POLITICS OF MEMORY IN TURKEY

In this section, I argue that Turkey of the 2000s has been marked by the popularization of “coming to terms with the past” discourse. Popular interest in memory is hardly new in Turkey. As Esra Özyürek has aptly pointed out, memory had already become a key axis of Turkish politics in the 1990s.Footnote ³ In tune with major global trends at the time, often summarized as the “rise of identity politics” and the “upsurge of memory,” several communities and groups, such as the Kurds, the Armenians, the Alevis, and Islamists, started to present and circulate versions of the past that challenged Kemalist historical narratives of an ethnically, culturally, and religiously homogenous nation-state. Memory persisted into the 2000s as a powerful means for undermining Kemalist hegemony. What renders this decade distinct compared to the earlier period, however, is the deployment of the discourse of “coming to terms with the past.” This discourse initially emerged in the early 2000s among a small group of intellectuals who used it to oppose the legacy of state violence, but in recent years it has become more pervasive. Many social groups and actors, including some mentioned previously, have started to reformulate their political agendas through this rubric. In what follows, I present a brief overview of the key moments and turning points of this process—how “coming to terms with the past” came to set the terms of public debate over Turkey's relationship to its past—during the 2000s.Footnote ⁴

Often translated into Turkish as geçmisle hesaplasma or geçmisle yüzleşme, “coming to terms with the past” has become a popular motto in civil society, and it has served many groups as a language with which to make claims.Footnote ⁵ Although throughout the 1990s many human rights groups had existed, only in the 2000s did groups and associations focused on issues of memory begin to emerge.Footnote ⁶ Some prominent examples include Hakikat, Adalet, Hafıza Merkezi (Center for Truth, Justice, Memory), Toplumsal Bellek Platformu (Collective Memory Platform), Diyarbakır Cezaevi Gerçeğini Araştırma ve Adalet Komisyonu (Investigation and Justice Commission on the Facts of Diyarbakir Prison), and Toplumsal Olayları Araştırma ve Yüzleşme Derneği (Association for Investigating Social Events and Confronting the Past). Founded between 2007 and 2011, these four associations work, in different ways, toward Turkey's reconciliation with its traumatic past, primarily by uncovering the truths of past human rights violations and supporting victims in their pursuit of justice.

“Coming to terms with the past” discourse has also pervaded the realms of cultural production and academia. Autobiographies by members of minority communities have had a major hand in bringing long-forgotten past incidents to public attention.Footnote ⁷ Past traumas have also become the topic of documentaries, feature films, TV series, and exhibitions.Footnote ⁸ Perhaps as a result, academics and intellectuals have become increasingly preoccupied with oral history and memory studies, which might in turn explain the growing number of workshops and conferences that address questions of violence, trauma, and Turkey's relation to its past.Footnote ⁹

Consequently, and as expected, “coming to terms with the past” discourse has had a substantial impact on the political scene. What is striking is that state and nonstate actors and groups have operationalized this discourse in very different and sometimes conflicting ways. For instance, minority ethnic and religious groups, such as the Armenians, the Alevis, and the Kurds, have used it to demand justice not only for past misdeeds but also for ongoing discriminatory policies and practices. Two major events in the mid-2000s involving Armenians in particular contributed to the popularization of “coming to terms with the past” as an oppositional political discourse. The first was a controversy triggered by an academic conference titled “Ottoman Armenians during the Demise of the Ottoman Empire: Responsible Scholarship and Issues of Democracy,” held in Istanbul in September 2005. The conference organizers and participants faced furious and hateful reactions from both the AKP government and nationalist groups. Nevertheless, they successfully initiated a public discussion on the 1915 Armenian Genocide. The second event involved Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, who in 2005 was convicted of “insulting Turkishness” under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code after calling “1915” a genocide. On 19 January 2007, Dink was gunned down by a Turkish nationalist. More than one hundred thousand people gathered for Dink's funeral carrying placards that read “We are all Armenians” and “We are all Hrant Dink,” to which the nationalists responded immediately with a counter-campaign declaring “We are all Turks.” In late 2008 a group of intellectuals and journalists launched an online petition apologizing for what they called “the Great Catastrophe of 1915,”Footnote ¹⁰ which received more than 30,000 signatures. Turkish nationalists once again responded with a counter-campaign in which they demanded an apology for past Armenian massacres of Turks.Footnote ¹¹ With Dink's funeral and the apology “wars” that have followed it, “coming to terms with the past” discourse has gained considerable public attention not only among already politicized minority groups, but also among Islamists and nationalists, and the 1915 Armenian Genocide has become a central topic of heated public debate among these various groups.

These debates have not yet reached a conclusion and “1915” remains a major point of contention, especially because the current AKP government neither recognizes it as genocide nor pays any material or symbolic compensation to Armenians. On 23 April 2014 Erdoğan did acknowledge the ninety-ninth anniversary of “1915,” calling it “our shared pain” and offering condolences for the killings of Armenians. However, while his supporters applauded the statement as the most conciliatory of its kind ever made by a Turkish state official and a significant step toward the normalization of Turkish–Armenian relations, many Armenians—and diasporic groups in particular—interpreted it as the persistence of the Turkish state's denial and of its effort to preempt international recognition of the Armenian Genocide on the eve of the 2015 centennial. This interpretation was proven correct when in April 2015 the AKP government changed the day of the Gallipoli celebrations from 25 to 24 April, the very day of the centennial, to counteract commemorations in Yerevan.

The debates between 2005 and 2010 over the apology for “1915” seem to have influenced minority groups other than the Armenians as well. In 2009–10, for instance, several Alevi groups organized a broad-spectrum political campaign demanding recognition of and an official state apology for the Dersim Massacre of 1937–38.Footnote ¹² As a result of the pressure exerted by Alevis both within and outside Turkey, and thanks to the support of other minority and opposition groups, Erdoğan, who was prime minister at the time, acknowledged “Dersim 1937–38” as a massacre carried out relentlessly by state soldiers against civilians. In a 23 November 2011 speech, he offered a half-hearted apology, but he also argued that real responsibility for the massacre belonged to the main opposition party, Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (Republican People's Party; CHP), because it carries the legacy of the Kemalist past. Erdoğan's apology received mixed reviews. Some Alevi groups were content with it as a symbolic gesture, while others claimed that it was merely a tactic to garner popular support and render invisible persisting discrimination against Alevis. “Dersim 1937—38” continues to be a key reference point in Alevi groups' demands for “coming to terms” with the history of state violence, and in their call for a truth and reconciliation commission.

Kurdish groups have also been struggling for historical justice, particularly in regard to human rights violations committed by the state against Kurds in the 1990s. After Erdoğan's apology in 2011 for the Dersim Massacre, the pro-Kurdish Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi (Peace and Democracy Party; BDP), which joined Halkların Demokratik Partisi (Peoples' Democratic Party; HDP) in the March 2014 local elections and has since operated under the HDP's banner, started to frame its demands for historical accountability and justice in terms of “coming to terms with the past.” Since late 2012, when peace talks between the AKP government and the Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê (PKK; Kurdistan Workers, Party) resumed, the BDP has put special emphasis on conflict resolution and the creation of a truth and reconciliation commission. Similarly, the imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan, who on 21 March 2013 declared a ceasefire that put an end to a nearly three-decades-long armed conflict, has urged postconflict reconciliation.

In its negotiations with the PKK, the AKP government has also embraced a new vocabulary that includes “remembering past traumas,” “confronting the past,” “reconciliation,” “forgiveness,” and “peace.” However, the AKP has deployed this vocabulary only sporadically and this development has not translated into a consistent policy. In contrast to the Armenians, the Alevis, and the Kurds, all of whom have utilized “coming to terms with the past” as a language for seeking justice, the AKP government has used it as a language of political legitimacy. Since coming to power in 2002, the AKP has aimed to weaken and eventually replace secularist Kemalist hegemony, particularly by curbing the military's power in politics, a process often dubbed “coming to terms with the legacy of Kemalism.” It has taken a variety of steps toward this end, such as pursuing trials for two coup plots (the 2008 Ergenekon trial and the 2010 Balyoz [Sledgehammer] trial) and the constitutional referendum of 12 September 2010. The AKP's agenda to confront the legacy of military interventions gathered popular support and won a resounding victory in the referendum. However, since then, mainly because of Erdoğan's drift toward authoritarianism, skepticism over the AKP's politics of memory has grown. In particular, there has emerged a critique of the AKP's allegedly pragmatic and selective deployment of “coming to terms with the past.” Similar to their Kemalist predecessors, AKP cadres, it has been argued, strive to implement another exclusionary and nationalist historical narrative—this time in Islamist and neo-Ottoman terms.Footnote ¹³

MEMORY VERSUS HISTORY: THERAPEUTIC MEMORY DISCOURSES

The popularization of “coming to terms with the past” in Turkey during the 2000s is best understood when situated within a global context. Since the 1980s, memory has become a subject of global interest, particularly as a response to “the crisis of history,” or the loss of confidence in history as an objective, universal, and self-evident narrative of progress.Footnote ¹⁴ Key factors that precipitated this growing disenchantment with history include the radical social movements and decolonization struggles of the 1960s, the growing popularity of oral history since the 1970s, the popularization of postmodern and postcolonial theory in the 1990s, and the rise of multiculturalism and identity politics in the aftermath of the Cold War.

Out of this disenchantment, memory emerged as a counternarrative to history. However, as Kerwin L. Klein aptly notes, memory has been viewed not merely as an alternative to history, but more particularly as a “therapeutic alternative” to history.Footnote ¹⁵ With the popularization of psychoanalysis and trauma literature, narratives of the past have increasingly come to be structured around the themes of trauma, victimhood, healing, and therapy.Footnote ¹⁶ The “therapeutic” has become a new modality through which the past, and memory in particular, are represented.Footnote ¹⁷ Characterizing this new modality is the association of memory with the psychological self and the use of individual psychopathological concepts to understand collective memory. According to Wulf Kansteiner, while references to the individual psyche should be “at best metaphorical,” they are often “hardened into literality,” as with the “traumatization” of a nation or the “healing” of a culture.Footnote ¹⁸

What is more, upholding memory as an alternative to history carries political implications. Whereas history, historicism, or modern historical discourse, as scholars variably refer to the modern science of history, presumes a break or at least distance between past and present, memory emphasizes their proximity.Footnote ¹⁹ Through its “multiple, non-linear, and non-homogenous temporalities,” by which the past persists in the present,Footnote ²⁰ memory upsets the linear grand narrative of history. For this reason it is particularly potent for critiquing the nation-state and its violent foundation.Footnote ²¹ Whereas nation-states and their ruling elites often embrace history's logic of distancing, victims of nation-state violence, colonization, and imperialism cling to memory as “a source of group empowerment, as a vehicle for reclaiming the past, and as a means of redressing past injustices.”Footnote ²² Barbara Misztal calls this the “politicization of memory,” the underlying premise of which is that memory gives voice to the voiceless and oppressed, or that memory is what history is not. Differentiating between the latter two, Kerwin Lee Klein points out that “History is modernism, the state, science, imperialism, androcentrism, a tool of oppression; memory is postmodernism, the ‘symbolically excluded,’ ‘the body,’ ‘a healing device,’ and a tool for redemption.”Footnote ²³

This therapeutic conception of memory crystallizes in the realm of postconflict restoration and transitional justice, which are processes of restoration and reconciliation in the aftermath of armed conflicts, civil wars, and authoritarianism.Footnote ²⁴ In this particular realm, the therapeutic conception of memory has turned into a popular “international discourse on healing nations.”Footnote ²⁵ Alternatively called a “post-conflict therapeutic framework,”Footnote ²⁶ “traumatic storytelling,”Footnote ²⁷ and “therapeutic imaginary,”Footnote ²⁸ the underlying premise of this model is that “repressed memory causes untold and ongoing psychological problems; that ‘revealing’ or truth-telling leads to healing; and that ‘closure’ on the past must be reached in order for the present to be lived and the future to be faced.”Footnote ²⁹

Three points deserve special attention here. First, psychopathological analogies abound in this therapeutic reconciliation model, especially in its depiction of the nation. As Yoshikuni Igarashi aptly points out, it posits the nation “as a viable unit of psychoanalysis and diagnosed with a schizophrenic condition,”Footnote ³⁰ mainly due to the silenced and repressed memories of past traumas. Second, trauma is “established as the ubiquitous explanation and site for action,”Footnote ³¹ meaning that the national historical narrative is rewritten in reference to trauma and its future resolution. The past comes to be characterized by violence, trauma, and oblivion, and the present by the “return of the repressed” and collective efforts to heal. This sense of a clear temporal break reinforces the perception of the past as, in Katherine Verdery's words, an “aberration,”Footnote ³² and the present as a period of normalization. Accordingly, the future is conceived as a period of restored truth and justice.

Third, this temporal reconfiguration “frame[s] and establish[es] the boundaries of moral and political courses of action.”Footnote ³³ Remembering, mourning, and forgiving are posited as key political-moral actions that should be carried out in the present in order to guarantee a peaceful future. As Jo Frazier puts it, this “economy of reconciliation,” or distribution of guilt, responsibility, and forgiveness among victims and perpetrators, is an emotional and moral exchange, a process of “societal forgiveness” intended to bring about “a peaceful and consolidated national polity.”Footnote ³⁴ The psychotherapeutic reconciliation model therefore reinforces “a unitary model of the national protagonist.”Footnote ³⁵ It redefines national identity in terms of trauma, healing, and forgiveness, and posits the nation as a collective self willing and able to make peace with its traumatic past.

Frazier's point is in tune with what Hamber and Wilson call “psychologizing the nation,”Footnote ³⁶ a phrase referring to the commonly shared assumption that in postconflict contexts individual and national processes of dealing with the past are largely concurrent and equivalent. As the authors argue, national processes of “healing” overlook the diversity of individual experiences and reinforce nation building through psychotherapeutic jargon:

Supporting Hamber and Wilson's argument, Claire Moon suggests that when taken too literally, this therapeutic model of reconciliation can end up dehistoricizing social and political problems. In the case of South Africa, she contends, overemphasis on individual suffering and therapy also clouded structural and material causes of massive human rights abuses, and reaffirmed the state's role as the guarantor of national reconciliation and healing.Footnote ³⁸

Moreover, this therapeutic reconciliation model frames how specific communities should relate to the nation's past. In his discussion of “reparations politics,” John Torpey focuses on group claims for the redressing of past crimes or misdeeds.Footnote ³⁹ According to him, the language of trauma and victimhood is central to reparations politics, signalling an obsession with the past and a move away from a progressive or future-oriented politics. This past-oriented language, he warns, might result in identity politics replacing universal mass politics.Footnote ⁴⁰ In a similar vein, Wendy Brown sees politics of victimhood, or as she alternatively calls it, “politics of ressentiment,”Footnote ⁴¹ as a retreat from emancipatory mass politics and its goal of creating a better future as a unified “we.” However, while Torpey interprets the rise of reparations politics as a sign of the decline of the role and legitimacy of the nation-state, Brown sees it as legitimizing the state as the “protector” of “victim” groups. For their part, these groups are reified as victims in need of state help, leading to the normalization of their marginalized status within a state constructed as benevolent.

Brown's line of critique has resonated in other contexts as well. Scholars working on multiculturalism in Australia have critiqued key developments around the issue of apology, such as the Sorry Books campaign in 1998 and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's apology to indigenous people in 2008.Footnote ⁴² Influenced by Michel Foucault's theory of governmentality and subjectivity, these scholars question the celebration of apology as a regenerative and transformative act, seeing it instead as a new technology of power in late liberal regimes that reinforces existing power inequalities between the state and indigenous subjects.Footnote ⁴³ Echoing Brown's point, both Elizabeth Povinelli and Sara Ahmed claim that the politics of apology in Australia has relegitimized and reconstituted state power and perpetuated nation building primarily through a vocabulary of shame and pride.

Other scholars, such as Dirk Moses and Lawrie Balfour, have questioned the critique of apology.Footnote ⁴⁴ According to Moses, in the context of Australia it overlooks the fact that it was indigenous communities that demanded a state apology in the first place, and that most of these communities were content with the apology. Similarly, Lawrie Balfour suggests that the African American reparations movement cannot simply be dismissed as an inward-looking or past-oriented form of politics. Contrary to the predictions of Torpey and Brown, she claims, this movement provided African American subjects with an opportunity to reclaim their political agency and to move beyond the vicious language of victimhood.

These contestations over the potentialities and limitations of the “politicization of memory,” particularly where the therapeutic conception of memory is at work, should be taken seriously, for they signal, among other things, the multifaceted character of therapeutic memory narratives. Diverse actors engage in memory claims in multiple and sometimes contradictory ways, and these claims have distinct implications for each group in each particular context.

As suggested earlier, in the Turkish context “coming to terms with the past” has functioned in distinct ways for different groups. For the Armenians, the Alevis, and the Kurds, it has served as a language for seeking rights and making claims; meanwhile, for the AKP it has served as a tool for legitimizing an Islamist-neoliberal order. In order to understand whether and how memory discourses, especially when deployed by “victim” groups, give rise to transformative politics, it might be useful to draw on ethnography. However, not having access to detailed ethnographic data, I explore another significant dimension of the “politicization of memory” in Turkey: how “coming to terms with the past” operates textually as a therapeutic public discourse, with a special focus on its conceptual repertoire and its notions of time and historicity.

COMING TO TERMS WITH THE PAST IN TURKEY: TRAUMA, HEALING, AND A NEW FUTURE

As noted earlier, “coming to terms with the past” discourse has influenced the parameters of public debate on the past in Turkey, especially since the early 2000s and even more so in the last few years. In what follows I focus on a number of academic and popular texts to examine the themes, tropes, and temporal sequence through which this discourse was constructed as a therapeutic memory discourse. Since 2002, and especially after the AKP's rise to power, intense debates have occurred in print around Turkey's relation to its past and the issue of historical justice. These debates have involved prominent scholars, intellectuals, journalists, and well-known public figures who are influential in shaping public opinion and have played a pioneering role in publicizing and popularizing the notion of “coming to terms with the past.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Relying upon the conceptual framework laid out previously, I suggest that “coming to terms with the past” introduces a novel conception of historical time. Rewriting national history through the psychotherapeutic terminology of individual trauma and healing, it repositions the nation as a wounded and traumatized self within the reconfigured temporal sequence of past, present, and future, and reimagines it according to the moral–political norms of therapeutic reconciliation. The past becomes a period of violence, trauma, and oblivion, the present is marked by the “return of the repressed” and by efforts to bring about healing, especially through remembering and forgiving, and the future is characterized by restored truth and justice.

In “coming to terms with the past” discourse, Turkey is an amnesiac society with a traumatic past extending from the late Ottoman period to the mid-1990s and early 2000s. Within this historical narrative, two key milestones were the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the foundation of the Turkish Republic. Upon the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, bureaucratic and military elites under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) aspired to create a society modeled on the West. They wiped out the remnants of Turkey's Ottoman past and homogenized its multiethnic and multicultural social fabric, resulting in mass violence inflicted upon minorities, especially during the early years of the republic. Such incidents include the 1915 Armenian Genocide, the 1923 Greek–Turkish population exchanges, the suppression of the Kurdish rebellions from 1925 to 1937, and the 1938 Dersim Massacre.

Moreover, this discourse portrays these early incidents as “primary” or “structural” trauma that was followed by other “layers” of trauma.Footnote ⁴⁶ The latter include the Kurdish rebellions of 1925–38, the Istanbul pogrom of 6–7 September 1955, the Varlık Vergisi (Wealth/Capital Tax) in 1932, the violent suppression of leftist movements during the 1970s, and the 12 September 1980 military coup d'état, among others. It is argued that up until the 1990s, the Kemalist ruling elite tried hard to erase all of these “layers” of trauma from public consciousness, mainly through a set of sanctions and bans. These “bans on mourning” forced minorities to repress their ethnic-cultural-religious identities in the public sphere and conform to the Sunni-Muslim Turkish majority.Footnote ⁴⁷ Anything perceived to contradict or disturb the official historical narrative was disallowed from the public sphere and became entrapped in the private realm.

According to this historical narrative, forgetting and denial have been a mechanism of state control over large segments of society, or, as Ayşe Hür, a widely read historian and columnist, puts it, they are a “constituent element of our national identity.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Many have borrowed from psychoanalysis to explain this amnesiac national character. Cem Kaptanoğlu, a well-respected psychiatry professor who publishes articles in various venues, explains Turkey's national identity formation by drawing parallels to individual identity formation in psychoanalysis.Footnote ⁴⁹ Just like the ego, he contends, the Turkish nation is on a quest for an imaginary future wholeness, and this creates a constant sense of frustration, insecurity, and vulnerability. In a similar vein, Murat Paker, a renowned licensed clinical psychologist and psychotherapist, proposes a psychoanalytical perspective for the study of Turkish political culture.Footnote ⁵⁰ In his account of Turkish national identity, for instance, he applies the psychoanalytical notion of “dissociation,” which, as he explains, means “detachment from reality” in psychoanalysis.Footnote ⁵¹ Mithat Sancar, a prominent academic and author, as well as a member of Akil İnsanlar Heyeti (Committee of Wise People), which was established in 2013 to inform the public about the ongoing peace negotiations between Kurdish guerrillas and the AKP government, constructs his analysis of modern Turkey upon the notion of trauma. In his oft-cited book Geçmişle Hesaplaşma (Coming to Terms with the Past), Sancar argues that it is reasonable to apply psychoanalytical insights about individual trauma to collective cases. Celal Yıldız, an author and human rights activist, has made similar analogies:

Such emphasis on “sickness” or “illness” can be found in other accounts as well.Footnote ⁵³

Inspired by Moon's brilliant analysis of the psychotherapeutic model of reconciliation in South Africa, I contend that Turkey, similar to South Africa, is depicted as a traumatized person whose “sickness” is caused by the repressed memories of its traumatic past. The ideal and required treatment for this sickness is therapy, and failure to undergo it, it is suggested, will lead to a vicious cycle of forgetting, dissociation, and denial that may even give way to a schizophrenic condition, if one did not exist already.Footnote ⁵⁴ Drawing an analogy between the human brain and a “political system,” Mehtap Söyler, who writes on democratization and institutions in Turkey, sees this unresolved condition as the main impediment to Turkey's “health,” meaning its prospects for becoming a full-fledged modern and democratic society.Footnote ⁵⁵

It is clear from the accounts mentioned so far that the late 1990s and even more so the 2000s mark a radical shift. During this period individuals began to take off their “masks” and confront the official national history by publicly talking about their personal, family, or group identities and memories.Footnote ⁵⁶ To describe this shift, many have drawn on Freud's notion of the “return of the repressed,”Footnote ⁵⁷ according to which traumatic memories resist symbolization or integration into the official historical narrative either because they are too painful to talk about or because they unsettle national myths. However, such memories still inform Turkey's relation to its past and present, mainly because of their tendency to “suddenly come back without necessarily being invited.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Regardless of efforts to repress or forget them, traumatic memories return to “haunt” Turkey, especially when they are least expected.

The metaphor of the Pandora's box also alludes to this unexpected return of traumatic memories. For instance, Oya Baydar, a well-known sociologist who writes a column on T24, “Bağımsız Internet Gazetesi” (Independent Internet Newspaper), maintains that public debates on the Dersim Massacre constituted a key moment that triggered the opening of a “Pandora's box”: all of the “lies” and “secrets” of the Turkish state poured out and came to light.Footnote ⁵⁹ This metaphor is also used to underline Turkey's transition from a dark and traumatic past into a bright future. As Sancar puts it, “the time has come” for Turkey to undergo a radical transition from a “culture of forgetting/denial” to a “culture of remembering.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Obviously, past and present are represented here as clearly demarcated and bounded periods characterized as having opposite features. The past was a time of taboos and silence, whereas the present is/should be a time of public debate and contestation over the past.

Moreover, the transformation is often presented as irreversible. As Baydar puts it, “The genie is out of the bottle now and it is not possible to put it back into the bottle.” She goes on to describe the present moment as one of “bewilderment”:

Here, the binary of past versus present is interwoven with the binary of history versus memory. The past is characterized not only by trauma and silence, but also by the predominance of (official) history over memory(ies). As Leyla Neyzi and Meltem Ahıska, two leading scholars of memory studies in Turkey, maintain, official history, or “History” with a capital “H,”Footnote ⁶² is a tool used effectively by the ruling Kemalist elites to repress memories and sustain the fantasy of the nation as a unified entity. History as an “empty formula” helped erase the multiple temporalities of an ethnically and culturally pluralistic society and replace them with the nation-state's linear temporality.Footnote ⁶³ However, official history, these scholars maintain, is no longer uncontested. The “return” of memories—that is, everything that was lost or repressed due to the forceful imposition of the Kemalist modernization project—in the present upsets official history's claim to truth. Thus, whereas history is a tool of silencing, memory returns a voice to all of those groups and communities oppressed or marginalized by the republic. And whereas history is associated with a Kemalist past, memory is a key aspect of a post-Kemalist present and future.

A major defining feature of this post-Kemalist present is healing, which is often understood as a lengthy and multifaceted—legal, judicial, emotional, and cultural—process that should start here and now and be completed in the future. The redemptive or therapeutic potential of memory becomes most visible in accounts on healing: Turkey can heal its wounds only through memory, that is, only by remembering the traumatic past.Footnote ⁶⁴ For instance, relying on Freud's notion of “working through,” Kaptanoğlu identifies three major steps for healing.Footnote ⁶⁵ First, one should remember and mourn past traumas. Second, victims should have access to a secure environment where they feel comfortable sharing their testimony with the witnesses. This is what Kaptanoğlu calls “truth-telling,” and he emphasizes the need to ensure that witnesses treat victims with respect. Third, the perpetrator should confess, apologize, and attempt to provide reparations or restitution, which ideally would be followed by the victim granting forgiveness. The protagonist of Kaptanoğlu's model is the individual. However, he suggests that we can learn “how to heal the wounds of social/collective traumas by looking at some methods used in the treatment of trauma victims.”Footnote ⁶⁶ As shown above, Turkey is first diagnosed with a psychopathological condition, and then it is prescribed a “treatment analogous to individual therapy.”Footnote ⁶⁷ As a clearly bounded collective entity, it is expected to undergo these three phases of the healing process. The assumption is that the Turkish collective or national self will be able to heal its wounds only when its individual members successfully recover from their personal traumas.

In this discourse, individual subjects of trauma and therapy are grouped into three categories: “victims,” “perpetrators,” and “witnesses.” Intriguingly, the category “victims” includes a long list of groups including the Kurds, the Alevis, the Armenians, and the Greeks, as well as leftists and Islamists. Regardless of which group is prioritized, there is a widely shared belief that large segments of the population have been “victimized” in one way or another by the Kemalist regime.Footnote ⁶⁸

Once placed into one of these three categories, individual citizens are expected to seek truth. This corresponds to the second phase of Kaptanoğlu's model of healing. Individuals find truth not by seeking revenge or carrying rancor, but through testimonies of their experiences and feelings. The reliance on testimony suggested by Kaptanoğlu is in line with the observation that Turkey has seen an increasing visibility and acceptability of personal testimonies in the public sphere, mainly in the form of autobiographies and documentaries.Footnote ⁶⁹ Personal testimonies reveal the truth not only about individual citizens, but also and more importantly about the Turkish collective self. For Ahıska, this is a “truth” about us, or our self-truth—that is, “the inner truth” of the Turkish national self. She argues that there are two “registers of truth”: the “external truth,” which is the truth produced through official history, a narrative of the national self intended for the “imagined Western gaze”Footnote ⁷⁰; and the “internal truth,” which refers to a truth “that is not registered in history, yet continues to define culture and identity.”Footnote ⁷¹ As such, internal truth is more about memories that are “silenced in and by history.” As individual citizens have begun to narrate their personal stories and memories in public, this internal truth has become more accessible and representable, and is paving the way for “a society of truth.”Footnote ⁷²

Prominent academics such as Nazan Üstündağ, Turgut Tarhanlı, Murat Paker, and others passionately demand the introduction of new mechanisms and institutional frameworks to reveal this internal truth. For instance, they often express this search as a call for truth and teconciliation commissions, especially since the debates on the Dersim Massacre of 1937–38, and even more so with the steps taken toward the resolution of the Kurdish issue since late 2012.Footnote ⁷³ Their demand is a testament to the widely shared belief in the link between truth and justice, which is often formulated as restorative or reparative justice. The goal in restorative justice is to restore the social relationships between the victim and the perpetrator rather than to penalize the latter.Footnote ⁷⁴ Echoing Kaptanoğlu's description of the healing process, these accounts of restorative justice call for confession and redress by perpetrators, which in turn is expected to result in the victim's forgiveness.Footnote ⁷⁵

“Coming to terms with the past” reconstitutes not only the past and the present, but also Turkey's future as democratic, prosperous, developed, and modern. Inspired by Cristian Tileagă's illuminating analysis of Romania, I contend that “coming to terms with the past” in Turkey carries “a clear promise of national change and transformation” by proposing a “new future of the nation.”Footnote ⁷⁶

As Kaptanoğlu aptly points out, “the future would come back” to Turkey, primarily through individual performances of memory as a political–moral duty.Footnote ⁷⁷ As discussed previously, in “coming to terms with the past” discourse individual citizens are expected to undergo a transformative and therapeutic experience of remembering and healing, which is also seen as their individual responsibility to future generations. As Hür has put it, the motto “never again” embodies this sense of civic responsibility: “the lessons drawn from past mistakes help us not to repeat the same mistakes in the future.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Failing to perform this duty renders the current generation guilty in the eyes of future generations, and reproduces the vicious cycle of forgetting and denial. Success, by contrast, almost miraculously helps to resolve some of the most pressing problems. According to Söyler, it can play a major part in restoring broken social unity:

Unlike Söyler, Paker does not see “coming to terms with the past” as a “magic wand” that can solve all of Turkey's problems at once.Footnote ⁸⁰ However, Parker and most of the other authors whose work I have analyzed still believe that it is a key step in building a commonly shared public conscience, morality, and culture of remembering, all of which are crucial elements of a “new” future.Footnote ⁸¹

What defines this “new” future is a desire to be perceived in the Western eye as a nation successfully passing through another phase or meeting another requirement of the liberal global order, namely, confronting and making peace with a traumatic past. The global/international community, particularly the West, is invited to act as witness to Turkey's “coming to terms with the past.” It is the “ultimate listener”Footnote ⁸² or the “super-addressee”Footnote ⁸³ to whom this discourse is directed. For instance, citing examples such as Germany, Chile, Argentina, South Africa, and Northern Ireland, figures such as Mithat Sancar and Cengiz Çandar, a widely read columnist and analyst, argue that “coming to terms with the past” is a standard to which Turkey, as a truly modern and liberal nation, should aspire.Footnote ⁸⁴ It is also both the proof and the guarantee of Turkey's commitment to respecting universal norms of democracy and human rights.Footnote ⁸⁵ In particular, it is the “entry ticket” or another step toward Turkey's admission to the European Union, which would confirm its status as a Western democracy.Footnote ⁸⁶ Fuat Keyman, a member of the Wise People Committee and a leading political scientist, similarly sees “coming to terms with the past” as an opportunity for Turkey to move away from its traumatic Kemalist past and toward becoming a powerful regional and global actor. He believes that Turkey's encountering its traumatic past will make it more compatible with the rest of the developed world.Footnote ⁸⁷ Overall, very much like the perceptions of the past and present described earlier, these accounts of the “new future” operate through the temporality of trauma, positing Turkey as a traumatized collective self that should move beyond its past and launch a new start by undergoing a therapeutic process of healing.

TOWARD A CONCLUSION

This article has unpacked how “coming to terms with the past” operates as a public discourse mainly through the temporality of trauma. While contributing to existing debates by providing a new perspective on an issue that is either celebrated or dismissed without sufficient inquiry, it also suggests possible directions for future research by raising questions about both the limits of “coming to terms with the past” discourse and the open-endedness of the politics of memory in Turkey.

By way of conclusion, allow me to highlight some of these questions. As I demonstrated earlier, “coming to terms with the past” reimagines the nation as a collective “we” that is able to reckon with its past and proceed toward a promising future. As Hamber and Wilson have argued, this imposition of forgiveness as a national mission can have the effect of eliding individual differences and lead to “closure,” leaving no place for other emotions to be openly expressed.Footnote ⁸⁸ In a similar vein, Thomas Brudholm maintains that forgiveness is not the one and only viable moral reaction to past violence.Footnote ⁸⁹ Individuals might be uninterested in or unconvinced by forgiveness when it is defined as a national process, and they might look for other ways of dealing with the past, including through resentment. In light of these theoretical insights, it is possible to ask how “coming to terms with the past” situates those who are unwilling to forgive or skeptical about forgiveness as such. Are they seen as “out of sync” with the realities of the current age? For instance, are there group-specific experiences at the local level that might contradict forgiveness as a top-down national process? And what of those individual dissonant voices that narrate the past in terms other than trauma and forgiveness? Examples might include, but are not limited to, Alevis who are not impressed or persuaded by Erdoğan's November 2011 apology for the Dersim Massacre of 1937–38; Armenians who are similarly skeptical about the condolences that Erdoğan delivered in April 2014; and Kurds who raise concerns about the AKP government's sincerity, or its lack thereof, in the ongoing peace negotiations.

Secondly, there are limits to the usefulness of this therapeutic framework, especially its language of trauma and victimhood. As mentioned earlier, some scholars underscore that such a perspective risks individualizing and dehistoricizing social matters, particularly because of the easy parallels drawn between individual and collective cases of trauma. This should not be read as a full-blown rejection of the deployment of psychoanalytical or psychopathological analogies to understand collective phenomena. Rather, as the renowned French historian Henry Rousso has brilliantly put it, “one must be careful not to take them too literally—borrowing terms of this nature, of course, has limits.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Without “careful disciplinary embedding and testing,” Susannah Radstone adds, the therapeutic perspective “may appear to explain more than it actually can.”Footnote ⁹¹

In the Turkish context, only a few have drawn attention to such limits. Hamza Aktan and Irfan Aktan, for instance, argue that the language of victimhood risks erasing the whole history of Kurdish political struggle, mainly by reducing the Kurdish population to a “traumatized group” that seeks to elicit pity from “Turks,” thus obliterating their political subjecthood and agency.Footnote ⁹² Bilgin Ayata and Serra Hakyemez discuss a similar drawback, though in the context of Erdoğan's apology in 2011 for the Dersim Massacre of 1937–38. As they succinctly put it, the apology was very “pragmatic, instrumental, and selective,” and it helped Erdoğan erase differences between Alevis and Islamists by depicting both as “victims” of the Kemalist regime and denying the power imbalance between them.Footnote ⁹³ What this perfectly illustrates is that when appropriated or reframed by the AKP government, “coming to terms with the past” ends up reproducing conservative and nationalistic desires as well as state power. And this line of critique raises another set of questions. What are the implications, not only for the Kurds or the Alevis, but also for other oppositional or minority groups, of self-identifying as “victims” of state violence? What sorts of possibilities does this perspective open up, especially in terms of claim-making? Does this representation obstruct alternative approaches to claim-making that are not centered upon victimhood? What are possible ways of counteracting the AKP government's efforts to take over “coming to terms with the past”?

These questions urge us to reflect on how the therapeutic logic I mapped out in this article might be disrupted. As the Gezi protests in Istanbul in the summer of 2013 show, “coming to terms with the past” can be deployed in nontherapeutic ways. During these protests, another perspective on time and politics emerged: memories of the past, whether of previous or recent struggles against state violence, poverty, environmental and urban degradation, or gender discrimination, flashed up and disrupted the present moment, rather than aiming to restore or heal it. Memory, in the Benjaminian sense, brought to light not only suffering and injustices of the past, but also the persisting impact of past struggles, including both victories and losses. Revealing such moments and experiences of nonclosure is a responsibility that falls upon us, and a task that awaits future research.