Editorial of novembre 1999

Belonging to a group, any kind of group, nation, religion, language, familly, clan, marriage, excludes a part of us from the largest part of mankind, and closes us in the borders of who we want to be and who we refuse. But this rejected personnality, which we deny for being ourselves, does not disappear, it tracks us, it hangs heavy on us, in this relation, this attraction between two opposite poles, the self and the Other, which against I want to exist. I call it our negative personnality.

Thus, all the nations grew against this black, invisible twin, who conforted their choices : the Barbarian or the man outside the City, the ennemy, or more slightly the Other, the Stranger. And more the identity, more the national particularism of a people is powerful (I mean serene, unaggressive, benevolent), more its relation with this Other who structures it, is ambiguous, with a fascinated attraction to this lost soul. Otherwise, without this merry self confidence, Homere would have not sing the Andromaque's smiling tears, Aeschylus would have not written The Persians with the cries and the remorses of his ennemies.

The historical background of Turkish people is quite bright and famous to satisfy any national proudness. And during a long time, the Turks had lived among another people, sometime as a group linguistically, ethnically and socially allogenous, without their identity or the conscience of their identity had never been altered. Of course, the decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire, its dismemberment by the great powers, and its implosion provoked by the various nationalism that grew with the Turkish national awareness caused this alteration. The last decades of the Empire were a serie of massacres and defiance whose Christians, suspected to be in collusion with Europa, were the first victims. But after ? When the danger of dismemberment was over, when the Treaty of Lausanne had been ratified in place of the one of Sèvres, why the pressure never ceased against the national "minorities" ? Since 1923, what kind of destruction threats Turkey ? "Turkey is surrounded by its ennemies", "A Turk has just for friend another Turk" : this is, more or less frankly, the background of all the relations between Turkey and its neighbours, and any problem with its own minorities could be nothing but a "malevolent stranger's activities".

On 29th October 1923, the Republic had been instaured on the basis of a single nation. Indeed, none of these Atatürk's children stemmed from Ionia or Phrygia, from Constantinopolis, Armenia or Kurdistan, but they were all the Turkmen's sons and all had risen from the steppes of Central Asia, following Gengis Khan and Timur Lang. "I am Turk/ Great is my race". Indeed, Turkey wishes to be never Garecian nor Armenian, nor Kurd, and for that reason it feels all Stranger as a threaten, a negation of its false and fragile identity, a disturbing remind of its true past, and for that reason, it is not able to have another friend than itself. But the last target of its fear, its more dangerous ennemy, the intruder which it is not able to expel from itself, is its own past, its true soul, I mean Anatolia.

Sandrine Alexie

Summary