Genocidal Thoughts

I was casting my over press reports at the weekend on the outrage in Turkey after the United States Congress defined the mass killings of Armenians in the First World War as ‘genocide.’

The Turks are a proud people, a people with a deeply ingrained sense of national honour. I suppose I can understand, to some degree at least, the collective anger that this move has occasioned. After all, it places their country on the same moral level as Nazi Germany, or at least that’s how they feel. Official channels in Turkey do not deny that something terrible happened in those years, though the tendency is to view these events as part of a pattern of inter-communal violence.

There are a number of things that occur to me. First, I think it wrong to reduce the debate to numbers; it’s just as terrible if a ‘mere’ 300,000 Armenians died rather than 1.5 million, a figure favoured by those who define the event as genocide. Second, and perhaps more important, it’s wrong to get stuck in a bog of semantics.

So far as I am concerned- and I do stress this is a highly personal view- the Armenian tragedy cannot be equated with the Holocaust for the simple reason that it was not premeditated and systematic. In other words, there was no master plan, no proposal to exterminate an entire race, no Turkish Wannsee Conference, no Turkish Heydrich and no Turkish Eichmann. The whole thing, the deportations of a politically suspect minority and all that followed, was just a bloody mess, the kind of horror, though on a larger scale, that had been such a feature of Ottoman history, in episodes like the 1878 Batak Massacre in Bulgaria that so angered Gladstone.

There is, perhaps, a more fundamental point still. The crime was the responsibility of the Ottoman Empire, in general, and the then Young Turk government, in particular. But the Ottoman state disappeared in 1923 when the Republic of Turkey was born, the creation of Mustafa Kemal. This was a genuine young Turkey, a new and modern nation, which emerged from the ruins of an empire that had been degenerating for decades beforehand.

So, yes, I do find it difficult to understand the passion over this lost past. I know it’s an even more remote past but I personally would feel no sense of outrage, bemusement, yes, but not outrage, if the Irish decided to define the crimes of Oliver Cromwell, or the more recent Potato Famine, as forms of ‘genocide.’ There are indeed occasions when the dead are best left to bury the dead.

And so far as the US Congress is concerned one wonders when it will accept a resolution to the effect that what happened to the Indians in the nineteenth century in their own country was genocide. Unlike Turkey the United States does not have the excuse of historical and political fracture. These are matters that should be thought about deeply before rushing into the politics of gesture, often empty and more often meaningless.

Cossack Pirates

I suppose when people think of Cossacks they bring horsemen to mind, but the story of the sea-going variety is every bit as dramatic, and still remembered in Ukrainian foklore. Their story really begins after the Ottoman Turks gained control of the Crimean Khanate, and began to operate a trade in Ukrainian slaves out of the port of Kaffa. In 1553 Dmytro Vyshnevetsky organised several Cossack bands into a single host, centred on a fortified camp, known as a sich. This fortification was located on the lower Dnieper River close to a series of cataracts or za porohamy. Because of this the host took the name of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, and began raiding Turkish settlements along the shores of the Black Sea.

Their first recorded naval raid dates to 1538, with an attack on the fortress of Ochakov. This was followed by more frequent and better-organised raids elsewhere, the freeing of Christian slaves being one of the chief aims, as well as the acqusition of plunder. Their success was such that they attracted the attention of the western European powers, including the Papacy, who made diplomatic overtures in the hope of launching joint ventures against the Turks.

During the early decades of the seventeenth century the Zaporozhian naval war reached the height of its success. Using small, shallow-draft, and highly manoeuvrable galleys known as chaiky, they moved swiftly across the Black Sea. According to the Cossacks' own records, these vessels, carrying a 50 to 70 man crew, could reach the Anatolian coast of Asia Minor from the mouth of the Dnieper River in forty hours. The chaiky were often accompanied by larger galleys, that served as command and control centres. The raids also acquired a distinct political purpose after Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny became hetman in 1613, intending to turn the host into the nucleus of a Ukrainian nation with the support of the European states.

By 1618 the Zaporozhians were members of the Anti-Turkish League, as Schaidachny transferred his seat of power to Kiev, nominally under Polish control, but functionally independent. The fighting qualities of the sea-going Cossacks was even admired in the Ottoman chronicles: "One can safely say that in the entire world one cannot find a people more careless for their lives or having less fear of death; persons versed in navigation assert that because of thir skill and boldness in naval battles these bands are more dangerous than any other enemy."

In 1615 the raiders even sailed to the walls of 'Tsarhorod', as they referred to the Turkish capital, plundering the ports of Mizevna and Archioca. An attempt by the Turks to blockade the mouth of the Dneiper, and thus deny the Cossacks access to the sea, was defeated in the spring of 1616, the raiders going on to capture Kaffa, which was burned down after all of the slaves were freed. That same year Trebizond, in eastern Anatolia, was captured and destroyed. Sultan Ahmed I sent his fleet to the Dneiper in pursuit; but instead of going home the Cossacks once more sailed to Istanbul, where they raided at leisure, even rampaging through the Topkapi Palace, according to one account. The city was raided four more times, once in 1620 and no fewer than three times in 1624.

After 1624 the Zaporozhian raids gradually died out, as the Cossacks began to devote more and more of their martial energies to land-based campaigns, fighting on one side and then the other during such conflicts as the Thirty Years War. But the legacy of the raiders remains an important part of the Ukrainian national consciousness. And if anyone wants a little fanciful insight into the spirit of these indomitable men, then I would suggest looking at Ilya Repin's marvellous painting Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV.

I want to sleep with Muhannad

I see the Turks are making some smash TV shows, a smash in the Arab world anyway. There is a show called Valley of the Wolves in which Israelis are shown doing nasty things to Palestinians, but that’s not the most popular, not by a long-way. You see Arabs don’t always go for high politics; they also like a spot of romance; they like a soap-opera called Noor.

This show, dubbed in Arabic, was first broadcast last year by MBC, a Saudi-owned satellite network viewed across the Arab world. The message is interesting, not one the Arabs are generally used to, cantering around the adventures of an emancipated modern woman. But for women throughout the Middle-East and North Africa that is not the main issue, no, the main issue is a blue-eyed blond former male model who goes by the name of Muhannad. The other issue is a portrait of a marriage; for you see Muhannad is a ‘modern man’, one who even does the dishes!

The bliss of this ideal throws the reality into a distressing contrast. Noor, it is said, is responsible for a rising number of divorces in the Arab world, as women compare Muhannad with their own husbands. In Jordan one woman was divorced after her husband found his picture on her mobile. It gets worse. In Syria another divorce was occasioned after a wife announced to her husband that “I want to sleep with Muhannad for just one night and then die.” :-))

Not surprisingly this trend has caught the attention of the Saudi religious establishment. The Grand Mufti has called for a boycott of the Turkish series, describing it as ‘evil.’ But MBC knows a good thing. Not only does Noor continue but it has obtained the broadcasting rights to other Turkish television dramas. This is how revolutions are made, by popular culture rather than grand politics. It was West German TV that brought down the Berlin Wall as much as anything else. Perhaps the Turks will bring their Muslim cousins right into the modern age, the age of Noor and dishy Muhannad.