Afterword

With these words about Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi war criminal, Hannah Arendt was pointing out that being a mere official, or the circumstances one finds oneself in, does not absolve the guilty. Evidence that came to light in the years since shows that Kanlı Pazar was an organized massacre. That, in its aftermath, only an attacker identifiable from photographs and a single police officer were arrested as culprits can itself be read as an indication of how far this organization actually extended, and of where the perpetrators' protectors were positioned.401 Together with the 4 December 1945 raid on the Tan printing house and the events of 6–7 September 1955 that preceded it, the fact that the perpetrators of Kanlı Pazar were never brought to light helped establish a pattern in Turkey, whose most recent example we saw in the Hrant Dink trial. For this reason, keeping this memory alive matters. Kanlı Pazar remains one of the defining events Turkey cannot afford to forget. The political divisions of 1960s Turkey, or a self-proclaimed mission to "save the homeland," do not, as Arendt pointed out, absolve the perpetrators.

Kanlı Pazar has taken its place in history as an event that demands a reckoning. That reckoning is both possible and necessary for each of the political currents and actors of 1960s Turkey. Nationalists must reckon with allegations of racism and ties to the counter-guerrilla; Islamists with their links to nationalists, their pro-Americanism, and their anticommunist positions; leftists with their kinship to Kemalism, their relationships with coup plotters, and their own nationalist reflexes.

This book is a modest attempt to remind readers of the necessity of that reckoning. If it succeeds in that effort, its author will count himself fortunate…