PARADIGMS OF EXCLUSION: THOSE WHO SERVED VERSUS THOSE WHO BETRAYED

One basic question, worded in various ways, had occupied Ottoman state cadres and concerned individuals from the 18th century on: how could the threat of a rising Europe be neutralized in order to preserve the territorial integrity of Ottoman domains and to maintain Ottoman grandeur? Ottoman leaders employed a variety of strategies that ranged from returning to a stricter interpretation of Islamic law to imitating the West, from resisting the West to co-opting its ways. Nothing seemed to work. Historical developments unfolded such that by the end of the Balkan Wars in 1913, the once rich and confident empire was reduced to its capital Constantinople/Istanbul, Anatolia, and the Arab territories. The Young Turk radicalization began.

In 1913, a faction in the ruling Young Turk party (Committee of Union and Progress, or CUP) staged a military coup that brought the triumvirate of Enver, Talat, and Cemal Pashas to power. In 1914, this group took the Ottoman Empire into the Great War alongside the Central Powers; its goal was the old imperative of preserving the state and its territory, perhaps even reversing the tide of the last century by gaining new territory. Yet, despite the extreme measures that the CUP employed during the war—including the genocidal elimination of Christian groups from Anatolia—the faction failed in its war aims. The Ottomans emerged from World War I vulnerable and defeated, having lost even the Arab lands. Moreover, their wartime mistreatment of Ottoman Christians seemed to confirm the 19th-century European orientalist stereotype of “Turks” as barbarous Muslims of inferior races.Footnote ¹⁵ The day after the Allies’ armistice agreement (30 October 1918), under which the Ottomans surrendered completely, the triumvirate fled the country and the CUP dissolved itself. In August 1920 the new government, under the anti-CUP Freedom and Coalition Party, signed the Treaty of Sèvres with the Allies. This treaty further reduced Ottoman territory, which was to become a rump state in middle Anatolia, neighbored by Greece, Armenia, and a potentially independent Kurdistan.

The provisions of the Treaty of Sèvres never materialized, and in three years they would be replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne. What happened in between—the Turkish War of Independence—defined post-Ottoman Turkey literally and symbolically. From 1919 to 1922, the Kemalist forces, with material help from pan-Islamist Indians and anti-imperialist Bolsheviks, fought the occupying Allies and their internal collaborators, which included Greeks and Armenians, as well as the Istanbul-based Ottoman government. The Kemalist victory forced the Great Powers to renegotiate the peace in the Near East. At Lausanne, the Allies’ only interlocutor was the Ankara-based (Turkish) Grand National Assembly, which since 1920 had acted as the civilian arm of the National Resistance.

The political elite of the new Turkey, almost all veterans of the National Resistance, believed that the War of Independence had given birth to their freedom and saved their honor. The war thus became the mother (ana) of the fatherland (vatan). In the years to come, those who shared this mother—and shed blood in her defense—would be considered “brothers.”Footnote ¹⁶ Those who did not fight were thus relegated to being step-brothers, if not “foreigners.”Footnote ¹⁷

Mehmed Şükrü's words, quoted in the introduction of this article, offer a representative snapshot of this exclusionary logic that became mainstream in the Republic of Turkey. Answers to the non-Muslims’ assimilability paradox are hidden in Mehmed Şükrü's narrative, including in what that narrative omits, distorts, and exaggerates in order to convince, justify, and enframe. I put special emphasis on Mehmed Şükrü's words precisely because they are not special at all; they are a typical portrayal still recognizable today in Turkish nationalist narratives, both popular and scholarly, inside and outside Turkey.Footnote ¹⁸ This portrayal was replicated in Mustafa Kemal's 1927 Speech (Nutuk), which became the foundational metanarrative of the Turkish nation and remains the basis of history textbooks.

Mehmed Şükrü's narrative relies on the dichotomy of selfish religious minorities versus selfless Muslim soldiers: the former pursue dreams, the latter spill blood. But why? Why would these minorities, who had apparently been living in comfort without even sharing the burdens of their tolerant host, want change? The text does not include any concrete reason. Given its aim—the expulsion of minorities—it cannot. If Mehmed Şükrü's narrative were to include real reasons, such as continued insecurity or past violence, it could mean that in the absence of these, the minorities might just stay loyal. The only explanation suggested is that the minorities are muzır—insincere, tricky, and designing, even conspiratorial; they might appear prosperous and happy, but they in fact wish the worst for their state. Because of their lack of material reasons for wanting change, and the presence of what is viewed as an innate trait, the narrative as a technology of timeless exclusion reaches its goal: the minorities should go. If they stay, they will betray the state and the majority because of who they are—not because of what has happened to them. Duplicity-thus-treason is biologized: they are minorities; therefore, they betray.

A second strategy of the narrative is dehistoricization. All minorities are lumped together in one category and temporality, with no differences among or within them. Mehmed Şükrü's point of reference is the recent War of Independence and specifically the behavior of Greeks and Armenians during the war, but his words suggest he is talking about the previous century or even the entire duration of Ottoman Muslim and “minority” coexistence.

This brings us to the third narrative strategy: lying. In his reference to selfless Mehmeds (the Turkish version of Muhammad and the generic name given to any soldier), Mehmed Şükrü accuses minorities of not doing what their state forbade them to do, a paradox. Based on the Islamic doctrine that the state could not be trusted to infidels, the Ottoman Empire did not allow non-Muslims to serve in the military; instead, they paid a poll tax.Footnote ¹⁹ After 1856, minorities were theoretically allowed to enlist in the military but usually were not conscripted. Only after the 1908 Young Turk revolution, which had promised equality, fraternity, and liberty for all, did military service become compulsory for Ottoman subjects irrespective of religion. Moreover, and crucially, during the War of Independence, non-Muslims were not asked or allowed to participate in either the civilian or the military wing of the National Resistance. It was assumed that all of them would betray the cause.

Fourth, the narrative must omit the rules excluding non-Muslim Mehmeds, and even their existence, because it simultaneously acts as a technology of inclusion. The narrative unites all Mehmeds into one group (servers) against those (betrayers) who enriched themselves thanks to the Mehmeds’ blood. That the unification of different groups of Muslims into a singular Mehmed (later to be called Turk) happened because of the disappearance—through massacre or deportation—of their neighbors is unspoken in this narrative, perhaps because it is assumed.Footnote ²⁰

This narrative became Turkey's self-narrative: a betrayed nation fighting an honorable battle to win back what was almost stolen from its bosom. This self-narrative makes sense only if, first, one remains strictly in the 1918–22 time frame (thus ignoring the potential causes of “betrayal”), and, second, one assumes that even though Turks (or Muslims) have the right to respond to the changing conditions around them, other groups (that is, Armenians and Greeks) lack or should lack such agency. A quick review of the defining years from 1918 to 1922 will better elucidate this point and help us historicize Mehmed Şükrü's position against the minorities as well as their treatment during the first decade of the Republic of Turkey.

After the announcement of the Ottoman defeat in 1918, the surviving Armenian deportees began returning to their homes. Lay and religious Armenian and Greek leaders in Istanbul assumed an accusatory stance toward the Ottoman government, based on how it had mistreated their communities during the war. They severed their relationships with the Sublime Porte; openly supported the Allied occupation forces; and worked for the reestablishment of what they perceived to be their greater historical homelands, territories that happened to include parts of what the Kemalist National Resistance claimed was its own Muslim-Turkish fatherland. But crucially, although open and across-the-board anti-Turkishness was displayed by Armenians only after what by 1916 they knew was a systematic annihilation campaign against them, and despite the fact that a common will for an independent Armenia was displayed only after the war, the metanarrative of betrayal generalized this sentiment to the era before the war.Footnote ²¹ In the end, Young Turks found the proof they needed to validate their original intentions to wipe out Greeks and Armenians from Anatolia after they had already acted on these intentions.

The immediate postwar years, characterized by the Ottoman defeat, the Allied occupation of Istanbul and parts of Anatolia, and Wilsonian hopes for a new world order, gave the surviving Armenian leadership a language and a context in which to seek accountability. Given the increasing global acceptance of the principle of national self-determination, the best retribution the leaders could conceive of was territory, a “piece of Ottomania” that they claimed was in fact “Armenia.”Footnote ²² With the Treaty of Sèvres, the Ottoman government in Istanbul conceded that piece, agreeing that part of Eastern Anatolia would become Armenia.

The Treaty of Sèvres posed an enormous challenge for the vast majority of Muslims in Anatolia. Many of them were refugees who had recently arrived from the Christian Balkans, expelled and feeling dishonored because of the group—Muslims—to which they belonged. The treaty divided Anatolia between Armenians, Greeks, Turks, and Kurds, which meant that thousands of Muslims would either have to move or continue life as unwanted minorities under vengeful Armenian and Greek states. All of these groups shared similar norms, values, and codes of honor. They all knew what a humiliated and wronged people could do (including from the experiences of Ottoman Muslims themselves after the Balkan Wars).

Article 142 of the Treaty of Sèvres stated that “[i]n view of the terrorist regime which has existed in Turkey since November 1, 1914” and “in order to repair so far as possible the wrongs inflicted on individuals in the course of the massacres perpetrated in Turkey during the war,” all persons who “have disappeared, been carried off, interned or placed in captivity since November 1, 1914” had to be returned to their communities of origin and all conversions to Islam since that date considered invalid. This meant that Ottoman Muslims would have to return the formerly Christian and now Islamicized women and children they had recently absorbed in their households or institutions, many of whom were now their wives, sons, daughters, concubines, domestics, or free laborers.Footnote ²³ With Article 144, the Turkish government solemnly undertook “to facilitate to the greatest possible extent the return to their homes and re-establishment in their businesses of the Turkish subjects of non-Turkish race who have been forcibly driven from their homes by fear of massacre or any other form of pressure since January 1, 1914.” This meant that all expelled Greeks and Armenians could return soon, in some cases displacing Muslims who had since occupied their farms and property. Even more alarming was the treaty's Article 144, which explicitly stated that the “Turkish Government recognises the injustice of the law of 1915 relating to Abandoned Properties (Emval-i-Metroukeh)” and therefore declares them “null and void, in the past as in the future.” Not only would the properties be returned to their owners or surviving relatives, but this would be done “without compensation of any kind to the present owners or occupiers.”Footnote ²⁴

The treaty fired up the National Resistance, armed with weapons as well as a Wilsonian language of numerical majorities, the right to self-determination, and popular sovereignty in order to claim Anatolia as exclusively Muslim (and, for some, exclusively “Turk”). The success of their military endeavor forced the Great Powers to accept those claims.Footnote ²⁵ The signatories to the Treaty of Lausanne, “being equally desirous to cause the events which have troubled the peace in the East to be forgotten,” declared amnesty for all war-related crimes committed between 1 August 1914 and 20 November 1922.Footnote ²⁶ The treaty thus brought long-awaited peace to the East. It allowed the newborn Turkey to remain clear of its unwanted past, but also forced it to accept that some remnants of this past would have to share its present. And all of this would happen under the watchful gaze of the same “outside forces” that had contributed to the rejection of that past in the first place.

TURKEY’S LAUSANNE MOMENT

During the 1919 Paris Peace Conference negotiations, the Allies concluded that for some people multiethnic coexistence was laden with instability and therefore should be undone or regulated.Footnote ²⁷ People should be either unmixed (via exchange of populations) or supervised by what were considered more civilized and experienced states to prevent their multiethnic cohabitation from turning into interethnic warfare.Footnote ²⁸ To ensure a durable world peace, every nation should be sheltered in a state, and each state should be governed by consent.Footnote ²⁹ Yet “national self-determination” was clearly impossible to attain everywhere, for everyone.Footnote ³⁰ To accommodate the near unattainability of one state for one nation, the concept of “minorities” was engraved in the national and international legal order. From its inception, then, the term minority signified misplacedness, thus secondary status.

At the Conference of Lausanne, the Allies and the Turkish delegation agreed that religious homogeneity would bring national stability and therefore international tranquility. But they diverged over the meaning of homogeneity and how to attain it. Wilson's progressive liberalism, based on the American multiethnic model, strongly influenced the Great Powers’ reasoning about how to create “tolerant majorities and loyal minorities.”Footnote ³¹ This liberalism was first inscribed in the Polish Minority Treaty of 28 June 1919, which became the model for treaties with other newly formed or expanded states, such as Czechoslovakia, Romania, Greece, Albania, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Turkey, among others.Footnote ³²

According to this Wilsonian logic, recognition of the cultural rights of minorities in the short run would eventually lead to value assimilation, therefore bringing about political loyalty and discouraging separatism. In other words, if people were given room to express their differences, the logic went, they would not forge extraterritorial alliances, pursue irredentism, or act as fifth columns.Footnote ³³ In this sense of the term, homogeneity did not amount to ethnic, racial, religious, and linguistic sameness but referred rather to unity of purpose. The Great Powers were explicitly against the formation of a “state within a state” and crafted the minority clauses such that there would be no room for isolated communal enclaves with autonomous, or even semiautonomous, standing.Footnote ³⁴ The goal was to create a shared culture of some sort that would give minorities the opportunity to render their nonconforming identities politically irrelevant. Wilson repeatedly told his skeptical colleagues (of which there were many) that the reason the Russian Jews had turned to disloyalty—that is, Bolshevism—was that Russia had failed to include them politically and culturally.Footnote ³⁵ In other words, there was a reason for the betrayal, and Europe could be saved from a similar fate if its Jews, the paradigmatic minority of the interwar minority regime, were given the right to be who they were. Their quiescence would surely follow.

Ankara's representatives found this reasoning unacceptable, if not conspiratorial. Their distant and recent past told them the exact opposite: that giving rights to members of nondominant religions, races, or ethnicities would not prevent but rather reinforce potential disloyalty.Footnote ³⁶ Recall Mehmed Şükrü words: “Unlike any other minority in the world, the religious minorities in this land had been living in utmost comfort thanks to the tenets of our religion.” Notwithstanding the hyperbole, Mehmed Şükrü was not totally incorrect. The cultural rights that the Allies argued minorities should have—such as over schools, courts, language, and charitable institutions—eerily resembled the entitlements that Ottoman non-Muslims had enjoyed for about half a millennium.Footnote ³⁷

Although this millet system worked more or less successfully, problems arose in the early 19th century. The rising economic and military success of the West was accompanied by the increasing consciousness of religious and national differences among Christian Balkan subjects, who then demanded and—with the help of the European powers—achieved their independence. The Ottoman center had tried various integrationist strategies to create a common Ottomanist identity in order to preempt centrifugal forces and delegitimize European meddling in its domestic affairs on behalf of Ottoman Christians but nothing worked to reverse the tide of disintegration.

By the time the Turkish delegation sat at the negotiating table in Lausanne, its members were confident they knew why all these efforts had failed. There were three chief culprits: the Great Powers themselves, who did not respect Ottoman sovereignty; Ottoman Christians, who let themselves be used as pawns of a Europe that had pretended to care for them but was in fact pursuing its own economic interests; and the dysfunctional Istanbul government, which by allowing room for the expression of diversity prepared the ground for outside intrusion. In short, a majority's tolerance did not lead to a minority's loyalty. Because the Turkish delegation was acutely aware of the Great Powers’ historical role in this outcome, they interpreted the insistence on minority rights as not only humiliating but also an excuse for future infringements on Turkish sovereignty.Footnote ³⁸ Minority rights threatened the new Turkey because they signaled the potential repetition of the past.

The European powers, meanwhile, remained blind to their own contribution to the problem they were now trying to solve. When the head of the Turkish delegation, Minister of Foreign Affairs İsmet Pasha (later, İnönü), understood that it would not be possible to exchange all non-Muslims, he argued in vain that “in Turkey, for an average citizen, the best way to benefit from all the rights is not to have any suspicious ties with outside actors.” He equated “minority protection” with “outside intervention,” and invoked Turkish Jewry as the example of a model minority that had not been bothered because they had not been collaborating with “outside forces.”Footnote ³⁹

The Great Powers, however, thought that they could not leave non-Muslims alone in a Muslim jungle. Their nearsighted reading of the recent past—a savage Muslim nation persecuting native Christians—gave them the moral obligation to safeguard the survivors of Islam's inherent intolerance. But it would be wrong to isolate the orientalist gaze—what we would now call Islamophobia—as the main culprit without taking into consideration the fact that except for Albania, all other states on which minority protection was forced were majority Christian. And none except for Ottoman Turkey committed such large-scale annihilation campaigns against its own citizens, acts that would help Raphael Lemkin to conceive a crime called “genocide.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Nonetheless, the fact that the obligation to protect minorities did not apply to the Great Powers themselves contaminated the whole process with double standards and partiality.Footnote ⁴¹ The Great Powers (which maintained significant colonial possessions) argued that their superior western European civilization had already evolved procedures to facilitate the peaceful assimilation of minorities. These procedures, they noted, did not yet exist in “immature states.”Footnote ⁴²

Thus, the bright new postwar order that U.S. president Wilson heralded as early as 1917, an order celebrated by many people around the globe, did not materialize. The League ended up ossifying a hierarchical system of states in which a given state's perceived historical experience in self-government and treatment of minorities (understood anachronistically) determined its rank. We know the first-tier countries, those that did the “perceiving” just mentioned. Second-tier status was partially produced by the imposition of minority protection clauses. Because Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey, and others were viewed as civilized—but not quite—they were to be allowed to govern themselves, though with outside supervision.Footnote ⁴³ Third-tier status was assigned to the many peoples of the Middle East (Arab lands), Africa, and Asia who, much like blacks in the United States, needed time and training in the “habits of civilization” and self-government; therefore they were to be placed under the Mandate rule of a well-established, experienced state.

Wilson ended up “breaking the heart of the world,” and the world has since retaliated, in one way or another.Footnote ⁴⁴ What is crucial for our purposes here is that given the circumstances that attended its birth, the designation of “minority”—as a category or a label, and the people it supposedly sheltered—became the ultimate proof of continued imperialist and interventionist Great Power politics with significant connotations of minority betrayal. Mehmed Şükrü and his comrades not only would have to accept the inevitability of continued coexistence with those they had tried to eliminate since 1915, but would also have to respect those minorities by bestowing on them extra rights. Before turning to the topic of how the Grand National Assembly dealt with this challenge, it is important to review an example of how the absence of Great Power impartiality produced a certain kind of Ottoman and Muslim defensiveness regarding the violence that befell Ottoman Christians during World War I. This defensiveness precluded alternative readings of history, an absence that had profound implications for the survivors who continued living among the perpetrators.

In 1919 Shaikh Mushir Hosain Kidwai, a leading Indian anti-imperialist activist, wrote two booklets in London.Footnote ⁴⁵ As a pan-Islamist critic of the Paris Peace Conference, he argued against the partition of the Ottoman lands and criticized the Great Powers’ justification of this process on the basis of Turkish savagery. Kidwai believed that the Ottoman government, run by a caliph, had been more tolerant toward its subject peoples than the imperialist countries of the West had been toward theirs. He noted how the British, “who are not even prepared to give Home Rule to India, on the plea that it is populated by peoples professing two different religions—Hinduism and Islam—demand autonomy, even independence, for different portions of the Ottoman Empire,” and asked, “Is that reasonable?”Footnote ⁴⁶ He warned that the division of the Ottoman Empire “into several petty states” would lead to “deep and insatiable discontent” among the seventy million Muslims of India and would be a source of troubles for Great Britain's own empire.Footnote ⁴⁷ Considering the anti-Ottoman sentiment in the Paris Peace Conference to be a result of anti-Muslim prejudices, Kidwai contrasted how British citizenship policies excluded colonized peoples while Ottoman constitutionalism allowed for an inclusive government representative of all subject peoples.Footnote ⁴⁸ He was right: as late as 1913 an Armenian served as the Ottoman minister of foreign affairs, and as late as 1915, of the 290 members of the Ottoman parliament fifteen were Armenians.Footnote ⁴⁹

But Kidwai did not add that in July 1915, at least two of those Armenian MPs were killed on orders of the state. He did not add that the minister of foreign affairs, Gabriel Noradungian, ironically owed his life to the 1913 CUP military coup: when Lieutenant Colonel Enver Bey and his men broke into the cabinet, Noradungian was sitting next to Minister of War Nazım Pasha, who was shot dead. Traumatized, Noradungian gave in to his wife's insistence that they flee. They left for France with their daughter, for what they thought would be a temporary relocation until the situation settled down.Footnote ⁵⁰

All that Kidwai and narratives such as Mehmed Şükrü's could see in Noradungian was the figure of a “betrayer.”Footnote ⁵¹ This was because, at the same time that Kidwai was penning propagandist booklets in London, Noradungian was doing the same in Paris. Noradungian, a longtime believer in an Armenian future inside the Ottoman Empire, now acted as a member of the Armenian National Delegation, which was lobbying the delegates of the Great Powers at the Paris Peace Conference for the establishment of “Greater Armenia.”Footnote ⁵² When the Armenians’ “dreams” were shattered in Paris, Noradungian continued his efforts at Lausanne, and at one point asked his Armenian colleagues—all Russian Armenians—to allow him to see İsmet Pasha so that “they could speak alone” and “freely in Turkish.”Footnote ⁵³ The two men did have a private meeting, but it did not amount to much because İsmet Pasha had little reason to concede even to Noradungian's minimal requests. Turkey denaturalized Noradungian in 1927 and declared all his property abandoned; it was then confiscated.Footnote ⁵⁴ He never returned home.

By bringing Kidwai and Noradungian into the discussion, I want to suggest that the exclusion of Armenians from post-1923 Turkness should not be seen as an inevitable post-genocidal process. Although it is difficult to imagine how the violence that characterized the period of 1913 to 1922 could have been followed by a new era marked by mutual trust, one thing is certain: the Great Powers’ double standard regarding what constituted savagery and civilization, and the employment of this language and perspective in selective distribution of political power and prestige among international actors, played an important role in making this possibility unimaginable.Footnote ⁵⁵ For when Kidwai wrote that “the record of the Turks is clean from the stain of such butcheries as have been committed in the Congo, or in British Colonies over indentured labourers, or in German Africa to enrich the European capitalists and profiteers,” he was wrong only partially.Footnote ⁵⁶

STEP-CITIZENS

The history of the drafting of the Republic of Turkey's first constitution in 1924 illustrates how the Treaty of Lausanne's minority protection clauses helped to harden notions of who the majority was. The parliamentary deliberations around Article 88 foreshadowed the direction the republic would take in its approach to diversity.

When the draft of Article 88 was introduced to the Grand National Assembly, it replicated the first Ottoman constitution of 1876 except that it replaced “Ottoman” with “Turk”: “The people of Turkey [Türkiye], regardless of their religion and race, would be called ‘Turk’ [Türk].”Footnote ⁵⁷ Opposition came from the floor: did “Turkness” (Türklük) mean nationality (milliyet) or subjecthood (tabiyet), asked one member of parliament?Footnote ⁵⁸ “But republics can't have ‘subjects,’” warned another. MP Celal Nuri (İleri) defended the wording of the article by saying that it did not aim to provide an ethnographic definition of “nation.” He went on to negate another MP's suggestion that they add an explicit condition for Turkness, such as “possessing Turkish culture.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Celal Nuri warned that this would contradict Article 39 of the Treaty of Lausanne, which had established that “Turkish nationals belonging to non-Moslem minorities will enjoy the same civil and political rights as Moslems” and that “all the inhabitants of Turkey, without distinction of religion, shall be equal before the law.” Moreover, Article 37 mandated that Turkey not pass any laws that contradicted the minority clauses of the treaty.Footnote ⁶⁰ As the anxious deputies continued to debate these questions, Hamdullah Suphi (Tanrıöver) came up with a solution.

Hamdullah Suphi started his long tirade against the draft article's inclusiveness with an emphasis on the recent National Resistance and the delicate situation. “We have just come out of a very difficult struggle and none of us is of the view that it is over,” he declared: “that's why legally erasing the division between non-Turks and Turks that exists in reality would be dangerous.”Footnote ⁶¹ He emphasized that, in theory, it was not impossible for non-Turks to become Turks, but they would have to meet some conditions to make the move. Hamdullah Suphi gave the example of Jews in France: they were fully assimilated; therefore, they were French. The evidence of their assimilation was that “they had forgotten their language, and do not have separate schools.” Yes, they remembered their descent (nesl) and ancestry (ecdad) as Jewish—note that he did not refer to religion—but they were “culturally” (hars itibariyle) French and carried French sensibilities (Fransız hissiyatını taşırlar). Then he gave the example of his former classmate, a Turkish Jew, who had recently asked Hamdullah Suphi what he could do to become a Turk. Hamdullah Suphi assured his friend that once Turkish Jews embraced the language of the land (memleket lisanı) instead of using the language of the people who had expelled them (Judeo-Spanish), and considered Turkish schools as their own schools, they could become Turks, much like French Jews became French and English Jews became English. But, given the fact that Turkish Jews had not been doing these things, “can we expect the law to render them non-Jewish” (kanun bunları musevi olmaktan menedebilir mi)? “No!” the floor yelled. So Hamdullah Suphi returned to the question of Armenians, who he said had been living peacefully with Turks. Then, “propaganda and factions” (propaganda ve nifak) had made them believe they were different from Turks (kalbine ayrı bir şey sokmuşlardır), and they had asked for a separate state. Hamdullah Suphi addressed an imaginary Armenian—no Armenian was present in the room—and said, “Close down your schools, renounce Armenianness [ermeniliği terkediniz], and accept the Turkish culture [Türk harsı] and then we will call you ‘Turk!’”Footnote ⁶²

Hamdullah Suphi saw Turkness and Armenianness or Jewishness as mutually exclusive, in the present and the future. He accused Jews and Armenians of perpetuating their groupness by practicing their millet-system entitlements and/or the minority rights granted by the Treaty of Lausanne. It is telling that, in the years to come, Turkish politicians and agencies of the mainstream culture would continue to talk about Lausanne's minority rights as “privileges,” some of which minorities “relinquished” in 1926, as I will explain below.

As Hamdullah Suphi's discussion of French Jewry as a model minority and, by extension, of France as the model host illustrates, the new Turkey aspired to the anti-communautarisme of French Republican citizenship and not the liberal Wilsonian version that contemporary scholars refer to as “multicultural citizenship” or “group-differentiated citizenship.”Footnote ⁶³ After the French Revolution eliminated the hierarchically organized society, Jews gained equal citizenship rights on the condition that they surrender their special privileges of communal autonomy and rabbinic jurisdiction in civil affairs.Footnote ⁶⁴ In this type of political theory, equality is achieved by making one's social, religious, ethnic, and other origins irrelevant in the public sphere.Footnote ⁶⁵ The long Ottoman experimentation with creating loyal citizens informed the Turkish conclusion, summarized in Suphi's words, that people should be rewarded with equality when and if they shed their particularistic identities. In other words, literal sameness was necessary in order to reach the abstract universalism of sameness before the law. In light of this thinking, it is easy to see why the MPs found the notion of minority rights toxic for the new Turkey and tried to come up with antidotes.

To further push for the change in the wording of the draft article, Hamdullah Suphi invoked the example of a recent planned decree that would compel foreign-owned private companies to lay off their Armenian and Greek employees. If the draft article passed as it was, he warned, these companies could have legal grounds to refuse to lay off Armenians and Greeks on the basis that the constitution of the land defined them as Turks.Footnote ⁶⁶ Alarmed, the MPs unanimously agreed on Hamdullah Suphi's proposition to add the clause “in terms of citizenship” to the sentence under discussion in Article 88. As a result, Article 88 of the 1924 constitution read this way: “The people of Turkey, regardless of their religion and race would, in terms of citizenship, be called ‘Turk.’”Footnote ⁶⁷ Thus it established two separate ideas of Turkness: real or authentic Turks and citizen-Turks. The MPs left the definitions of Turkness and Turkish citizenship intentionally vague.Footnote ⁶⁸

During the discussions, MP Celal Nuri defined “our native/real/main citizens” (öz vatandaşlar) as “those who are Muslims of Hanafi sect and speak Turkish.”Footnote ⁶⁹ In the decades to come, Turkey relegated its citizens of non-Muslim faiths, of non-Hanafi Muslim sects, and with non-Turkish mother tongues to the status of what I call üvey vatandaşlar (step-citizens). As the unfolding policies would disclose, however, even though sect, linguistic, and ethnic differences would remain relatively bridgeable, religious difference—given its recent adventures between the West and the East—remained fixed.

HOSTAGES OF THE PAST

Armed with Article 88's vagueness and the ineffectiveness of the League in supervising minority protections, Ankara breached most of the Treaty of Lausanne's provisions regarding minority rights. In this regard Turkey was no different from other states in which minority protections worked somewhat against the minorities, failing to truly protect them while instigating the majority's resentment.Footnote ⁷⁰ For instance, Jews in Poland suffered more pogroms after 1919 than before.Footnote ⁷¹ In Turkey, while some laws designated only Turks as entitled to participate in various professions, other laws referred to Türk vatandaşları, which could mean “citizens in/of Turkey,” “Turkish citizens,” or “citizens who are [ethnically] Turk.” The binary opposite of all these depictions was the same: ecnebi (foreigner), which often included Turkish citizens of non-Muslim faiths.

Following are several examples of discriminatory policies. Non-Muslims did not have freedom of travel inside the country: they were forbidden to move and/or settle in some regions, and their travel to other parts of the country was conditioned upon acquiring official permits.Footnote ⁷² The 1926 law defining who could become a state officer declared that only “Turks” could become civil servants; minorities were thus forced out of public service. The 1934 Resettlement Law gave Turkey the right to denaturalize those citizens who either lacked the “Turkish culture” or did not speak Turkish.Footnote ⁷³ After Law Number 1246 declared that only “Turkish citizens” could establish youth organizations such as Boy Scouts troops, non-Muslim Boy Scout groups were closed down, and non-Muslims (even those with Turkish citizenship) were not allowed to join the Turkish Boy Scout groups.Footnote ⁷⁴

The state also intervened in the practice of minority rights. Minority schools had to hire a certain percentage of Turk teachers. Turkish literature, geography, and history had to be taught by Turk teachers, and the vice principals had to be Turks.Footnote ⁷⁵ These teachers and administrators had to be appointed by the Ministry of Education from among teachers who possessed a “national consciousness” and “national sentiments” (milli bilince ve milli duygulara sahip olmaları).Footnote ⁷⁶

As testimony to the importance that Turkish leaders attached to the remembrance and the study of the past, minority schools were not permitted to teach the history of their separate communities but only the history of the Turks—and only through standard textbooks distributed by the Ministry of Education in which all minorities, but especially Armenians and Greeks, were depicted as enemies of the Turks.Footnote ⁷⁷ The 1931 edition of the Citizenship Education book included a section called “Bad People” (Fena Adamlar), in which non-Muslim citizens of the republic were depicted as usurers (faizciler), swindlers (madrabazlar), and profiteers (muhtekirler). It should come as no surprise that the “Bad People” section also included Ottoman sultans.Footnote ⁷⁸

None of these discriminatory measures was justified by reference to religion, thus making Turkish nationalism appear voluntaristic and civic even when it remained close to the ethnic version.Footnote ⁷⁹ The legislation employed a mixture of fluid, open-to-interpretation concepts such as “culture,” “shared history,” and “descent,” as well as more concrete criteria such as “language,” all ultimately disclosing a preference for groups that the state trusted, groups that became Turks in this process of inclusion. Here, the importance of the War of Independence cannot be overemphasized. The 1927 Denaturalization Law (according to which former minister of foreign affairs Noradungian lost his citizenship) stipulated that “those Ottoman subjects who had stayed outside Turkey and did not participate in the National Resistance during the War of Independence . . . and had not returned since then would lose their citizenship.”Footnote ⁸⁰ The ruling Republican People's Party's bylaws adopted at the 1931 Congress stated that only “those Turkish citizens who had not been in opposition to the National Resistance movement” could become members.Footnote ⁸¹ The 1931 Press Law declared that those “who had served the enemies’ goals during the Turkish Independence War” would not be allowed to publish newspapers or journals.Footnote ⁸²

In 1931, a citizenship textbook said it all: “[P]eople who established the Turkish Republic are known as the Turkish nation.”Footnote ⁸³ The “nation” clearly belonged to Mehmeds, men who shed blood in its defense. Yet the state had to nationalize and standardize in order to become new and modern. Religious difference could not be left alone.

PARADIGMS OF INCLUSION: BUILT OF SAND OR CLAY?

The leadership of the new regime soon moved from a religion-based concept of citizenry to one based on ethnicity. The political language of the War of Independence years—a multiethnic though religiously uniform fighting group—was transformed into a language of monoethnic, secular citizenry. The reasons for this transformation and its timing are multiple and lie outside my scope here. What is relevant for the discussion is that the processes that aimed at transforming the Muslim Mehmed into a Turk Mehmed had implications for non-Muslims.

With the assumption that those who share a past would share a future, the state implemented policies to make sure that everyone imagined the same kind of future. Especially after the religiously motivated Kurdish Sheikh Said rebellion (1925), it began attacking intra-Muslim communautarisme.Footnote ⁸⁴ Kurds, Lazes, Circassians, Bosniaks, and others were expected and sometimes even forced to stop using their mother tongues, adopt Turkish names, intermarry with so-called purer Turks, and live among them. Certainly, this assimilationist formula did not hold true for all Muslims throughout the early years of the republic. On the contrary, depending on their numbers, concentration, autochthonous or immigrant status, historical alliances with foreign states, and perceived past or present disloyalty, different Muslim groups presented different challenges for the project of turning them into Turks. But for my purposes here, it is important to see how the attempts at their assimilation also offered possible avenues of inclusion for non-Muslims.

The 1934 Surname Law is a good example. The law stipulated that everyone in Turkey must acquire a last name, that last names be adopted from the Turkish language, and that “names denoting rank, tenure, official position and those belonging to foreign races and nations” not be adopted.Footnote ⁸⁵ The ensuing Surname Regulation (Nizamname) forbade the adoption of patronyms not only associated with certain Muslim groups (i.e., -veled, -bin, -madumu, - zade) but also with non-Muslims (e.g., -yan for Armenians and -dis for Greeks).

With this law, Minister of Interior Şükrü Kaya argued, Turkey would transform itself from a pile of sand (different and unmixed tribes prone to dispersion with a gentle blow) into a sturdy piece of clay, with its intermixed molecules resistant to penetration from the outside.Footnote ⁸⁶ MP Refet B. (Canıtez) challenged him on the grounds that it would be more appropriate to leave onomastic differences alone so that the state could differentiate friend from foe “with the seal of a foreigner on his forehead.” In response, Kaya turned to history and declared that the Ottoman state had crumbled because it had not fulfilled “the highest duty of a country,” which is “to annex [ilhak] and assimilate [temsil] everyone that lives within its borders.” He continued, “Why should we still call them Kurdish Memet, Circassian Hasan, Laz Ali? First of all, this would show the weakness [zaaf] of the dominant element.”Footnote ⁸⁷

Kaya's diversity-as-historical-mistake discourse found expression in the lives of those who had already been branded as inherently not-one-of-us; they were offered a chance to unmark their visible or audible differences. Minorities could now pass as authentic Turks even if they could not legally become Turk.Footnote ⁸⁸ This mentality was fully at work in the semiofficial “Citizen! Speak Turkish!” campaigns that attacked the polyglot Ottoman legacy by ordering everyone to speak only Turkish in public. Not speaking Turkish was considered disrespectful to the Turkish nation and was occasionally punished on the grounds that such behavior “insulted Turkishness.”Footnote ⁸⁹

The fear of turning into a reincarnated millet system (and facing the same dishonorable end) conditioned two other policies involving minorities. When Turkey adopted a new, secular Civil Code in 1926 (which replaced the shariʿa), the state pressured minorities to abandon their right, granted by the Lausanne Treaty, to apply their personal status laws in accordance with their religion and customs.Footnote ⁹⁰ Despite opposition from some members of their congregations, the chief rabbi and the Greek and Armenian patriarchs relinquished this right on behalf of their communities.Footnote ⁹¹ This is how legal pluralism, a defining feature of the Ottoman millet system, ended in Turkey. The League of Nations did not express concern over the fact that Turkey unilaterally cancelled a treaty provision.Footnote ⁹²

Another revealing measure of the state's difference-blind treatment was in the sphere of military conscription. During the negotiations at Lausanne, the Turkish delegation rejected the Allies’ demands that minorities be exempted from military duty. The Allies’ reasoning was based on the fact that during World War I, the Ottoman state had organized Christian males into labor battalions and ordered their killing, and therefore minorities could not be safe in the Turkish military. The Turkish side, however, argued that such an exemption would disadvantage Muslim youth, because while they served in the army the non-Muslims would continue earning incomes and accumulating fortunes, much as they did during Ottoman times.Footnote ⁹³ In the end, the Turkish side won the negotiations. In the Republic of Turkey, non-Muslim men served in the army, but as proof of the state's continued mistrust, they were usually not armed and, even when they were allowed to use arms, they typically faced discrimination.Footnote ⁹⁴ Most significant, in a manner similar to the pre-1856 Ottoman restrictions on non-Muslim employment in high military and civil bureaucracy, the new Turkey kept the doors to professional military careers closed to non-Turk citizens. This conflicting duality produced the assimilability paradox: because they were Turks, minorities could die in defense of the homeland, but because they were non-Turks, they could not order others to do the same. Turkey was so afraid of its past that it could not help but repeat it.