Transactions in Time

Enforced disappearances and the Armenian Genocide.

by KABIR TAMBAR

A photograph of a "Saturday mother," holding the picture of a victim of forced disappearance, during a sit-in vigil. Photo by Mehmetaergun available via Wikipedia.

Every week a group called the Saturday Mothers/Peoples (Cumartesi Anneleri/İnsanları) gathers in Istanbul to remember the lives of individuals who were forcibly disappeared by Turkey’s security forces in the 1980s and 1990s. Holding photographs of the disappeared, relatives, friends, and supporters come together to publicly describe how the disappearances took place and unremittingly demand accountability for the presumed deaths.

With their vigils the Saturday Mothers/Peoples ask us to think in two historical directions at once.

Many of the enforced disappearances took place in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeastern provinces during the 1980s and 1990s: a time when the state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) were engaged in armed conflict; a state of emergency was legally authorized in that region and forced evacuations from villages were increasingly common; and media reportage of these events was heavily controlled and censored by state authorities. The vigils are politically charged because participants call out the specific individuals whom they hold responsible for the disappearances, including public prosecutors, security officials, interior ministers, prime ministers, and presidents of the republic.

Every April since 2010, the Saturday Mothers/Peoples have devoted one of their gatherings to commemorating the over two hundred Armenian intellectuals who were detained in Istanbul on April 24, 1915, dispatched to central Anatolia, and ultimately deported and killed. As in their vigils for Kurdish individuals disappeared in the past thirty years, the Saturday Mothers/Peoples carry photos of the disappeared to the April gatherings and mention by name the government officials responsible for what they call a “crime against humanity” (insanlık suçu).

Armenian intellectuals who were arrested and later executed en masse by Young Turk government authorities on the night of 24 April 1915. Public Domain.

The gatherings are acts of commemoration, but they are also acts of commensuration, drawing together events of enforced disappearance separated by almost a century. The practice of holding public vigil itself functions as a communicative channel that allows for a relay between contexts. A transaction in time, it asks us to think in two historical directions at once: just as the events of 1915 give contextual depth to the disappearances of the past thirty years, so too the more recent events re-cast the significance of the Armenian deportations.

The vigils press us to contextualize what in Turkey is commonly called the “Kurdish problem” as a late iteration of the violence of 1915. The “problem” in question, therefore, refers not simply to the struggle for Kurdish rights, including the armed uprising of the PKK that began in the 1980s, and the intensifying militarization of statecraft in predominantly Kurdish provinces in subsequent decades. We are referred, as well, to the birth of the Turkish republic and the practices of assimilation, deportation, and violence that defined the political form of the nation-state over the course of the twentieth century.

The act of commensuration moves us also in the other direction, requiring us to rethink 1915 in light of the security operations that took place in the 1980s and 1990s. Looking back with the Saturday Mothers/Peoples upon a century of disappearances allows us to ask not only about what the violence of 1915 sought to eliminate but also what it proved capable of founding: a political technique that is arbitrary in its exercise but institutionally structured in its orchestration. Seemingly an extreme action for exceptional times, the recurrent recourse to this technique suggests a systematic method of governance.

On April 27, 2013, Serpil Taşkaya, whose father was forcibly disappeared in 1993 in the province of Urfa, spoke at a gathering of the Saturday Mothers/Peoples. Taşkaya indicated the stakes of bearing memories of violence into the present: “For the sake of a free, just, equal, and peaceful future, we need to remember the darkness of the past, together with political, historical, and social truths, and convey these to the present.” She continued that, in addition to being relatives of those disappeared in the 1980s and 1990s, “we are also the mothers and siblings of our grave-less Armenian children” (mezarsız Ermeni evlatlarımızın da annesiyiz, kardeşiyiz).

The Reckoning of Pluralism » offers a critical appraisal of the tensions of democratic pluralism.

To be killed and disposed of without a marked grave is the defining characteristic of a historical pattern, and it becomes apparent as such when viewed from the present-day assemblies of the Saturday Mothers/Peoples. Yet Taşkaya’s comment does not simply function as historical criticism, and 1915 is not only presented, as on a timeline, as a precedent for the enforced disappearances of the 1980s and 1990s. Her statement is commemorative but also anachronistic. In its intimacy it confounds a chronological sensibility: she claims responsibility, as mother to child, for Armenian intellectuals who died a century prior to her own declaration. Laying moral claim to the disappeared of 1915, Taşkaya refuses to allow the violence against Armenians to be effaced from the present and relegated to the past. Her claim permits us to interpret those grave-less deaths as symptoms, not simply of a grievous tragedy of history, but of the political imaginary inherited by the republican nation-state.

The Saturday Mothers/Peoples’ efforts to recall the Armenian genocide are politically contentious in part because they contest the state’s intransigent refusal to acknowledge the scale and effect of the catastrophe. They also provide an abiding challenge for political thought. For in looking back, they reposition the very grounds on which it is possible to think toward a political future. Cultivating community with those whose dispossession and death were proclaimed necessary for the future well-being of the Turkish nation, the vigils offer a space of gathering that breaks from the asserted destiny of the nation-state. Week after week of remembering the disappeared, the group slowly reconstructs the terms and conditions for narrating the history of politics and for anticipating its possible trajectory.

Kabir Tambar is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University and author of The Reckoning of Pluralism: Political Belonging and the Demands of History in Turkey.