{"id":17246,"date":"2010-03-03T07:12:19","date_gmt":"2010-03-03T07:12:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishforum.com.tr\/en\/content\/?p=17246"},"modified":"2014-01-05T17:58:58","modified_gmt":"2014-01-05T15:58:58","slug":"a-look-at-the-snarled-past-of-armenians-and-turks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2010\/03\/03\/a-look-at-the-snarled-past-of-armenians-and-turks\/","title":{"rendered":"A Look at the Snarled Past of Armenians and Turks"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>Books of The Times<\/div>\n<p><script type=\"text\/JavaScript\">\/\/ <![CDATA[\nfunction getSharePasskey() { return 'ex=1425358800&#038;en=cad85afdc80cab49&#038;ei=5124';}\n\/\/ ]]><\/script> <script type=\"text\/JavaScript\">\/\/ <![CDATA[\nfunction getShareURL() {\n\treturn encodeURIComponent('http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/03\/03\/books\/03garner.html');\n}\nfunction getShareHeadline() {\n\treturn encodeURIComponent('A Look at the Snarled Past of Armenians and Turks');\n}\nfunction getShareDescription() { \n\n\treturn encodeURIComponent('A deeply unconventional book about Armenians and Turkey that is as much memoir as proper history.');\n}\nfunction getShareKeywords() {\n\treturn encodeURIComponent('Books and Literature,War Crimes&#44; Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity,Armenia,Turkey,Christopher de Bellaigue,Rebel Land: Unraveling the Riddle of History in a Turkish Town (Book)');\n}\nfunction getShareSection() {\n\treturn encodeURIComponent('books');\n}\nfunction getShareSectionDisplay() {\n\n\treturn encodeURIComponent('Books of The Times');\n}\nfunction getShareSubSection() {\n\treturn encodeURIComponent('');\n}\nfunction getShareByline() {\n\treturn encodeURIComponent('By DWIGHT GARNER');\n}\nfunction getSharePubdate() {\n\treturn encodeURIComponent('March 3, 2010');\n}\n\/\/ ]]><\/script><\/p>\n<div id=\"toolsRight\">\n<form action=\"https:\/\/s100.copyright.com\/CommonApp\/LoadingApplication.jsp\"> <input name=\"Title\" type=\"hidden\" value=\"A Look at the Snarled Past of Armenians and Turks\" \/> <input name=\"Author\" type=\"hidden\" value=\"By DWIGHT GARNER\" \/> <input name=\"ContentID\" type=\"hidden\" value=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/03\/03\/books\/03garner.html\" \/> <input name=\"FormatType\" type=\"hidden\" value=\"default\" \/> <input name=\"PublicationDate\" type=\"hidden\" value=\"MAR 03 2010\" \/> <input name=\"PublisherName\" type=\"hidden\" value=\"The New York Times\" \/> <input name=\"Publication\" type=\"hidden\" value=\"nytimes.com\" \/> <input name=\"wordCount\" type=\"hidden\" value=\"1088\" \/><\/form>\n<\/div>\n<div>By DWIGHT GARNER<\/div>\n<div>Published: March 2, 2010<\/div>\n<p><!--NYT_INLINE_IMAGE_POSITION1 -->Christopher de Bellaigue\u2019s new book begins with the story of a journalistic blunder, the author\u2019s own. In 2001 Mr. de Bellaigue wrote a long essay for The New York Review of Books about Turkey\u2019s tangled history. It was a topic he thought he knew something about. At the time he was living in Istanbul and working as a foreign correspondent for The Economist.<\/p>\n<div id=\"articleInline\">\n<div id=\"inlineBox\"><span class=\"removed_link\" title=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/03\/03\/books\/03garner.html#secondParagraph\"><br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<div><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/graphics8.nytimes.com\/images\/2010\/03\/03\/books\/03garner\/03garner-articleInline.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\" width=\"190\" height=\"320\" \/><\/p>\n<div>Bit Ghezelayagh<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p><a name=\"secondParagraph\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>His essay had barely arrived on newsstands, though, before complaints began to pour in. It turns out that Mr. de Bellaigue, while describing the age-old ethnic conflict between Turks and Armenians, declared that \u201csome half a million\u201d Armenians \u201cdied during the deportations and massacres of 1915.\u201d Unknowingly, he had stumbled into bitterly contested territory.<\/p>\n<p>James Russell, a professor of Armenian studies at Harvard, was among those who wrote to rebuke him. Three times that many Armenians \u201cwere murdered,\u201d Mr. Russell replied, \u201cin a premeditated genocide.\u201d Mr. Russell\u2019s letter to The New York Review of Books continued: \u201cIf a reviewer wrote that only a third of the actual number of Jewish victims of the Holocaust had died, or that their deaths came about because they had rioted, or elected to make war against the German government, would you print it?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Mr. de Bellaigue was appalled at the tone of Mr. Russell\u2019s letter, he writes, and at the possibility that he had made serious mistakes. He was shattered when Robert Silvers, the venerable editor of The New York Review of Books, scolded him over the telephone for appearing to be an apologist for the Turks.<\/p>\n<p>Chastened, Mr. de Bellaigue \u2014 a talented British journalist and the author of \u201cIn the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran\u201d (2005) \u2014 set out to discover the truth about what happened nearly a century ago between the Turks and the Armenians. The result of that quest is \u201cRebel Land: Unraveling the Riddle of History in a Turkish Town,\u201d a deeply unconventional book that is as much memoir as proper history. It\u2019s a murky and uneven book, too, one that Mr. de Bellaigue\u2019s twitchy intellect and acid prose can\u2019t quite rescue.<\/p>\n<p>Mr. de Bellaigue lets us know early on that \u201cRebel Land\u201d is not going to be, at bottom, a research project. \u201cI would not pore over books in libraries and faculties,\u201d he declares, nor will he \u201csolicit help from the Kurdish and Armenian lobbies.\u201d He decides to \u201cgo to the back of the vessel and mix it in steerage with the forgotten peoples. From them I would get the story, gritty and unfiltered, of their loves, their losses and their sins.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>What this jaunty bit of cultural condescension (mix it in steerage?) means in practice is that Mr. de Bellaigue begins to spend a lot of time in a small town in southeastern Turkey named Varto, in a district (also named Varto) that was caught up in the turmoil of 1915. Thousands of Armenians once lived there, and the ruins of their churches linger still.<\/p>\n<p>This place is a far cry from the cosmopolitan Turkey that Mr. de Bellaigue knew and loved in Istanbul. Speaking of that urban Turkey, the one that mostly prefers to deny its complicated past, he writes, \u201cI would now go behind its back and betray it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>So Mr. de Bellaigue goes to Varto and begins to poke around. Because he is a keen observer and a natural satirist \u2014 I would like to read a novel by him \u2014 the parts of \u201cRebel Land\u201d that are akin to travel writing are shrewd. He is good on people, observing one man\u2019s \u201cflowery nose\u201d and \u201cgrenadine complexion,\u201d another\u2019s \u201cwhite parabola\u201d of a mustache, yet another\u2019s \u201cprecarious nail-bitten superiority.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Mr. de Bellaigue is a mordant sensualist, noting how a river flows into \u201ccurvaceous oxbows\u201d and how boots \u201csucked and popped\u201d through mud. He is particularly attentive to his meals, enjoying \u201cmezes of superlative quality,\u201d \u201ca delicious apricot cake\u201d and noting how one local man enjoys deep-fried local trout with rocket and radishes. He describes Varto itself as \u201cthis curious place with a name like a cleaning detergent.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>There is Kafkaesque humor, too, in the way the local authorities trail him, and in the way he tries (and usually fails) to get the locals to trust and to talk to him.<\/p>\n<p>Mr. de Bellaigue\u2019s peppery asides rub up awkwardly, however, against the main story he is trying to tell in \u201cRebel Land,\u201d one that doesn\u2019t lend itself to pithy aper\u00e7us. The arc of his narrative becomes lost amid the place names and rumors and dimly remembered family stories. He complains that he \u201cmight be told three or four versions\u201d of every event, and the reader begins to feel his pain.<\/p>\n<p><a name=\"secondParagraph\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>This is a book that has a two-page dramatis personae at the front, of the kind that makes your heart sink. Mr. de Bellaigue does not do enough to separate all these living and historical people, to make them distinctive, and they become a jumble on the page.<\/p>\n<p>As his book progresses, Mr. de Bellaigue begins to limit his focus to the crucial questions, notably this one: what happened to the Armenians of Varto? His book becomes a kind of intellectual, emotional and forensic detective story. He delivers, piece by piece, a summary of the Armenians\u2019 case against the Turks and he blasts the Turkish historians who, he feels, have whitewashed a portion of their country\u2019s history.<\/p>\n<p>Ultimately, he writes, \u201cthe big historical question is not whether very large numbers of Anatolian Armenians met with a violent end in the spring and summer of 1915, but whether or not the killings took place by fiat.\u201d In other words, was it genocide or merely the actions of a few bad men? Mr. de Bellaigue worries that \u201ca genocide fixation\u201d has blinded both sides to all shades of gray.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat is needed is a vaguer designation for the events of 1915, avoiding the G-word but clearly connoting criminal acts of slaughter, to which reasonable scholars can subscribe and which a child might be taught,\u201d he suggests. \u201cBy raising knowledge about this great wrong, a way might be opened to a cultural and historical meeting between today\u2019s Turks, Kurds and Armenians, for they were not alive in 1915, and need not live in its shadow.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The gimlet-eyed and sensible Mr. de Bellaigue proposes all this, and then immediately realizes his cosmic folly. \u201cBut no; this is the prattle of a na\u00eff,\u201d he writes, \u201claughable, unemployable.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Books of The Times By DWIGHT GARNER Published: March 2, 2010 Christopher de Bellaigue\u2019s new book begins with the story of a journalistic blunder, the author\u2019s own. In 2001 Mr. de Bellaigue wrote a long essay for The New York Review of Books about Turkey\u2019s tangled history. It was a topic he thought he knew [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":783625,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[1571,120,204,1153,1018,2129],"class_list":["post-17246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-armenian-question","tag-ahmet-davutoglu","tag-gulen","tag-nagorno-karabakh","tag-politics","tag-recep-tayyip-erdogan","tag-turkey-and-armenia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17246\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/783625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}