Istanbul, City of the Fearless. Christopher Houston
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and ideals pursued in that intense and formative period. T. S. Eliot’s lines from the play Murder in the Cathedral capture something of TKP activists’ discomfited position in the shift to a post–Cold War world: “The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.” Akın’s more prosaic words express the same sentiment: “We learned that for all those years we had pursued not an empty [boş] politics, but worse, a wrong one. This was a bigger trauma for us than 12 Eylül.” Testifying to the intrinsically temporal and affective character of consciousness, and to how memory both retains and reinterprets past experience in each new moment of meaning, Filiz (TKP) describes a similarly shattering perceptual modification in 1988 and its reconstituting of other entities and relationships:
My father was a Democrat Party parliamentarian. He was arrested in the coup [1960] and stayed in prison for two years; I remember visiting him in Kayseri when I was six. I was always interested in politics, and realized later that I got my feelings of justice [adalet duygusu] from him. I never knew that my father paid for roads, etcetera from his own pocket. We owned land, were very rich, but I was uncomfortable with our wealth. I first began getting interested in politics through reading novels, and felt uncomfortable at injustice. Sometime in the 1970s my father gave me a Solzhenitsyn novel, but I refused to read “bourgeois” lies/literature. When I went to Moscow for three months in 1988, I was criticizing the perestroika politics, and a party historian gave me the same novel. “This is true,” he said, and I began to cry. I was changed.
Softly, almost in passing, she added, “What a pity I was never able to talk about this with my father before he died.”
Both accounts reveal the weighty loss of an esteemed political ethic, so that activists’ past cause of revolution is felt to have lost its footing in any legitimate continuing struggle. Militants’ feelings of shock and sadness were connected to the great sacrifices they had made—in some cases involving a rift with family—for principles that they no longer perceived to be true.
Importantly, it was not just TKP members and sympathizers who in interviews reflected on acts and practices performed for reasons now perceived as wrong. Activists from virtually all factions expressed an intense ambivalence about those years of sound and fury. Thus Nuriye (THKP-C) (Turkish People’s Liberation Party-Front) noted that, “We [the left] also did wrong things that we haven’t come to terms with. How could we have entered into the killing of a seventeen-year-old ülkücü so easily?” Ömer (MHP) felt that “there was no time to think, we were drowning in events/action. There was no balance. Our movement started in love and ended in a lake of blood.” Mehmet Metiner (see above) remembered slapping someone for eating during Ramazan, and confessed that then “everyone sought to gain control before someone else, with the aim of restricting the world of those others. Perhaps the government would change but the logic of authority and nature of it would have been exactly the same. The hand that held the stick would have been different but the stick would still have worked” (2008: 83). Ümit (Dev-Sol) said something similar, that in those years “normal things were abnormal; abnormal things became normal. We saw ourselves as heroes [kahramanlar]. The junta killed hundreds of people, but if we came to power, we would have killed thousands.” And Erdoğan (Kurtuluş) noted pensively that “if we hadn’t been so ambitious or impatient, and just tried to provide services to the poor, we would have been more successful. And if we weren’t so fragmented among ourselves. . . .” Finally, Özlem (THKP-C) diagnosed the reason for the unhappy and asymmetrical relationship between political factions and local people in the shantytowns (see chapter 4): “We wanted to replace the existing order. But gecekondu people wanted to create an order. They didn’t care that someone lived in a köşk (mansion), like we cared; they wanted food, work, and a house. We were valuable to them because we gave: importantly, we looked like we were strong and capable. But they were also scared of us: I raised a finger to a man who hit his wife, and we put them in danger as the fighting spread.”
2.4 COMMEMORATING ACTIVISM
Most significantly, ex-militants’ chastened perspective on the spatial politics of the period before the military coup reveals a profound ambiguity over whether, or how, to commemorate their project of revolution, whose rationale or romance has been modified in the light of disillusionment with Kemalism, socialism, and anti-communism.15 For many activists there has been no easy acceptance of vindication or vice, victimhood or virtue that might modulate or temper the profusion of affective memories immanent in bodies, places, objects, and sounds; no shared collective memory that might authorize an agreed-upon narrative of the past. Even the military do not celebrate 12 Eylül. Casey argues that commemoration inheres in the action of “carrying the past forward through the present so as to perdure in the future” (1987: 256). He goes on to say that the past can only be honored and preserved in this way “if it has attained a certain consistent selfsameness in the wake of the perishing of the particulars by which it had once presented itself” (256, my emphasis). Which particulars must perish so as to generate the “selfsameness” of the past? Whose past is to be memorialized in its reenactment? If many ex-activists in the forty or more years since those years have elected not to commemorate their acts despite an abundance of particular memories of the city, could not this, too, constitute an honoring of the past? Rather than signifying something negative—say the absence of an ethically efficacious common narrative regarding their past deeds—non-commemoration may express humility on the part of ex-militants, generated by an awareness of the moral ambiguity of their actions. With memorialization is born the first lie.
One consequence, however, as we have noted already, is the difficulty activists have had in translating the dramatic sense and context of their memories of urban politics in Istanbul to non-activist others, even to their own children. Further, alongside this reluctance of many ex-revolutionaries to mythologize or lionize the spatial activism of their generation, we must revisit military actors’ strategies to manufacture a public condemnation of it, so as to better comprehend how up until recently each has combined to make commemoration of those years so problematic. Noting that forgetting is not a “unitary phenomenon,” Paul Connerton (2008) identifies a number of its forms. As we have already seen in their expunging of place names, the junta has pursued his first type, “repressive erasure.” It was exercised most systematically in their prohibition of the publishing of activists’ written or spoken defense or of their petitions in the huge number of court cases opened up by army prosecutors in military courts in the immediate years after the coup. In reporting the list of charges against activists—typically armed robbery, murder, bombing of property, arson, escaping from prison, membership in an illegal organization, communist propaganda, separatist activities and so on—newspapers were forbidden to print that confessions were extracted under torture, or that defendants were not allowed to read to the courts prepared statements.16 The result was that throughout those years there was no legitimate or sanctioned way for militants to publicly testify to or justify their intentions and experiences. Thus, Filiz felt that “Turkey lived through fascism in the ’80s, though even now it is not said very openly. It was hard to know what was happening after the coup: You heard that so and so was arrested, that x was killed, or y tortured, that this house had been searched. In this way people lived through a massive trauma.”
Connerton’s second and third types, “prescriptive forgetting” and “forgetting that is constitutive of a new identity,” do not apply, as they involve a decision to consciously forget—perhaps in an amnesty (literally, to not remember)—that which once was known, not to assign to oblivion past actions that have never been remembered. His fourth, fifth, and sixth types are not relevant here. However, his last form, which he calls “forgetting as humiliated silence,” is more suggestive. This is a forgetting that is not solely “a matter of overt activity on the part of a state apparatus” (2008: 67) but also expresses civil society’s exhaustion and disillusion with a project, as well as its experiences of shame and fear. In particular, the trauma of mass torture of activists in prison, their returning home injured and broken with no prospect of redress or rehabilitation, and “legal” press censorship in the 1980s and ’90s (engineered through the 1982 constitution) all combined to produce decades of censorship and self-censorship, of buried grief and strictly controlled memories. Jenny White found that still in the late