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AT THE TIME, I had three American friends working on books about the Armenian genocide, and when I applied for my fellowship, I, too, had wanted to investigate the Turkish-Armenian phenomenon, because for an American who knew nothing about Turkey, and who had read about the persecution of Orhan Pamuk for talking about the Armenians’ suffering, the denial of genocide was the likeliest subject about which to be enraged. “How does a people go about forgetting the past?” I wrote in my application essay. One of these American friends invited me to Gallipoli, which had seen one of the most important battles in World War I, a giant victory for the flailing Turks, and from which Atatürk emerged as a brilliant hero. Our guide, Bülent, told us the National Ministry of Education made it mandatory for all Turkish students—every student in the country—to visit the peninsula “to build national consciousness.” Thousands of kids ventured from all over Turkey to Gallipoli by the busload. In Turkey, courses in militarism begin early. One social studies textbook for fifth graders explained that “our duty is to eliminate all subversive and divisive threats directed to our country.” Another read: “Turkish existence would come to an end if nationalism were abandoned.” In high school, every Turkish student took a mandatory national security course, taught by military officers. “War and war-making are essential in our culture,” one teacher explained. Turks learned that the military must stay strong to protect them from constant foreign and domestic threats. They were told the Kurds and Armenians inside Turkey tried to take Turkey from them. They were told Westerners outside Turkey tried to take away Turkey from them, too.
When, that October, six months after I arrived, Kurdish militants killed a dozen soldiers in an ambush in southeastern Turkey, my neighborhood turned into a strange fantasia of red flags. Even Caner couldn’t hide that he was worried; the anger, the nationalism, the war cries, only one day old, already seemed as bad to him as it did in the nineties, when the Turkish state waged a vicious war against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or the PKK, a Kurdish militant group, and by extension much of the Kurdish community. People marched down Istiklal Caddesi waving those enormous bloodred Turkish flags, the men sporting red bandannas like warriors, the women holding photos of Atatürk on sticks, the children clutching signs that read WE ARE ALL TURKS. Small vans decorated with photos of dead soldiers shuttled loads of people through the heart of the city and played 1930s-style anthems. Men sat out the windows of beat-up sedans wielding those man-size flags as if at the barricades; flag sellers stumbled beneath the weight of their wares on every block. Even Starbucks had a flag. At night, e-mails were dispatched urging people to march, to turn off their lights at nine thirty, to wear black. Flags were posted on Facebook, instead of personal photos. Black ribbons that had been worn on people’s chests to commemorate the fallen littered the Metro. Even women were enlisting in the army—one was six months pregnant—along with the thousands of men who were volunteering to go back to it. Across Turkey men marched, armed with their young sons in one hand and guns in the other. Sometimes the young sons waved toy guns, too. The Beyoncé concert was canceled.
“Maybe we should buy a flag,” Caner joked. “Just in case?”
By then, I had been often hanging out with Caner and his Kurdish friends, most of whom went to Bo?azi?i University, the Harvard of Turkey. One evening, Caner was slowly drinking his four-lira vodka lemonade at one of the few cheap bars in the pleasant Istanbul neighborhood of Cihangir, where his parents, Orhan Pamuk, dog-owning expatriates, and Turkish soap opera actors shared a fancy Carrefour food store and stunning views of the Bosphorus. He told a joke:
Once there were two Kurdish men and they really wanted to be Turks. So they went to a military commander and asked him, “How can we become Turkish?” And the military commander said, “Just go to the highest mountain and scream three times, ‘I am a Turk, I am a Turk, I am a Turk!’ And you will be a Turk.” So the two Kurdish men went to the mountain and in order to get as high as possible the one stood on the other’s back. He screamed, “I am a Turk! I am a Turk! I am a Turk!” Then he stood there. When his friend below him said, “Hey, my turn,” the Turk on top looked down at the Kurd and replied, “Shut up, bitch.”
He told this joke with the typical irony and sly grin that he and his Kurdish friends employed regularly—when they teased one another about not really being Turks, when they called one another “peasant,” when they derided ethnic music in favor of “modern” contemporary pop music, all as if pretending to suck up to an invisible Turkish minder. This humor protected as much as it might have isolated them.
At the time one of the only newspapers writing critically about the government’s treatment of the Kurds, about the military, and about nationalism was a new one called Taraf. I went to visit the founder, the novelist and journalist Ahmet Altan. Taraf’s office was located on the Asian side of Istanbul, in a lively neighborhood called Kad?k?y. Inside the office, I passed through two guards and a bag checkpoint. Very young people crouched over black laptops under fluorescent newsroom lights. It was carpeted, and felt like a bookstore. From the windows, I could see my neighborhood across the twinkling water.
Altan had been fired from newspapers and prosecuted for his columns many times. In Turkey, censorship served to bolster Turkish nationalism. Altan was once sentenced to a year and a half in jail for “inciting racial hatred.” In 1999, he went to trial for insulting “the moral characteristic of the government and its armed and security forces.” The year before, his crime was writing, according to one newspaper, “about government doctors who issued conflicting forensic examinations on a nine-year-old boy who had been molested.” He had also been accused of collaborating with the PKK, and criticizing military generals.
Altan wanted to start Taraf because of the Kurdish issue. “Most Turks are very suspicious about the Kurds,” he said. “The Turkish media likes to write ‘our army, huge and powerful army’—a very chauvinistic approach.”