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Blood Brothersby Zach DorfmanJune 27, 2011

REBEL LAND: UNRAVELING THE RIDDLE OF HISTORY IN A TURKISH TOWNby Christopher de BellaiguePenguin Press, 2010

A work of taut and absorbing beauty, Christopher de Bellaigue’s Rebel Land documentsthe author’s exploration of the area known as eastern Turkey, where history issimultaneously elusive and oppressive, cloaked and hiding in plain sight.

From the weather-beaten ruins of a church; to a slip of the tongue over drinks; or to aconversation where commission, at least of a conceptual sort, is betrayed by animportant omission in one’s account of a massacre that occurred almost one hundredyears ago — in places like these, history hangs in the air.

“It is not for nothing,” the author observes, “that eastern Turkey, a.k.a western Armenia,a.k.a. northern Kurdistan, has never properly been scrutinized.” De Bellaigue, a formerTurkey correspondent for the Economist who spent years living in Istanbul, immersinghimself in Turkish culture, language, and — importantly — history, returned to explore thehistory of the District of Varto, in Turkey’s Kurdish East.

Here, however, I’ve already fallen into a linguistic trap. Conventional descriptors do notdo justice to Rebel Land’s project, which is precisely to explore how this corner of the

world can only implausibly be considered “Turkish,” and certainly not be considered historically “Kurdish.” And the region isonly “eastern” if one’s gaze is directed outward from cosmopolitan and western-oriented Istanbul and not plaintively fromYerevan, or wistfully from Mosul.

Credit: Penguin Press.

Five generations of an Armenian family gathered together for thisphoto from Christopher de Bellaigue's book. Credit: Penguin Press.

Kurdish Hamidiye fighters, c. 1900. Credit: Penguin Press.

One of Rebel Land’s chief virtues is its attention to complexity, and its refusal to cede the superiority of one narrative overanother, for many peoples are bound to Varto through blood and soil.

The first are the Armenians, whose presence is nowvestigial, and whose ancient churches remain as testamentsto their long history in the region. During the waning days ofthe Ottoman Empire — or alternatively, the gestative periodfor the modern Turkish state — the Armenians of Varto, andall over the Empire, were subject to what was at the veryleast a vicious program of ethnic cleansing withconcomitant, if unplanned, massacres, if not a genocidemasquerading as a series of “forcible transfers.”Supplementing scholarship on the matter — good examplesof which are difficult to obtain, given the Turkish state’ssuppression of data related to the matter — with first-personinterviews, Rebel Land reconstructs the events of1915-1917 in Varto. This is history at its most personal.Body counts do not speak to us: they are merely numbers,abstractions. But when De Bellaigue pieces together anaccount of the deportations, and subsequent massacres,that decimated the Armenians of Varto, he writes somovingly, and with such an attentive gaze, that the horrorappears to unfold simultaneously before both author andreader.

The Sunni Kurds are the second group to inhabit Varto. It isfrom their ranks and tribes that the local leadershiptraditionally arises. The Sunni Kurds have been bothoppressor and oppressed, complicating any simple moralschematic.

While they have formed the backbone of resistance to thediscriminatory anti-Kurdish policies of the Turkish state (whichoperated for many years under the official illusion that Kurdsdid not exist), their participation in the Armenian massacreswas widespread, and their treatment of minority groups withinTurkish Kurdistan has been, at times, less than savory.

Which brings us to the third group to feature prominently inRebel Land. The Alevis form the lowest rung on the socialladder in Varto, and have been intermittently but violentlypersecuted by the Sunni Kurds for their beliefs. According toDe Bellaigue’s account, Alevis in Varto consider themselvesMuslims. But theirs is, at a minimum, a heterodoxinterpretation of Islam. For instance, while they revere Ali andHussein — holy figures in Shia Islam — Rebel Land relaysaccounts in Alevi texts “of the Prophet bowing to Ali and theProphet and Ali becoming one.” This, unsurprisingly, has beenseen as deeply disturbing by the Alevis’ orthodox Muslimneighbors.

Questions about Alevi identity extend beyond matters ofreligious faith, and Rebel Land explores how they havebecome enmeshed in debates about national and politicalmembership. Are Alevis Kurds or are they Turks? This is not an easy question to answer, and De Bellaigue deftly traces theshifting alliances and ideological currents that have led the Varto Alevis to associate themselves, at least recently, with theKurdish national cause.

The idea of “Turkishness” also features prominently in Rebel Land. Although there are no ethnic Turks living in Varto (asidefrom representatives of the state, most notably the military), the Turkish state is pervasive — a kind of absent presence. Vartois not merely administered; it is occupied. Much of the latter part of Rebel Land surveys the history of Kurdish nationalism inVarto: the town’s tense relationship with the Turkish state, and, beginning in the 1970s, the profusion of militant leftistorganizations — the most famous and successful of which was the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) — that found in Vartofertile terrain for recruitment efforts. Although sympathetic to Kurdish nationalist aims, De Bellaigue looks wearily upon thePKK’s guerilla campaigns. His disdain for Apo, the PKK’s megalomaniacal and ultimately craven founder, is even morepronounced.

Unusually, De Bellaigue himself features prominently in Rebel Land. After living in Istanbul for years, he admits to havingpreviously been enamored with the vision of Turkey proffered by Ataturk — secular, rational, and indivisibly Turkish. RebelLand is thus also the story of a man chastising himself for the lies he once willingly believed, and who has decided to peer intothe abyss in order to shine a light. We should be glad that, whatever sense of ablution De Bellaigue may have achieved fromthe researching and writing of Rebel Land aside, he has produced this illuminating and delicate work.

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Zach Dorfman is assistant editor of Ethics & International Affairs, the journal of the Carnegie Council. He can be contacted atzdorfman@cceia.org.

Source Citation

Dorfman, Zach. 2011. Blood Brothers. Tikkun 26(3).

tags: Books, Reviews, War & Peace http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/blood-brothers