Regarding Vecdi Gönül’s speech about the actions taken by the Turkish national state as a confession, Dr. Cengiz Aktar, a faculty of Bahçeşehir University at Istanbul, said, “I do not know if he has taken into consideration the possible reactions to his speech, but it is not wrong to say that the Turkish nation was shaped by Islam.”
In a speech given at the Turkish Embassy in Brussels on November 10, Gönül had said “If there would be Greeks in the Aegean region and Armenians in many regions in Turkey today, then could there be today’s national state?”
Claiming that the forced migration and exchange of populations had had positive results for the economy, Gönül continued as follows: “I had worked at the Izmir Chamber of Commerce for a period. There was not a single Muslim among the founders of this chamber. It was composed of the Levantines (the European Christians who had been living in the Ottoman Empire, for centuries in some cases). There were four neighborhoods inhabited by the Armenians, the Greeks,the Jews and the Muslims in Ankara before the founding of the Republic. The fertile lands had belonged to the minorities.”
Likening these words to a form of confession, Aktar said these were very brave words, although they were probably said for different reasons. He believes these words clearly describe what had actually happened. Aktar made the following comments about the speech:
The role of religion in nation-building: Gönül says that at the beginning of the twentieth century, the bonding factor at the root of the nationalist currents in this region was religion. In fact, the concrete base the Unionists and later the Republicans had in mind for the Turkish nation was Islam. None of the other qualities that make a nation – language, race, culture and economy – had existed in this region at the time of the invention of the Turkish nation. Religion as the fundamental factor of nation-building naturally excludes those who are not from that religion, consider them as non-national. The Armenians, the Greeks and the Jews, thus, become the natural other, the natural enemy of the nation.
Non-Turkish Muslims are Turkified: As Gönül put it, there was no place for the non-Muslims since the very beginning of the Republic, but the non-Turkish Muslims could only take their place in the new nation only after they were Turkified and as long as they would discard their former identities.
Greece is similar too: This kind of nation-building process based on religion can be found in Greece, too. Over there, no religion is allowed, other than the Greek orthodox faith. In fact, when Greece had conquered Macedonia in 1912, the first action it had taken was to remove the Muslim and Jewish components in the region. This process had reached its culmination with the exchange of populations put into effect with Turkey.
Instead of taking lessons: The important thing is to read the nation-building process correctly, with its rights and wrongs, to accept the pains it caused, to understand it and to take lessons from it. The nation-building is probably the gravest incident that has befallen upon humanity in recent history. But Turkey does not have the luxury to make the Kurdish people to go through the homogenizing nation-building process of “ethnic and religious cleansing” of the early 20th century in the 21st century.
“This nation-building process has weakened Turkey"
Economy: It is highly questionable if the operation of forcing the capital change hands all over Anatolia was effective economically.
Armenians, the eastern Anatolia and the Kurdish problem: After the Armenian forced migration and massacres , the economy of the eastern Anatolia crashed, never to recover again. Today’s Kurdish problem has a lot to do with this economic crash.
Greeks: Even though the economic vacuum created by shipping off the Greeks from Anatolia was filled with the Muslims coming from the Balkans and Greece, that the western shore could not come back economically for a long time is a fact accepted by the historians. Çağlar Keyder’s work titled “Turkey Within the World Economy” is very enlightening in this respect.
Those who accumulated capital were kicked out: Those bourgeoisie and artisans who had managed to accumulate capital were kicked out. This operation was an operation of plunder rather than an operation of the capital changing hands. For those who got their hands on the Greek and Armenian properties could not convert them into productive capital, since they did not have the necessary knowledge and experience. It took a long time for Turkey to get to the same level and this led to the weakening of Turkey. The nation-building process did not enrich Turkey, but rather weakened it. (TK/TB)
