic for firing shots to Turkey’s territory, Washington Post informs on October 13, 2006

Reuters report quoted a Turkish military officer as saying, “Turkish soldiers came under harassing fire from Armenian territories on the Turkey-Armenia border on October 11, 2006,"

The Turks Are Coming: Members of the Ankara Club, called ' Seymen' in their traditional dresses march to the French embassy to protest against a bill voted by deputies in France's National Assembly on Thursday to make it a crime to deny that the killings of Armenians during and after World War I amounted to genocide, in Ankara, Friday, Oct. 13, 2006. The bill provoked great anger in Turkey and the European Commission's President Jose Manuel Barroso said on Friday that the French bill could harm the EU's relations with Turkey. (AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici)

My first reaction to the news is not the question why Armenia would do this. My question is, “What does Turkey want?”

Is it preparing a war against Armenia? I hope the answer will never be “yes,” but if it is, I will be preparing my baggage to send to Armenia: myself.

With the emergence of two Armenian-related top news in the world press, a very important Armenian event faces ignorance.

Thousands of Lebanese Armenians have gathered in downtown Beirut today (October 12, 2006) to protest the arrival of Turkish peacekeeping forces due to the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel.

There are about 150,000 Armenians in Lebanon, most of whom are descendants of Armenian refugees who survived the Armenian Genocide organized by the Ottoman Turkish government.

Agence France Press reports:

Lebanon's Armenians rally against Turkish UN force
by Rana Moussaoui Thu Oct 12, 11:49 AM ET

BEIRUT (AFP) – Thousands of Lebanon's Armenians have rallied in Beirut against Turkish troops taking part in a UN peacekeeping force there, on the same day France moved to make denial of the Ottoman genocide of Armenians a crime.
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Armenian political and religious leaders attended Thursday's demonstration, which came just two days after the first contingent of Turkish peacekeepers arrived to police a ceasefire between
Israel and Shiite movement Hezbollah.

The rally took place on Beirut's downtown Place des Martyrs, which honours six Lebanese nationalists who were hanged by the Ottomans during World War I.

The crowd, drawn from an Armenian community of about 140,000 people, held high banners denouncing the presence of Turkish troops as "an insult to the collective memory of the Armenian people", while waving Armenian, Lebanese and French flags.

"Genocide, massacre, deportation: Turkey's definition of peace," read another banner.

Earlier Thursday, French deputies approved a bill making it a crime to deny that the 1915-1917 massacre of Armenians by the Ottomans was genocide, provoking the fury of Turkey, the modern state that emerged from the Ottoman Empire.

"What France has done is very good. The Lebanese goverment should do the same instead of welcoming Turkish troops," said an elderly demonstrator who gave his name as Taurus.

"Chirac is on the right track," said one of the organisers, Sakis Katchadorian, referring to French
President Jacques Chirac.

Overriding widespread opposition, the Turkish parliament approved a government motion on September 5 to contribute troops to the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) following a ceasefire that ended 34 days of fighting.

In total, Turkey is to deploy some 700 soldiers in Lebanon, including troops aboard naval ships. Those that landed on Tuesday were the first Muslim peacekeepers to arrive in the war-scarred country.

Turkey contests the term "genocide" and strongly opposed the French bill.

It says 300,000 Armenians, and at least as many Turks, died in civil strife when Armenians took up arms for independence and sided with invading Russian troops as the Ottoman Empire fell apart during World War I.

Armenians say up to 1.5 million of their ancestors were slaughtered in orchestrated killings, which they maintain can only be seen as genocide.

The French bill must now go to the Senate, or upper house of parliament, for another vote.