Rebel Land: Among Turkey’s Forgotten Peoples by Christopher de Bellaigue
Christopher de Bellaigue begins his account of Eastern Turkey with an astonishing admission: that a 1995 article on Turkey and its history he had written for the New York Review of Books, after living in the country for many years, learning to speak the language fluently, and falling in love with the country and its people, was fundamentally flawed. “I found to my dismay that I had got my information about Abdulhamit II and about the Armenian massacres of 1915 only from Turkish or pro-Turkish authors.” Accused in a letter to the publication by Harvard’s James Russell of having “done his part to keep Turkey’s past hidden,” de Bellaigue writes “Russell had a point.”
After a period in Iran, de Bellaigue returns to Turkey to, in effect, make amends and “confront the story of how Asia Minor had gone form being perhaps the most cosmopolitan place on earth to a declared homogeneous nation state, with what agonies and what cost.” This he does by telling the story from the inside out, from a base in Varto, a small town in Eastern Anatolia, home to Kurds, Alevis, Armenians—and Turks. The past is intertwined inextricably with a present that can sometimes seem more part of the nineteenth century than the twenty-first.
Rebel Land is a brutally honest book, as strict in its judgments of the author (journalists are not often as aware as Christopher de Bellaigue of their own intellectual and emotional baggage) as the people he meets and the historical personages he researches, a necessity given the conditions of direct and indirect oppression, ethnic and religious competition (if not always hatred) endured and perpetrated by the various groups on each other.
It is also a complicated book: it can be hard to keep track of the people, current and historical, whose stories de Bellaigue recounts. The political issues can sometimes seem obscure. The region is remote and, except for the way the Kurdish region overlaps into Iraq, perhaps not obviously immediately relevant to those issues which make today’s international headlines.
But as remote as Anatolian politics may seem to those from Asia farther East, one cannot help but see the similarities between Turkey’s ethnic conundrum and that of China. The path from a multi-ethnic empire to a nation-state is not an easy one, when citizenship and loyalty gets conflated with the majority language, culture and heritage: unrest, sometimes violent, is an all-too-common result, with negative consequences for foreign relations. Turkey may only now be pulling its national head out of the sand.
One cannot live long in this part of Asia without being sensitive to the accusation that foreigners have little or no business commenting on domestic affairs of which their understanding is, by necessity, that of an outsider. Nevertheless, the experience of others can be illustrative and de Bellaigue has much to say of potential relevance far beyond the borders of the region and country of which he writes.