’My son, my name is Süleyman. And I am circumcised.’
Güncelleme Tarihi:
Oluşturulma Tarihi: Aralık 20, 2008 00:00
A long time ago, only it could have been last week, I had my first real introduction to the complexity of the conflicting Armenian and Turkish historical narratives that once again we see reverberating through the socio-political spectrum.
It is always an incendiary issue, this symbolic matter of "genocide" with alleged, provoked, non-existent, or any other of the many adjectives that precede the noun. We here at the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review have worked very hard to explore and reflect the many facets of the ongoing rapprochement between Turks and Armenians. We have also sought to do the same with the many areas of continuing white hot controversy, including the newly launched Web site www.ozurdiliyoruz.com that seeks to be a vehicle for strictly personal Turkish apologies for Armenian suffering. We have also reflected the reaction and criticism to this effort, some of it noteworthy for its sober maturity, some of it less so. We continue today, in a look at the veracity of online information gathering by reporter Sevim Songün.
This is not a debate in which we take a position, for that is not our job. It is an issue to which we feel particularly close. As thoughtful readers know, we are a newspaper with a staff whose political sensibilities cover all points of the ideological compass. None of the monotheisms is without at least an adherent or two among us. We are well equipped both intellectually and in terms of experience and perspective to cover incendiary social issues ... including this one.
Most weekends I try and use this column to offer a window into the Daily News newsroom, a look inside at just who we are, how we think and how we approach our task. The dynamics of the reporting process are too often opaque; they should not be.
So I choose to share a formative experience in the shaping of my own outlook on this issue that came long before I ever imagined I would manage any newspaper, let alone a Turkish one. In the early 1990s, I was a reporter in Washington assigned to the Department of Agriculture. About as international as I got was in analyzing the tariff rates on Colombian flower imports or the seasonal volumes of Chilean grape production.
But one day I spied a press release on a colleague’s desk. It was for a rally on April 24, the day Armenians traditionally mark the anniversary of this chapter in history. Five elderly "survivors" of the events of 1915, who were receiving medallions in a ceremony at the Kennedy Center, would be available for interviews on that day at Dupont Circle, a park in the center of Washington. Reporters would have the chance to hear their stories, and then join a march down Massachusetts Avenue to protest in front of the Turkish Embassy. No one else at the bureau was interested. So I decided to go to DuPont Circle.
There was a scattering of tables and chairs, with the five elderly witnesses to history seated separately. There was a line of reporters; when a witness became available, the scribe at the front of the line was invited to sit down for an interview. I drew a woman whose name I remember as Garabedian. I should mention, however, that I failed in an effort to access the U.S.A. Today electronic archive Friday so I may be mistaken.
She was from the city of Maraş. She had lost her entire family and the graphic description of slaughter does not need repeating here. As she told her story, she shared a few lines of blasphemy in Turkish, things apparently said during the assault on her family. She then started to translate in to English. I responded in Turkish, addressing her as "aunt," which somehow seemed appropriate. I said that she could continue, that I spoke Turkish as well. I also sought to explain that I was not Turkish, that the language was just a piece of an accidental childhood. I didn’t get that far. She would not hear it.
"The Turks saved me and my sisters," she declared, bursting into tears and throwing her arms around me. "Oh, to meet a Turk." Her narrative then changed and the "Turks" become the heroes of the story, the evildoers another group.
This turn in storytelling events surprised me as well as the minders. But then the elderly man decrying the Turks to a reporter at the next table overheard us. I will never forget his exact introduction as he abandoned the journalist with whom he was speaking and ran to grasp my hand: "Oğlum, oğlum, adım Süleyman. Ben sünnetliyim." (My son, my son, my name is Süleyman. And I am circumcised.)
A native of Sivas, he chose to walk with me all the way down Massachusetts Avenue. In Turkish, he described his adoption by a Turkish family, how he was wrested away from them by Christian missionaries and raised in an orphanage in Greece. His story included his return to Sivas to rejoin his adoptive family in the 1940s, the adventure of trading currency on Istanbul’s black market in the 1950s and ultimately his migration to Israel in the 1960s. He took his adoptive "Muslim" father to live with him in Jerusalem, where he died. The "father" was buried with Islamic rites by the son who considered himself a Christian. Ultimately "Süleyman bey" as I was calling him, moved to Florida and he was then living in a rest home.
We made our farewells. I wrote some kind of story, which I actually hope to retrieve out of curiosity. But I am sure it was not much. There is no major insight here. Very old people. Layers of trauma. The desire to please the listener. And a young farm reporter who just happened to speak Turkish, unsure of himself. It is just an anecdote really, one that can lead to no serious conclusion, no reasoned judgment.
But my new friends "Süleyman bey" and "Mrs. Garabedian" did offer me a lesson that day, one for an editor some two decades hence. The lesson I draw is that this ongoing story, despite the passage of nearly a century, is one at the boundaries of human endurance, of extraordinary pain, of clashing traumas, of conflicting narratives and of the deepest emotions. We reporters must strive to make things clear, a task that too often becomes an exercise in simplification. Nothing in this story, the story of Turks and Armenians, is simple.
Few journalistic challenges rise to this level of complexity. But it is a challenge that we are up to. We don’t take sides. We just take notes. And we are and will be as complete in our reporting as humanly possible as this difficult story continues. This is our commitment. I believe Süleyman bey and Mrs. Garabedian would expect nothing less.
David Judson is the editor-in-chief of the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review
This is not a debate in which we take a position, for that is not our job. It is an issue to which we feel particularly close. As thoughtful readers know, we are a newspaper with a staff whose political sensibilities cover all points of the ideological compass. None of the monotheisms is without at least an adherent or two among us. We are well equipped both intellectually and in terms of experience and perspective to cover incendiary social issues ... including this one.
Most weekends I try and use this column to offer a window into the Daily News newsroom, a look inside at just who we are, how we think and how we approach our task. The dynamics of the reporting process are too often opaque; they should not be.
So I choose to share a formative experience in the shaping of my own outlook on this issue that came long before I ever imagined I would manage any newspaper, let alone a Turkish one. In the early 1990s, I was a reporter in Washington assigned to the Department of Agriculture. About as international as I got was in analyzing the tariff rates on Colombian flower imports or the seasonal volumes of Chilean grape production.
But one day I spied a press release on a colleague’s desk. It was for a rally on April 24, the day Armenians traditionally mark the anniversary of this chapter in history. Five elderly "survivors" of the events of 1915, who were receiving medallions in a ceremony at the Kennedy Center, would be available for interviews on that day at Dupont Circle, a park in the center of Washington. Reporters would have the chance to hear their stories, and then join a march down Massachusetts Avenue to protest in front of the Turkish Embassy. No one else at the bureau was interested. So I decided to go to DuPont Circle.
There was a scattering of tables and chairs, with the five elderly witnesses to history seated separately. There was a line of reporters; when a witness became available, the scribe at the front of the line was invited to sit down for an interview. I drew a woman whose name I remember as Garabedian. I should mention, however, that I failed in an effort to access the U.S.A. Today electronic archive Friday so I may be mistaken.
She was from the city of Maraş. She had lost her entire family and the graphic description of slaughter does not need repeating here. As she told her story, she shared a few lines of blasphemy in Turkish, things apparently said during the assault on her family. She then started to translate in to English. I responded in Turkish, addressing her as "aunt," which somehow seemed appropriate. I said that she could continue, that I spoke Turkish as well. I also sought to explain that I was not Turkish, that the language was just a piece of an accidental childhood. I didn’t get that far. She would not hear it.
"The Turks saved me and my sisters," she declared, bursting into tears and throwing her arms around me. "Oh, to meet a Turk." Her narrative then changed and the "Turks" become the heroes of the story, the evildoers another group.
This turn in storytelling events surprised me as well as the minders. But then the elderly man decrying the Turks to a reporter at the next table overheard us. I will never forget his exact introduction as he abandoned the journalist with whom he was speaking and ran to grasp my hand: "Oğlum, oğlum, adım Süleyman. Ben sünnetliyim." (My son, my son, my name is Süleyman. And I am circumcised.)
A native of Sivas, he chose to walk with me all the way down Massachusetts Avenue. In Turkish, he described his adoption by a Turkish family, how he was wrested away from them by Christian missionaries and raised in an orphanage in Greece. His story included his return to Sivas to rejoin his adoptive family in the 1940s, the adventure of trading currency on Istanbul’s black market in the 1950s and ultimately his migration to Israel in the 1960s. He took his adoptive "Muslim" father to live with him in Jerusalem, where he died. The "father" was buried with Islamic rites by the son who considered himself a Christian. Ultimately "Süleyman bey" as I was calling him, moved to Florida and he was then living in a rest home.
We made our farewells. I wrote some kind of story, which I actually hope to retrieve out of curiosity. But I am sure it was not much. There is no major insight here. Very old people. Layers of trauma. The desire to please the listener. And a young farm reporter who just happened to speak Turkish, unsure of himself. It is just an anecdote really, one that can lead to no serious conclusion, no reasoned judgment.
But my new friends "Süleyman bey" and "Mrs. Garabedian" did offer me a lesson that day, one for an editor some two decades hence. The lesson I draw is that this ongoing story, despite the passage of nearly a century, is one at the boundaries of human endurance, of extraordinary pain, of clashing traumas, of conflicting narratives and of the deepest emotions. We reporters must strive to make things clear, a task that too often becomes an exercise in simplification. Nothing in this story, the story of Turks and Armenians, is simple.
Few journalistic challenges rise to this level of complexity. But it is a challenge that we are up to. We don’t take sides. We just take notes. And we are and will be as complete in our reporting as humanly possible as this difficult story continues. This is our commitment. I believe Süleyman bey and Mrs. Garabedian would expect nothing less.
David Judson is the editor-in-chief of the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review