Occidentalism and Registers of Truth The Politics of Archives in Turkey

9
Occidentalism and registers \

of truth: The politics of s
archives in Turkey I
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Department of Sociology, *
Meltem Ahiska Bogazici University -<
What is an archive, and how does it relate to our sense of history and,
moreover, to our sense of the present? This question stands at the
interstices of bureaucracy, historiography, and memory. Needless to say, it
is also a highly political question. This article deals with the politics of
archives, specifically as it manifests itself in Turkey. My aim in looking at
the problem of archives is to further raise questions about the relation of
history, memory, and truth. The politics of archives is a significant topic
today, not only in Turkey, but also, for example, in many post-communist
countries, regarding which past records of the old totalitarian regimes
should be made public in the age of so-called democracy. In this respect,
archives are not only the concerns of historians who are interested in
recovering the past, but also of political rulers who aim to frame the past for
present purposes.
The debate on the publicizing of archives directly relates to questions of
authenticating the past. However, archives do not usually reveal
unmediated truths. Most often, they are sites of destruction, falsification,
and corruption. In Starn's words, they can be "surrogates of God" but "of
the devil too."1 There are many historical cases where the existing archives
have been destroyed by official decree. For example, just after the French
Revolution, vandalism was officially sanctioned by a decree of 1792: "All
the genealogical charters which shall be found in a public depository,
Author's Note: I would like to thank all the participants of the "The Politics of Remembering" workshop
in Bogazici University (2003) for their valuable discussions on social memory and on this paper first
submitted there. I also owe thanks to the organizers and participants of the "Continuity/Rupture:
Perspectives on the past, the present and change" symposium organized by the Program in
Cultures, Civilizations and Ideas, Bilkent University (2004) for their instructive comments and
questions on the slightly changed version of this paper delivered there as a keynote speech. Finally,
I would like to thank Biray Kolluoglu Kirli for her insightful contributions, and Randolph Starn and
Cengiz Kirli, for their very helpful suggestions as historians, for thinking on the meaning of archives.
1 Randolph Starn, "Truths in the Archives," Common Knowledge 8, no. 2 (2002): 387.
New Perspectives on Turkey, no. 34 (2006): 9-29.

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10 Meltem Ahiska
i whatever it may be, shall be burned."2 There was a deliberate intention to

I destroy the past in order to create a new present. However, we also know
^ that the Imperial Archives in Paris were established by Napoleon by looting
archives all over Europe; thus, the present then was very much fabricated
> by power. A more recent example comes from Iraq: the
u destruction/fabrication of archives has also been a significant aspect of the
S; ongoing war. Journalist Robert Fisk gives a vivid, yet tragic account: "So
yesterday was the burning of books. First came the looters, then the
j* arsonists. It was the final chapter in the sacking of Bagdat. The National
z
Library and Archives, a priceless treasure of Ottoman historical
documents, including the old royal archives in Iraq, were turned to ashes in
3000 degrees of heat. Then the library of Korans at the Ministry of
Religious Endowment was set ablaze."3 Paradoxically, the war leading to
the destruction of archives in Iraq had been justified by claiming that
archives demonstrating the existence of weapons of mass destruction, the
truth of which was highly contested. Much debate ensued oVer whether
these documents concerning these weapons were true or false, and this led
to government investigations. These two examples suffice to introduce us
to what is at stake in the politics of archives.
Today, one of the most heated debates about archives in Turkey centers
on the issue of the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire in the early
years of twentieth century. While opposing historians compete for "the
truth" by referring to different documents in the Ottoman archives, and
while some historians allege that the Ottoman archives are not fully
accessible,4 the archives have become suspect in terms of their
transparency to support competing claims and accusations. Furthermore,
critical historians working on the recent past also face a problem of indirect
censorship under the guise of technical issues, such as classification and
repair of documents. For example, historians' requests for certain
documents may be rejected on the grounds of irrelevance or of documents
being fragile.5 The claim of irrelevance is especially striking, given that the
2 Cited by Starn, see Ibid.: 395.

3 Independent, 15 April 2003.
4 Turkey decided to open the Ottoman Archives to academic research related to Armenians in the late
1980s as a potential proof of its immunity from the so-called Armenian Genocide; however, this did
not help to end either the academic or the political debate on the status of archives and the
Armenian Genocide. The fierce debate is still continuing in various conferences and workshops in
Turkey, as well as in the form of national and international political statements. The conference
organized by Bogazicj, Bilgi, and Sabanci Universities in September 2005, "Ottoman Armenians
during the Decline of the Empire," was one of the first attempts to historicize the question in Turkey.
Many of the papers in the conference were based on archival research; however, the assumed
transparency of the archives was also questioned through a critical-historical perspective.
5 I would like thank Cengiz Kirli for drawing my attention to this point. His comments on my paper
11
pre-processing of documents in the institution under certain categories ^

most likely involves choices based on political concerns.
However, my aim in this article is not to focus on censorship or
falsification of archives relating to certain politically charged questions, iS
such as the Armenian Genocide, despite their very important significance -
for history writing and historical truth. Instead, I will engage with the
social aspects and impacts of archive keeping and its failures. In that
respect, what interests me more for the purposes of my arguments here is ^
the general indifference to public archives in Turkey. Therefore, I attend to *
the question of routine destruction of archives, namely the "missing "*
archives" in Turkish national history, under what seems to be normal
circumstances. I must make it clear that by "missing archives" I do not
mean the literal non-existence of archives. There are, of course, many
archival documents in the Ottoman Archives in Istanbul and the
Republican Archives in Ankara and in other various institutions.
Furthermore, archival documents can be found in personal collections or
from booksellers. What I mean by "missing," then, is the social
insignificance of archives for national history, as can be deducted from the
fact that they are often and easily dismissed as irrelevant. Therefore, I am
using the term "missing archives" as a native category, since it is also a topic
for daily conversations, circulating stories, and narratives. The accounts
regarding the instances of the destruction of archives rarely appear in the
news, but more often in some, literary or other, narratives of memory.
However, memory is not an unproblematic concept. Memories are also
structured and narrativized within power relations, and memory does not
have a homogeneous subject. Thus, instead of emphasizing the immediate
redemptive force of memory to fill in for the missing archives, I attempt to
problematize the construction of truth by pointing to different registers of
telling the truth in Turkey.
I would argue that the claims of transparency and democracy for the
archives, advanced by official archivists and historians,6 point to one
were very instructive for re-writing some parts, although I must admit that I could not fully address
all of his important questions.
6 An official internet site in English, entitled "Access to Documents and Condition of the Turkish
Archives," contains statements such as: "'Transparency,' which is the main principle of modern
archival studies, is also a basic principle which applies to Turkish archives. In the Turkish archives
classified documents are immediately available to researchers without any restrictions. As a matter
of fact, from the beginning of 1900 up to the present, thousands of researchers from 78 countries
including the USA, England, France, Canada, Israel, Hungary, the Netherlands, Japan, Spain, Italy,
Russia, Bulgaria, Albania, Algeria, Kuwait, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Greece, Iran and Romania have
carried out and are still carrying out research on the Ottoman Archives of the Prime Ministry"
(www.turkses.com). Here not only the self-assured claims of democracy, but also the equation of
Turkish Archives with Ottoman Archives is interesting. I will dwell on this latter point later below.
12 Meltem Ahiska
u register of "truth," which is informed by power relations, but also shaped

" in relation to the timeless fantasy of Turkey being a modern/Western
z country. Here, an imagined Western audience is addressed, albeit
dialogically against the alleged claims of falsification and censorship, as in
> the case of documents pertaining to the Armenian Genocide. Although the
u claimed transparency is practically and politically contested, the
S; constitution of this kind of truth cannot be just rendered a lie and cast aside;
a*
it deserves critical analysis both in its dialogical character and its
j* connection to other truths that are generated in other media. Therefore, we
z
should also attend to other registers of truth at intimate levels.7 The term
"intimate" refers to what everybody knows but rarely talks about in a
public political language. In this context, I would argue that both the official
and intimate accounts, which, in most cases, seem to oppose each other, are
in fact interdependent. I suggest that Occidentalism,8 as a
conceptualization that attempts to situate complex political subjectivity in
non-Western contexts, may provide a frame of analysis to address this
interdependency, and tackle some issues regarding the politics of archives.
Archives, history, and the Turkish case
An archive is considered to be a document of any kind, a concrete record
that transmits information as registered by past generations. The
institutional frame that keeps, classifies, and publicizes archives marks the
significance and the power of the archive. The extension of archive-keeping
not only in state institutions but also in other public or private
institutionssuch as museums, libraries, universities and various
foundationsis a modern phenomenon. Gillis argues, together with Pierre
Nora, that prior to the nineteenth century, memory was a pervasive part of
life: "Ordinary people felt the past to be so much a part of their present that
they perceived no urgent need to record, to objectify, and to preserve it."9
Institutionalized memory in the form of history belonged only to the elite
classes: "Only the aristocracy, the church, and the monarchical state had
need of institutionalized memory. Outside the elite classes, archives,
genealogies, family portraits, and biographies were extremely rare; and
there was no vast bureaucracy of memory as there is today."10 When
7 I use the term "intimate" with reference to Herzfeld's term "cultural intimacy." See, Michael
Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State (London: Routledge, 1997).
8 I have developed the concept of Occidentalism elsewhere. See Meltem Ahiska, "Occidentalism: The
Historical Fantasy of the Modern," South Atlantic Quarterly 102, no. 2/3 (2003), Meltem Ahiska,
Radyonun Sihirli Kapisi: Carbiyatfihk ve Politik Oznellik (Istanbul: Metis, 2005).
9 John R. Gillis, "Memory and Identity: The History of a Relationship," in Commemorations: The Politics
of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 6.
10 Ibid.
13
*
history developed by monopolizing forms of popular memory, the archives

as repositories of factual evidence stood out as the primary site of the ,,
authentication of the past. Researchers, especially historians, have a certain
passion for the archives. Archives' becoming the main source for history m
writing has been part of the establishment of modern history as a i
distinguished discipline in the nineteenth century. Or in Starn's words, "it
is only since the nineteenth century that archives have been primary sites
of the labor and legitimacy of professional historians, their equivalent of
laboratories or fieldwork."11 However, it is not only the historians who are *
interested in archives. Institutional public archives, which regulate the "*
documents concerning the usable past of the nation, also constitute one of
the primary sites at which the assumed natural connection between the
state and the modern nation has been established. Hence, in many
European countries, the national or public archives have had an important
role in sustaining the legitimacy of governments by transforming the past
into a public good. For example, the Public Record Office in Britain is
positioned as an institution that serves the public's demand for
information on past public events, as well as on private histories. In France,
as some archivists would argue, the public archives have existed as a proof
of the public's legal rights beginning in the nineteenth century,
contributing to the idea of democracy.12 Archives in an institutional
framein Derrida's wordskeep the order and give an order, for thinking
about the past, the present and the future.13
The archives, in this respect, have been regarded both by positivist
historians and governments as technical and transparent media of
information that narrow the gap between historiography and truth. The
close connection of history to truth was shaped in the process of nation-
building and of history becoming the history of the nation. But it is this
very idea of national history corresponding to truth that has been contested
throughout the history of modern nations. When, for example, as Pierre
Nora argues, state and nation were decoupled in mid-twentieth-century
France due to various social and political discontinuities, the nation is no
longer taken as a cause, but as given; consequently, the state loses its
pedagogical authority, which leads to the pluralization and differentiation
of archives, as well of histories in society.14 The post-colonial rupture also
11 Starn, "Truths in the Archives."

12 Michael Cook, "Arsivlerin Kullanimi ve Ydnetimi: Bir Arsiv Hizmetinin Ulkedeki Yeri," in Giinumiizde
Arsiv Ybnetimi: Meslek Egitiminin Temelleri, ed. (ale Baysal (istanbul: Istanbul Oniversitesi, 1984).
13 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996).
14 Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux De Memoire," Representations, no. 26 (Spring
1989).
14 Meltem Ahiska
sheds radical doubt on the status of archives as bearing the national truth.
* For example, colonial archives have been used to construct the history of
2 new post-colonial nations, such as India, wresting apart a history separate
from the colonizer. Furthermore, post-colonial critics have attended to the
> question of colonial archives as part of an epistemic violence, silencing the
u non-elite histories of colonized contexts.
UJ
In Turkey, there is no social counterpart to the problematization of

archives in terms of their relation to history and truth. Except for a few
* critical historians who formulate methodological questions regarding
z
archives,15 and except for few vital political debates on the status of
archives, archives remain untouched as a social and a political problem.
Turkish national archivists still claim to associate transparency and
democracy with archives. In the mid-1990s, the head of the General
Directorate of State Archives, in his book on archives, states: "It is known
that the true knowledge on history depends on first-hand original
documents, namely archival documents. There can be no history writing
and no clarification as to what really happened in history without
documents. To write history on assumptions, to judge or evaluate the
events of a certain period without knowing the archival documents
contradicts the impartiality and scientific objectivity of history as a
science."16 However, the practical situation and its perception in Turkey are
far from supporting these claims. Also, while there seems to be a
considerable national and international concern regarding the way the
Ottoman archives are kept and publicized in Turkey, the documentation of
the operations of governments and various national institutions have not
enjoyed the same kind of scrutiny. Turkish Archives most often are simply
equated with the Ottoman Archives.17 National historians usually share
the commonsensical knowledge that Turkish national archives do not
really provide rich sources for historiography.
The problem of archives is usually posed as a technical problem and in
relation to a certain underdevelopment in comparison with the West. For
example, the newsletter of Turkish archivists introduced their first issue
by asserting that "although the tradition of archive keeping is very old in
Turkey, because the subject has been neglected in the Republican period
15 For example, Selim Deringil, historian of the late Ottoman Empire, addressed in his paper questions
of method and pointed to the importance of contextualization for interpreting archival documents.
See, Selim Deringil, "Archives and the Armenian Question: 'Grabbing the Document by the Throat'"
(paper presented at the Ottoman Armenians during the Decline of the Empire, istanbul, 2005).
16 ismet Binark, Turk Arsivlerinin Ktsa Tarihcesi ve Devlet Arsivleri Cenel Miidurlugu'riun Faaliyetleri
(Ankara: T.C. Bajbakanlik Devlet Arsivleri Cenel Miidurlugu, 1994), v.
17 See Access to Documents and Condition of the Turkish Archives; available from www.turkses.com.
15
and there has been a rupture in the tradition, archiving in Turkey could not *
reach the development of the West."18 It is also worthwhile to look at the
published proceedings of a conference organized by istanbul University
on archive management in order to get a further sense of how archivists m
themselves speak of a problem of archives. Jale Baysal, who has edited the ~
proceedings, states in the introduction: "the question of archives is a
contemporary and lively subject, which has often made its way into the
national press. In fact, in some of its aspects, this is a problem that can not
be really solved."19 This vague acknowledgment of a problem, points not 5
also to the national archives, but evokes the issue of the historical archives, "
that is, the Ottoman archives. Baysal talks about a technical inadequacy
(that "everybody knows to exist," she says) in managing the vast archives
of the Ottoman Empirewhich have been kept rigorously for its duration
of 600 years. She also briefly emphasizes the need to attend to the
question of slowly accumulating archives in what she names "the young
republic."
The above accounts introduce, but do not analyze, several crucial
questions: Why is archiving neglected in Turkey, especially since it could
have served ideological legitimacy and hegemony, as it did in the case of
England and France? Why and how does the above-mentioned rupture in
the so-called traditional archive-keeping occur, both technically and
socially? And, given the failures in archive-keeping, why is it not a scholarly
and politically discussed issue? As I have tried to show by some examples,
the discourse of archivists generally poses the problem as a technical one.
According to this discourse, technical or technological inadequacy
contributes to a failure in the management of archives. However, the
technical discourse cannot really address the fact that significant portions
of national archives have not only been censored and falsified, but also
destroyed. These are registered in more ordinary media. Once in a while we
read in the newspapers that some public archives were accidentally burned
or were destroyed due to unfavorable conditions of storage. For example, a
newspaper clip from 1999 that I still keep in my personal archive reads that
the archives of the National Senate between 1961 and 1980 were
destroyed. The directors of the Archives of the National Assembly claim
that this was due to a mistake.20 A more recent newspaper article
commenting on the very new discovery of the destruction of National
Security Council archives also cites numerous instances of the destruction
18 Archimedia, no. 1 (1993).

19 Jale Baysal, ed., CunumUzde Arjiv YSnetimi: Meslek Egitiminin Temelleri (istanbul: istanbul
Universitesi, 1984).
20 Radikal, 29 July 1999.
16 Meltem Ahiska
of not only national, but also Ottoman, archives.21 Informed by circulating

stories among historians and other people, the author of this newspaper
z article mentions several examples of how large amounts of institutional
archival material have been destroyed, or how most of them ended up in
> SEKA, the state paper factory, to be re-cycled. These stories point to an
u acute and excessive problem; yet, the absence of open problematization of
5; archives within the institutions themselves makes the question officially
invisible.
j* How to interpret this destruction and the indifference to this
z
destruction of archives? There are two primary functions of archives
according to Starn: "Storing mundane memoranda that are expendable
once the transactions in question are complete; [and] producing ideological
legitimacy through the accumulation of material with ritual or reliquary
value."22 Is the problem in Turkey due to a failure to distinguish what is
mundane from what is ideological? Is it due to the irrationality that
purportedly reigns in a non-Western context? Is it a feature of a traditional
society, which privileges oral means of transmission over written
documents? Or is it merely the outcome of political manipulation of
administrators and governors who try to evade accountability? Although it
is very difficult to give a precise answer to this understudied question in
Turkey, I would like to dwell on some possible ways of approaching the
problem.23
First of all, the possible ideological functions of archives seem not to
be pertinent to the Turkish case. This is demonstrated by the fact that the
Directorate of Republican Archives was established only in 1976 and by
the inadequacy of the legal framework to protect significant archival
documents.24 Although a distinction has been made in the modern
discipline or science of archives between those administrative
documents that need to be regularly assessed and destroyed and those
that need to be secured as archives valuable for public research, in Turkey
the distinction is very much blurred in the official and sometimes so-
21 Ayse Hiir, "imha Edilen Kacmci Arjiv?," Radikal, 19 December 2004.

22 Starn, "Truths in the Archives," 394.
23 This paper is part of a larger project on the politics of archives; therefore, it reflects some initial
perspectives, rather than offering any conclusions.
24 The existing law specifies neither the authorities, nor the principles for protection. It is only recently
that a new law was drafted and presented to the National Assembly, which gives the General
Directorate of State Archives the authority for the designation and preservation of archival
documents and their use for "national interests and for the benefit of the public." All public
institutions and occupational institutions of public character, except for the Presidency, the National
Assembly, the National Intelligence Organization and the Ministry of Defense, will be bound by the
new law. The new law also includes the Ministries of Domestic and Foreign Affairs, which were
hitherto excluded from the existing law (no. 3473) on national archives.
1
called accidental practice of the destruction of documents, given not only ^

the absence of a sound legal groundwork for protection, but also the
general seemingly indifferent attitude to the archives. The indifference *>
itself could be interpreted as an inability to cope with piling records, m
especially in the bureaucratic machinery. It suffices to remember that the -
popular imagery of Turkish bureaucracy is usually associated with the
abundance of unnecessary papers. Thus, the failure to decide on the
preservation value of the documents points to an excess in recording, yet jj
also to a lack of established generalized principles for their "
destruction/preservation. Hence, the process of destruction seems "*
sporadic, chaotic and irrational. The problem is indeed technical then.
But the technical is at the same time socially informed. Preservation can
function smoothly only on the basis of a more technicalized (and
legalized) destruction; then the technicalin its assumed neutrality
will contain and mask the political. I read the failure of the technical in
taming the political (the signs of which appear in the narrative accounts
of the destruction of archives) as a symptom of the contested and non-
hegemonic character of history in Turkey.
Secondly, the indifference to the preservation of archival material is
coupled with a common sentiment that this is only normal in Turkey. Some
examples for this kind of shared sentiment emerged from my research on
the history of national radio broadcasting in Turkey. My first challenge in
this research was, in fact, the stories of the destruction of archives. In my
interview with Uygur Kocabaoglu, one of the few scholars in Turkey who
have done research on the history of national radio broadcasting,25 I was
advised not to rely on the existence of archives, as he himself witnessed
their destruction. A pile of documents concerning radio programs,
especially radio dramas that he had discovered, all covered with dust and
scattered in the storage room of Ankara Radio in the late 1970s, were gone
when he wanted to see them again after 1980. He was told unofficially that
they were destroyed during the military regime of the early 1980s.
Later, my research generated other stories of destruction. These stories
sound tragic, but they are also amusing. Every one of my attempts to gain
access to any kind of archive on the history of radio broadcasting seemed to
prove that the state institution of radio broadcasting functions without any
need for historical documentation. Although a few selected sound
recordings of radio programs existed, they were not catalogued according
25 Uygur Kocabasoglu published his extensive research on radio broadcasting from its inauguration in
1920s until the establishment of TRT (Turkish Television and Radio Institution) in 1964 in a book:
Uygur Kocabajoglu, Sirket Telsizinden Devlet Radyosuna (Ankara: A.U.S.B.F., 1980).
18 Meltem Ahiska
to date. The collected recordings mostly consisted of speeches of national

" leaders. A high-level administrative director in the Press and Publications
z Bureau told me very openly: "This institution does not keep organized
0
either sound or writtenarchives; most of the old materials have been
> destroyed either due to neglect or to the obsessive wish of 'cleaning' the
u place by newly appointed directors." 26 "Cleaning the place" is an
t interesting phrase in this account; it is known to be a common practice in
public institutions in Turkey. Cleaning usually means to dispose of the
s material and documents that belong to the former director's period of duty.
z
Although this practice implies a very particularistic relation to the past, in
the sense that history starts anew with each new director, it can also be
interpreted as a modern attitude that sets the past clearly apart from the
present. Yet, the act of privileging the present as a blank page constitutes
moments of disruption and destruction in the history of the institution,
and also of the nation in a larger framework. In other words, the history is
discontinuous and full of ruptures and holes, as it were. The particular
experience of the modern in this context, and the resulting conception of
history and historicity need further analysis, to which I will return in the
last section of the article.
The holes that disrupt the continuity of history are not without life
though; they are filled with lived experiences, as told in personal stories.
What struck me in the numerous confessional stories of the destruction of
archives in my research was that the discontinuity in the archives was taken
for granted. Another significant point was the enjoyment that accompanied
the stories of destruction. I heard many stories, told with pleasure, of how
the old records of broadcast programs in Ankara Radio were broken in half
to ease storage; how they were distributed to members of the staff, who
turned them into objects of decoration, such as wall clocks. The written
documents were abandoned to lie in storage rooms for years, and
eventually most of them were destroyed by rats; the remaining ones were
destroyed by the military after the coups of 1971 and 1980, echoing
Kocabaoglu's personal account. The director of Ankara Radio did not try
to refute these stories; instead, he wanted to convince me that there were
no existing archives in the radio station. However, a former sound engineer
of Ankara Radio, Ertugrul imer, whom I interviewed later,27 was quite
certain that he remembered some old records of programs stored in the
Ankara Radio building. "They must be still there," he said and drew a little
map on a piece of paper to describe the place where he had seen those
26 Personal interview, January 1996.

27 Personal interview, January 1996.
19
records years ago. Guided by this informal map that relied on memory, I *
found my way in the Ankara radio building, almost like a detective, and
finally discovered a number of precious old records of programs from the
1940s, lying behind a cupboard. The director of Ankara Radio seemed m
surprised. But when he kindly agreed to tape them for meconsidering me -
a foreigner due to my affiliation with the University of LondonI could see "
no sign that he was keen to protect these newly discovered precious records
as part of the institution's archives.
These stories clearly reveal an indifference to archive keeping. However, "
they also enact an oral archiving of repression or destruction. The accounts "*
of memory, even of administrators, bear a certain kind of distrust towards
the power of archives over the politics of the institution. As archives seem
to embody a foreign and distanced truth, the politics seems to lie
elsewhere.
The truth in the archives: Memory and history

At this point, rather than limiting my argument to the meaning of the mere
presence or absence of archives, I would like to look more closely at what a
public archive is supposed to reveal for giving and keeping an order. An
expert on archive management, Michael Cook from Liverpool University,
who was invited to speak at the Istanbul University Conference on
Archives in 1984, explicitly draws a parallel between a country's
development and its public archive services.28 He argues that archives are a
source of national honor; yet, in less developed countriessuch as
Malaysia, Nigeria, and Kenyahe said the public archive services have been
less receptive to public demands. Consequently, they are less developed. He
implied that the Turkish archives also need to be developed. However, the
paradigm of development evoked in the equation of archives with a more
developed democracy conceals that archives are always appropriated for
and within a power regime.
The paradigm of development evacuates the experienced time (the
specificity of time and place) from what the archive reveals; instead, it
posits a homogenous and linear time of progress in which archives are seen
functional. Archives are taken to be almost abstract mathematical points
that will add to each other to enable a linear mapping of objective history.
The politics of archives is displaced in this frame. Yet, one can cite several
examples in which archives have not been regarded as neutral units, but
found to be threatening for a political regime. For example, Verne Harris, an
archivist from South Africa, poses the question of the so-called "less
28 Cook, "Arjivlerin Kullanimi ve Yonetimi."
20 Meltem Ahiska
developed archives" in completely different terms.29 He has been an

" archivist under the apartheid regime since 1985 and has personally
z experienced the archives as a site of political struggle. He has witnessed the
"selective destruction of public records and the confiscation or destruction
> of non-public records generated by those who resisted the system." He was
tj directly involved in the politics of archives. Nevertheless, he also adhered
5; to the point of view that archives are transparent factual evidence. By trying
to stop the destruction of documents, he designated himself as a self-
* conscious subversive in the archives. He says: "I have supported and lived
z
the role of the archivist as advocate and activist for human rights ... The
lines were drawn clearly. The enemy was plain to see. I was for
remembering and against forgetting; for exposure and against the secret;
for seeing, against blindness ... I believed in the archive as an idea ...
transcending particular societal and other contexts." However, in the
transition period to democracy starting in the early 1990s, he seemed to
start thinking differently. He came to realize that "an archive never speaks
to us as a thing in itself and of itself," as he found himself now in a process
of redefinition and re-invention of archives for a "democratic South
Africa," as well as, in his own words, a "sanitization of memory resources."
It became clear to him that an archive gains its meaning only in a specific
political configuration.
Harris's shifting perception is significant for showing two important
aspects of archives simultaneously at work: First, archives are a site of
political struggle; second, there can never be a full recovery of memory in
the form of archives, since a power regimedemocratic or otherwise
always depends on the selective appropriation of documents and
necessarily entails exclusions. Similarly, Derrida in his talk on archives in
South Africa in 1998 said: "Since the archive doesn't consist simply in
remembering, in living memory, in anamnesis, but in consigning, in
inscribing a trace in some external location, there is no archive without
some location, that is, some space outside. Archive is not a living memory.
It is a location. That is why the political power of the archons is so essential
in the definition of the archive."30 Therefore, in order to problematize the
truth value of an archive, we need to understand how an archive speaks to
or is contested by its outside, for example, by narratives of memory in a
29 His keynote speech at the August 2001 Silver Jubilee Annual Conference of the Archives and Records
Association of New Zealand has been published on the worldwide web, See, Verne Harris, Seeing (in)
Blindness: South Africa, Archives and Passion for Justice (August 2001); available from
www.caldeson.com.
30 From his seminar on "Archive Fever" at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, August
1998; cited by Ibid.
21
specific society configured within a specific power regime. To this end, we *

need to distinguish between memory in the form of recollection or
anamnesis and a trace or image of a memory in the form of the archives. The
distinction somewhat corresponds to the difference made between
memory and history. -
In the recent and rapidly growing literature on memory, the concepts of Z
history and memory are usually opposed to each other, or at least put in
tension with each other. Those who privilege the concept of memory to
history argue that modern history-writing is a power-rich realm and "
excludes the memories of the Other under the false pretension of "*
objectivity. On the other hand, there is a concern that memory is local and
subjective and cannot replace history's claims of objective truth under its
false pretension of authenticity. The primary arguments revolve around
history being linear, general, and objective, whereas memory is regarded as
circular, local, and subjective. The metaphors used to describe memory and
history evoke interesting dichotomies: While memory is feminized,
history is regarded to be a male prerogative. While memory is associated
with trauma and suffering, one can speak of the promise of history, since
trauma and suffering can be relativized in the broad perspective of history.
Davis and Starn argue that the opposition between memory and history
should be countered by attending to their interdependence. 31
Modern history buries the dead and deals with the past as past, whereas
memory engages with specters to constantly and circularly re-establish the
meaning of the present. To return to the question of the archives, I would
like to argue that an archive, in fact, stands at the border of history and
memory. On the one hand, it provides an exteriority, a trace for accounting
for the past and, therefore, becomes an objectivized site for writing history;
on the other hand, an archive has subjectivity in the sense that it provides a
spectral response to those who are in search of the past time. Derrida, while
emphasizing the first meaning of the archive as exteriority, also offers an
interesting elaboration on the spectral nature of the archive. 32 According to
him, one can also think of the archive as a spectral response to questions
posed to the past. It is as if one expects the dead in the past records to speak
and answer one's questions about the present and the future. This is re-
appropriation of history by memory within a certain power configuration.
It is interesting that the spectral response does not only bring the past into
the present, but it also gives a promise to the future, as it bears a
responsibility for tomorrow. British historian Carolyn Steedman's
31 Natalie Zemon Davis and Randolph Starn, "Introduction," Representations, no. 26 (Spring 1989), 5
32 Derrida, Archive Fever.
22 Meltem Ahiska
experience in the archives resonates with Derrida's conception of the

specter in the archives.33 Steedman expresses her thrill about how she
z could make herself hear the voices of those suppressed in history writing,
namely the domestic servants in the eighteenth century, in the dust of the
> archives. Her emphasis on a method that used archives not merely as self-
tj evident documents of information, but as sites of historical imagination
5; and memory, clearly rests on the idea of a spectral response. According to
her, the archive, as a collection of papers, just sits there until it is read, and
j* used, and narrativized. The archive stands at the border of keeping the past
z
as past, and bringing the spectral response to the present. The significance
of the archive lies in the fact that it gives an order to both engagements:
reconciling the conceptions and possibilities of the past with the
conceptions and possibilities of the present.
What, then, happens when we talk of missing archives? Where do the
specters of the past live? How do they relate to the living? As Steedman
argues, "an absence is not nothing, but is rather the space left by what has
gone: how the emptiness indicates how once it was filled and animated."34
When the archives fail to provide a spectral response to the present, I argue
that there is an excess of memories not put into any relationality and
comparability. In other words, memories are not given a right and a place to
exist in history. When the act of remembering cannot appropriate history
in the form of archives, memories cannot achieve a public recognition. This
has a very significant impact on registers of truth, or on different ways of
telling the truth.
We can point to two registers of truth in Turkey by looking at the
instances of destruction of archives. One register resides in the site of the
destroyed archives. That location refuses to accommodate the traces of
certain memories and, consequently, the specters of the past. In that sense,
it does not transmit any continuity with the past, or any promise for the
future. What it transmits are the dark holes in history that can only be
apprehended as lifeless and meaningless signs of an absent past within that
register of truth. It does not only transform the past into dead signs through
the rhetoric of official history, but it also leaves the future generations no
option other than memorizing these dead signs of an absent past. What
happens in the second register of truth then? The other register resides in
the ongoing references to the repression and destruction in the excess of
stories. These are transmitted in the narratives of memory; yet, they cannot
33 Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
2002).
34 Ibid., 11.
23
also deal with the future, if their ways of telling the truth does not match *
the truth of history and are ultimately denied by it. They are then turned
into living specters. *
To illustrate this point, I will briefly point to a novel written by the m
internationally acclaimed Turkish author Aziz Nesin who is famous for his i
humorous satires and parodies of social life in Turkey: Yaar Ne Yaar Ne S
Yaamaz}5 In this novel, Nesin tells the story of Yaar (a common male
name that also means "one who lives"), a poor, rural man who is denied to
be legally living due to an archival mistake. He cannot get a birth certificate,
since he is shown to be dead in the archives. In fact, he seems to have died "
at two different dates, once in 1915 in the battle of ^anakkale during the
First World War, and again in 1935, in the military operation that silenced
the Kurdish Dersim revolt. These two moments interestingly correspond
to the founding moments of the nation. The former is memorized as a
Turkish victory leading to the War of National Independence; and the latter
is the historically significant moment of repression not only of the Kurdish
people in ethnic terms, but it also represents the originary point of a more
general repression of any popular revolt and opposition in Turkey and,
hence, the establishment of the national order. However, paradoxically,
these two moments in the novel are depicted as the registered moments of
the death of an ordinary citizen. Yaar, in contradiction to the meaning of
his name, is considered dead, cannot go to school, cannot get married, and
cannot get a job. Yet, the state practically recognizes his being alive when he
is forced to go to the military, to the psychiatric hospital, or to prison. In
fact, the whole story is told from prison by Yaar himself, performing as
storytellera traditional occupation that the inmates keep alive in prison.
The stories told by Yaar each night to the prisoners describe the violence
caused by the disorder of bureaucracy and the archives, as lived memory.
Once in a while, one of the inmates questions the truth of these stories to
which others respond by saying that they are fictive, but true in the sense
that they belong to all of them. The prisonwith its dark, unregistered, but
widely familiar storiesis the site of lived experiences and memories; it is
put into opposition to the official law and truth, which denies a promise of
life to the living.
Another striking theme in the novel is the presence of a counter-law
embodied in the figure of Karakaph Nizami Bey (Mr. Black Order) and
implied by the prisoners as a practical solution to official problems. Yaar,
who first thinks that Karakaph Nizami Bey is a real man, finally discovers
and embraces the logic of the counter-law, which rests on all sorts of
35 Aziz Nesin, Yafar Ne Yajar Ne Yafamoz (istanbul: Adar.i Yayincilik, 1998).
24 Meltem Ahiska
Z> arrangements, such as bribery and other illegal methods that have proven
a practically efficient to deal with the dead body of the existing law and truth.
2 But instead of posing one as the alternative to the other, the author makes
us see that these two registers of truth reinforce each other. If the official
> truth is static and falsified and not able to accommodate the diversity of
u lived experience, then the other register of truth acknowledges this and
S; creates ways of informal falsification. History and memory cannot be
reconciled, but they seem to be trapped in the same operation of canceling
j* past promises that could lead to a possible change in the future. The official
z
truth realizes this by destroying the records of lived experience and the
singularity of the proper name to generate a common frozen truth that is
applicable to all at all times. However, the narratives of memory that
register the destruction produce a practical and local supplement, such as
Mr. Black Order, to refer to what we know perfectly well to exist, yet what
we can only bypass in practice without changing its publicly registered
meaning. Thus, it keeps the meaningless dead truth practically in place.
These different registers of truth evoked in the opposition of law and
practice, or history and memory, apply to many instances in Turkish
national history. I have tried to show above that the stories of the
destruction of archives in radio and the indifference to this destruction are
practical supplements that uphold and secure the history of radio
broadcasting in Turkey. Similarly, there exists an excess of memories of
destruction that are familiar in everyday life and which marks the violence
of the state, the local authorities, or the ruling classes in stories. Yet, most
of these memories cannot have a future orientation; since they cannot
bring themselves into the light of generality, they cannot turn the proper
name into common. Not only are they constantly denied and destroyed by
the archiving of history, their way of telling the truth is usually based on a
practical closure. The truth evoked in these narratives of memory fades
with the enjoyment of an intimate patriarchal bonding that secretly
assumes that the register of the official truth is only a lie. Mr. Black Order,
itself based on lies, is the ultimate practical solution.
If we may say so, the official truth, as depicted by Aziz Nesin, suffers
from agoraphobia, because it cannot locate itself in relation to a specific
time and place; it is everywhere, yet nowhere. It has to be secured against
the challenge of the practical and the specific to have a closure. It denies the
life of the singular person, while positing a general subject of total
institutionssuch as the military, the psychiatric hospital, or the prison.
The narratives of memory, in contrast, are claustrophobic; they are
encapsulated in secluded placessuch as in the prisonor can only
survive in the intimacy of private places. These metaphorical descriptions
25
can give us a sense of how different registers of truth operate in Turkey, but ^
they cannot really account for the reason why the official truth does not rely ,,
on institutionalized archives, as for example in Britain or France. Is it
because Turkey is less developed, as Cook, the Western expert on archives m
has implied to the Turkish audience in 1984, just after the 1980 military 2
coup which is known to have destroyed so many archival documents? Z,
o
z
Occidentalism and registers of truth g
Here, I would like to make use of the theoretical frame of Occidentalism to "
m
highlight some points that can guide us in understanding the destruction of "
archives and their relation to truth. By Occidentalism I do not mean to
point simply to a desire to be Western or practically to adopt Western ways
of life, institutions, and governance. In contexts historically and politically
labeled as non-Western, Occidentalism is produced by the reified images of
the West as markers of modernity. These images are simultaneously
differentiated and consumed in a moral economy of good and bad. If the
good West is the ideal, the bad West generates a constant source of threat.
Accordingly, Occidentalist fantasy evokes the ideal, but implicates the
national difference in relation to the threat of too much western influence.
Although one can cite several historical events to illustrate that the
Occidentalist fantasy has been dialogically shaped in the historical
encounters of Turkey and Europe beginning in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries and constitutes a response to Western imperialism
and Orientalism, the fantasy itself is devoid of historical time and instead
refers to the timeless modality of being Western and national at the same
time. Thus, Occidentalism is primarily a lack of historicity. The lack of
historicity in Occidentalism is in resonance with the modern conception of
change and history belonging exclusively to "civilized" European societies.
"The nineteenth century acceptance of the normality of change included
the idea that change was normal only for the civilized nations, and that it
therefore was incumbent upon these nations to impose this change upon
the recalcitrant other world."36 Accordingly, the Orientalist discourse
emphasized the elements that were unchanging.37 When change is
introduced externally to modernizing nations, such as Turkey, the
normality of change, in Wallerstein's terms, is disrupted. Change is
something to be manufactured according to a model rather than something
that would be socially experienced. Provoked by the anxiety of always
36 Immanuel Wallerstein, "The French Revolution as a World-Historical Event," in Unthinking Social
Science (London: Polity Press, 1991), 20.
37 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Penguin, 1985).
26 Meltem Ahiska
u already being late to modernity, Occidentalism in Turkey appears as a

% refusal to know the complexity and heterogeneity of the social, which is
2 consequently reduced to a national idiom and captured in the constantly
reproduced timeless polarity of West and East.
> The Occidentalist fantasy is not just a defensive response against
tj imperialism and Orientalism; it informs and is reproduced by the power
5; regimes in Turkey as a hegemonic construct. Most often, the legitimacy of
power lies in its references to the Western gaze, both in negative and
? positive ways, alternatively implicating the good or the bad West, as well as
z
marking various groups and regions within the society along these lines.
The imagined Western gaze, then, is publicly signified as the ultimate
authority and judge of modernity.38 Developing from this frame, I would
argue that the Occidentalist fantasy renders the very location of archives
suspect, due to its openness to external gaze. It is a site that can be
examined by foreigners who are able to distance themselves. The
Occidentalist power display needs to curb and even destroy the specificity
and singularity that an archive reveals. The singularity could only belong to
the intimate realm, where we know things to happen but would not want
to reveal to them, the foreigners. The state almost acts like a clandestine
organization that avoids and destroys written evidence to avoid Western
scrutiny of its so-called modernity. Therefore, the truth nurtured by the
Occidentalist fantasy is ideal and static. It makes more use of rhetoric and
sentiments than facts. The public is made to engage in this truth by faith-a
faith not only in the nation, but also in the Occidentalist fantasy that
functions as the boundary management of the inside and the outside,
between good and bad modern. The evidence should not run counter to the
faith that Turkey is a modern and democratic nation. Occidentalism, then,
justifies the secrets of the state that should not be revealed to others. It
nourishes a political atmosphere in which state practices that go against the
law and employ violence to solve many of the social problems can be
associated with the secrets of the state and legitimized by the distinction
that has to be made between the outside and the inside. It is this secret
which is usually evoked in the narratives of memory.
There is enough evidence to think that the national archives have no
significant role to play in upholding Turkish modernity, which manifests
itself more in fantasy than in history. The timeless Occidental fantasy
posits that history is over, once the nation has become modern at its
inception. It is not at all surprising, then, that for Turkish authorities
historical archives mostly mean Ottoman archives. They have to be
38 Ahiska, "Occidentalism."
27
managed by modern techniques, since the Ottoman Empire is not *

exclusively the Turkish past; it is also a site of foreign interest and
contestation of different nationalisms as the heirs of the Ottoman Empire,
as well as a resourceful depository for expert research all around the world, m
given the significance of the Ottoman history for European and Middle -
Eastern histories. The external gaze on the Ottoman archives is "
unavoidable.
I have argued that the implicit knowledge about the falsification of
lived experience in the official national truth on display secures an *
intimate bonding and produces its own registers of truth through various "
narratives of destruction and falsification. I have also claimed that these
narratives are deprived of public recognition and of a place in history. As
long as they inform a Turkish culture as different from the modernity on
display, they end up supplementing the Occidentalist fantasy and cannot
break its spell. "The power of the false" in both cases should be
acknowledged. 39 In conclusion, I would like draw attention once again to
the politics of archives. History writing has become a highly contested
realm in the recent decades. The constructivist criticism of historiography
approaches history as a textual creation and point to its fictive, rhetorical
character. 40 As the distinction between fact and fiction gets blurred in .
historiography, many historians increasingly have the tendency not to
treat the archives as direct facts of truth. Archives indeed do not guarantee
truth. However, I contend that a historical narrative based on archival
knowledge still needs to be differentiated from fiction. First of all, as
Chatterjee argues, "the conditions of plausibility remain entirely different
in the two genres and, consequently, so do the protocols that bind writer
and reader." 41 Secondly, one has to recognize the control of the archon in
the archives, as the official custodian of truth, in interpreting the archival
documents. 4 2 But these are not to reproduce the fact/fiction dichotomy.
One also has to be cognizant of the popular narratives that the historical
archives are entangled in. I have suggested here to position the archive at
the border of history and memory. History provides a ground for
establishing and criticizing the relationality of specific experiences; yet,
history can only be meaningful when actively appropriated by memories
in the present. It is this connection that the archive makes. W h e n archives
39 Achilles Mbembe, "On the Power of the False," Public Culture 14, no. 3 (2002).
40 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).
41 Partha Chatterjee, "Introduction," in History and the Present, ed. Partha Chaterjee and Anjan Ghosh
(New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002), 12.
42 Derrida, Archive Fever.
28 Meltem Ahiska
are destroyed, not only history and historicity but also the claims for truth
a and justice would be impaired. It is worth remembering what Yerushalmi,
z the Jewish scholar of memory, has said: The opposite of forgetting is not
just remembering, but justice.43
>
H
U
uj
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43 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud's Moses (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).
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Wallerstein, Immanuel. "The French Revolution as a World-Historical Event." In Unthinking Social m
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White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns
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m
O
z

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9

Occidentalism and registers \

New Perspectives on Turkey, no. 34 (2006): 9-29.

i whatever it may be, shall be burned."2 There was a deliberate intention to

2 Cited by Starn, see Ibid.: 395.

pre-processing of documents in the institution under certain categories ^

u register of "truth," which is informed by power relations, but also shaped

history developed by monopolizing forms of popular memory, the archives

11 Starn, "Truths in the Archives."

In Turkey, there is no social counterpart to the problematization of

18 Archimedia, no. 1 (1993).

of not only national, but also Ottoman, archives.21 Informed by circulating

21 Ayse Hiir, "imha Edilen Kacmci Arjiv?," Radikal, 19 December 2004.

called accidental practice of the destruction of documents, given not only ^

to date. The collected recordings mostly consisted of speeches of national

26 Personal interview, January 1996.

The truth in the archives: Memory and history

28 Cook, "Arjivlerin Kullanimi ve Yonetimi."

developed archives" in completely different terms.29 He has been an

specific society configured within a specific power regime. To this end, we *

experience in the archives resonates with Derrida's conception of the

35 Aziz Nesin, Yafar Ne Yajar Ne Yafamoz (istanbul: Adar.i Yayincilik, 1998).

u already being late to modernity, Occidentalism in Turkey appears as a

managed by modern techniques, since the Ottoman Empire is not *

Wallerstein, Immanuel. "The French Revolution as a World-Historical Event." In Unthinking Social m

Science, 7-22. London: Polity Press, 1991. *

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