!ßÈÀ="justify">All that time we were trying to forget about our recent past, and were it not for the Armenian allegations, obviously it would not have been possible for us to look back at the incidents of that period. Yet our current state of mind resulted from what happened to us during that period.

Gündüz Aktan
  All that time we were trying to forget about our recent past, and were it not for the Armenian allegations, obviously it would not have been possible for us to look back at the incidents of that period. Yet our current state of mind resulted from what happened to us during that period.

  It is true that we have not faced up to the Armenian incidents of 1915. This is because we have been trying to forget all about the pain of the great injustices done to us during the last century of the Ottomans. Psychology tells us that we would not be able to share the grief of others unless we remembered our own tragedies and mourned them.

  For this reason the Center for Eurasian Strategic Studies (ASAM) has started a research project about the massacres committed against the Turks and Muslims in the Balkans and the Caucasus throughout the 19th century. As the past unfolds we will inevitably start having feelings of hatred towards those who did us injustices. And during that process we may not be able to muster the inner strength needed to remember that our side, too, had committed certain injustices. We may start viewing as the homeland once again all those territories that had once been ours, territories that we have chosen to forget about. We may think that the flow of history is a long process and, as a result, we may even start dreaming about regaining those territories some time in the future. Our souls may come to be possessed by the lust for irredentism. When these lands were lost we were unable to display our reaction to the great powers of that era. These may now surface with waves of anger overpowering us. All these would be the natural -- albeit highly dangerous -- characteristics of the mourning process.

  Genocide is the destruction of a group, women and children included, a crime only racists can bring themselves to commit -- and only when they their racism reaches a highly advanced stage. To be able to do that one has to harbor an extremely strong feeling of contempt for the target group, a feeling that would “dehumanize” that group. The Ottomans were being defeated and destroyed by the West. In the course of that tragic process they lost their self-confidence. So, there was no way the Ottomans could have possibly looked down on the Armenians or anyone else. On the contrary, the Ottomans themselves were being dehumanized, that is, described as an “out-of-history,” uncivilized, backward and inferior race doomed to become extinct as a result of prejudices formed in the West starting with Montesquieu in the 1750s. This process was exactly what slavery, colonialism, anti-Semitism and “scientific” racism have done to their own target groups. It was on that platform that the Balkan Christians waged their struggle for independence from the Ottoman state. The Armenian nationalists too rebelled with similar sentiments.

  Five million Turks and Muslims were annihilated in the Balkans and the Caucasus in dozens of massacres of the type witnessed in Srebnica -- which is on record as a case of genocide, thanks to a court decision to this effect. Another five million of them were driven to Anatolia. The Sevres Treaty constituted the “final solution” of  “the Orient problem.” That was a genocide in which the “civilized” world also participated. Those who survived this genocide waged the Turkish War of Liberation.

  Once the members of the generation that waged that terrific struggle for survival became a thing of history, that aura of psychological depression that surrounds genocide survivors gradually came to penetrate us. What has emerged is a group of intellectuals that lack self-confidence and see themselves as weak and worthless beings. In an effort to overcome that depression first they embraced the Socialist utopia. More recently they have turned into the kind of colonial intellectuals who surrender to the West, as described by Fanon.

  Confronting them is another group of people: nationalists who defend the nation's honor and rights. In reality that group too tried to compensate for the depression. They did that with a reactive outburst; however, nationalism, which ensures a society's survival, has still not been able to formulate the kind of development and modernization it ardently seeks.

  Meanwhile, some of the Kemalists, the guards of the republic, go beyond the boundaries of the realities of today's world with the way they yearn for a utopist revival of the National Forces movement of the Turkish War of Liberation. Their political movement is shrinking, caught in the kind of nationalism that has no economic model to offer and that cannot become reconciled with religion. They keep hoping that by defending Kemalist principles they can automatically beat the depression.

  Let us come to the pious believers alienated by radical secularism. Their way of trying to “cure” depression is seeking a return to the golden age of Islam and a reintegration with Ummah, or religious community. They lull themselves by dwelling on the glory of Islam in the past. Now they are trying to legitimize themselves through European Union membership.

  To escape our depression we have to mourn the tragedies of the past and, also, we have to perform successfully in this world. For that, a new model has to be created, a model that would reconcile Islam with the founding principles of the republic, a model that would ensure socioeconomic development with a nationalistic “core.” In other words, we must reshape the political structure that has become fragmented due to polarization.

  Our enormous domestic problems and the historical prejudices that characterize the EU approach to Turkey create the kind of conditions that require such a new initiative.