The Perils of Minorityhood

The nationalist fervor that led to the Armenian Genocide still haunts us today.

by JANET KLEIN

Armenians are marched to a prison by Turkish soldiers, April 1915. Public domain.

In this centennial year of the Armenian Genocide, the matter of official recognition remains a focus of activists and for many in and beyond the global Armenian community. Recognition of a group’s tragedy is important, not only for the victims, survivors, and their descendants, but also for the perpetrator group. Any recognition must acknowledge that the genocide was not just a singular event, but rather a wider set of practices, backed by a particular worldview.

The genocide is more than an artifact of its time—though, to be sure, certain practices and ways of thinking were specific to the late-Ottoman period—and its effects remain with us today. Until we look carefully at the ongoing social construction of minorities, at the real and symbolic violence associated with this construction, mere recognition is not enough; recognition may heal the wounds of the past, but recognition alone cannot address the continuing trauma wrought on Ottoman and Turkish minorities—then Armenians and now especially Kurds.

In Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories, Gyanendra Pandey presented the concept of the “marked citizen.”

Nationalism continuously constructs social and political hierarchies, privileged languages, and relations of dominance and subordination, not only outside but within the natural modern political community and state. These hierarchies and languages signal other political problems to which we need to attend: the problem of minorities, of hyphenated (and sometimes second-class) citizens, of homogenized histories and national cultures that all the inhabitants of a particular land are expected to accept and cherish.

The majority, or the “unmarked national, [who is] the real, obvious, axiomatically natural citizen,” is contrasted with those who live “under the sign of a question mark.” This sign is most apparent when the question of loyalty surfaces: “the test of loyalty is in fact required only of those who are not real, natural citizens,” according to Pandey. These are the nation-state’s minorities.

Armenians and other non-Muslims were not always considered minorities over the history of the Ottoman Empire. They were subordinate groups, numerically smaller within the overall population and separate from the dominant ruling class that embraced Islam. But with the 19th century and the development of modern states, subordinate groups became minorities, defined both in terms of ethnicity and religion. With nationalism and national thinking on the rise, dominant state elites began to view minorities as potential threats to the unity of the nation-in-the-making.

For Armenians, this process began in the last quarter of the 19th century with the rise of the “Armenian question.” As Western European governments and Russia claimed the right to intervene in internal Ottoman affairs on behalf of Armenians, their loyalty to the empire fell permanently under the “sign of the question mark.” At a time when the concept of citizenship was being freshly defined, Armenians became the chief “marked citizens” of the empire.

With nationalism on the rise, state elites began to view minorities as potential threats to the unity of the nation-in-the-making.

To control a perceived threat from the Armenian population, the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) turned to practices of social engineering, resulting in distinctive population policies—Uğur Ümit Üngör’s The Making of Modern Turkey and Taner Akçam’s The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity shed light on these measures and their underlying nationalist impulse. Ultimately, in the context of war, these policies resulted in the violent uprooting and destruction of the Ottoman Armenian community.

Following World War I, Turkey emerged as an independent republic from the fallen Ottoman Empire, but many of the new state elites were former Young Turks (CUP) and continued to embrace the same sort of chauvinistic nationalism. In the process of Turkish nation-building, with the Armenians now gone, the Kurds became the new minority to live under the “sign of the question mark.” Turks sought not simply to distinguish themselves from peoples across the border, but now from the minorities within. The process of making minorities, whether Armenians or Kurds, exists at the heart of Turkish nationalism.

The Margins of Empire » explores the contradictory logic of how states incorporate groups they ultimately aim to suppress.

Armenian identity was never denied, but the existence of Armenians in Turkey has been erased. For the Kurds, their identity officially denied for decades, now are acknowledged, but still as “marked” citizens. Today, on top of Armenian ruins lie Kurdish ruins—“palimpsest memories” of village life destroyed, as Anoush Suni notes (borrowing Professor Rosalind Shaw’s apt metaphor). War waged ostensibly between the Turkish military and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) has affected millions of Kurdish citizens and their villages. Kurds are denigrated with negative ethnic stereotypes and continue to be judged on their ability to conform to official nationalist standards. They remain a perceived threat against the unity of the country.

The justifications and rationalizations that resulted in genocide a century ago are still with us, and not just in Turkey but around the world. It is not only state officials who embrace this line of thinking and the policies that result from it. Ordinary citizens are drawn into the discourse of “good” and “bad” community, of “us” and “them,” and, out of fear, become party to the violence against minorities in their midst.

Recognition of the Armenian Genocide may be an important and essential step. But until Turkey understands and acknowledges that the process that led to the destruction of the Ottoman Armenian community is alive and well in its present-day thinking and practices related to citizenship and minorityhood, the nation will not be at peace.

Janet Klein is Associate Professor of History at The University of Akron and author of The Margins of Empire: Kurdish Militias in the Ottoman Tribal Zone.