How Turkey Destroyed or Disposed Its
Historical Archives and Documents
By
Harut Sassounian
Publisher,
The California Courier
www.TheCaliforniaCourier.com
For
several decades, the Turkish government and its propagandists have been
announcing that the state documents, particularly the Ottoman archives, are
fully open and available to any researcher from around the world.
What
Turkish officials and their supporters do not say is that many documents of the
Ottoman archives have been removed, destroyed, sold or disposed of. In
addition, some of the most sensitive archives are still closed to outsiders.
Last
month, Turkish journalist Uzay Bulut posted a revealing article, “TurkeyUncensored: A History of Censorship and Bans” on the PhilosProject.org website
regarding the status of Turkish archives and documents going back to several
centuries. Ms. Bulut is free to expose such secrets because she no longer lives
in Turkey. She is currently based in Washington, D.C.
In
Turkey today, Wikipedia’s website is blocked by governmental order because
Wikipedia refused to delete articles revealing that the Turkish authorities are
supporting the Islamic State terrorists. Furthermore, 127,000 websites and
95,000 individual Web pages are blocked by Turkey, according to journalist
Bulut.
This
modern-day banning of thousands of websites is the continuation of Ottoman
Sultan Bayazid II’s decree of 1485 A.D. imposing the death penalty on anyone
printing books in Turkish or Arabic. The ban remained for more than two
centuries, Bulut reported. “That prohibition is widely cited by historians as
one of the major reasons for the intellectual and scientific collapse of Islam
at the dawn of the industrial revolution.”
The
Turkish Republic, during the rule of its founder Kemal Ataturk as of 1923,
continued the tradition of censorship by banning “at least 130 newspapers,
magazines and books, according to Mustafa Yilmaz and Yasmin Doganer’s book,
'Censor During the Republican era (1923-1973).’” Turkey’s second Prime Minister
(1950-1960), Adnan Menderes, banned 161 publications, according to Bulut.
Returning
to archival censorship, Bulut quoted Turkish-Jewish historian Rifat Bali who
“explained the history of disposed or destroyed state archives in his 2014
book, ‘The Story of Destruction of Plundering: Printed or Written words, Dead
Letters, Archives Thrown Out (or Sold) for Scrap.’ …The archives of many
political parties, the Senate, and several other governmental or
non-governmental institutions in Turkey are either closed to public use or no
longer exist.” According to Bali, “the archives of the political parties closed
down during the September 12, 1980 coup d’état were sent to SEKA (Cellulose and
Paper Factories) as scrap paper.”
The
Republican People’s Party’s (CHP) archive is the most important one because it
is the party of the founding years of the Republic. As Bali wrote: “Some say it
[the archive] was burnt. Some say it was thrown away on September 12. Some say,
no it hasn’t been thrown away. It is here. So it is a mystery today. A large
part of the archive is nonexistent.”
In
addition, Bali reported that “the archives of the presidency, the National
Intelligence Organization (MIT) and the Ministry of the Interior are closed.”
Interestingly, Bali noted the strange story of how “confidential documents of
the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were found at a scrap dealer in Ankara in 1998.
For the ministry had sold 15 steel safes to a scrap dealer. It was then
understood that the ministry sold the safes because of a lack of space at the
ministry without even looking what was inside them.”
Bali
also reported in his book several other examples of the destruction of
important documents:
--
“Many of the Turkish Institute of History’s documents – including a letter by
Ataturk – have been thrown away;”
--
“All minutes of the proceedings of the Senate that was established with the
1961 constitution and remained active until the September 12, 1980 coup d’état
were sent to the Cellulose and Paper Factories (SEKA);”
--
“When the state-funded Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) moved to a new
building in 1965, its authorities said that ‘old documents do not fit a new
building’ and sent some of the documents of the archives to SEKA;”
--
“When a shortage of paper emerged at SEKA in 1980s, state institutions were
called on to send their old papers to the factory. Many archives at
institutional level were thus gone;”
-- As
recently as 2013, Turkish National Library's old books in Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac
were sold by the ton, “as there were no librarians who could read in those
languages.”
As an
investigative Journalist Uzay Bulut concluded: “with so much information
withheld from the Turkish public, state propaganda has created masses who blindly
follow whatever state authorities − who have lost their moral compass and never
object or speak out even when they see brutal violations of human rights, who
do not respect differing opinions or the right to dissent, and who promote an
extremely inaccurate version of history – have to say.”
The
next time Turkish government propagandists write “our archives are open,” you
can send them a copy of this article, the revelations of which from
distinguished Turkish journalist Uzay Bulut will shut them up!
