5 Minutes With Taner Akçam, a Turk Who Will Bring Scholars o... http://chronicle.com.ezproxy.baylor.edu/article/5-Minutes-With...

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March 28, 2010

A Turkish Scholar Talks About the Armenian Genocide
By Andrea Fuller
Taner Akçam made history in the 1990s as the first Turkish
academic to publicly acknowledge that an Armenian genocide took
place, an assertion long disputed by the Turkish government.

An estimated 1.5 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire died

beginning in 1915 and culminating in the years following World War
I. The Armenian National Institute, in Washington, says those lives
were lost through mass slaughter, starvation, and disease as
Armenians were displaced by the Ottoman government.

This month Mr. Akçam, an associate professor of history at Clark

University, will again break new ground when he leads one of the
first international conferences of Armenian-genocide scholars, April
9 to 10, sponsored by the Strassler Center for Holocaust and
Genocide Studies at Clark.

Mr. Akçam grew up in Turkey, where he was arrested in the 1970s

for leading a revolutionary student journal that criticized the
government. He spent a year in prison before escaping and
immigrating to Germany, where he earned his Ph.D. The scholar has
received numerous death threats from Turkish ultranationalists,
who have also vandalized his Wikipedia page and called him a
terrorist, he says.

Mr. Akçam is working on a book about political trials of the

perpetrators of the Armenian genocide, based on daily newspaper
coverage from that time. He is also collecting oral histories from the
last survivors of a massacre in the Dersim region in the 1930s.

Q. In your youth, you were arrested for your protest

activities in Turkey. Why did you put your mind to
becoming a scholar and not simply an activist?

A. When I was a student at the university, my dream was to be a

scholar. The Turkish justice system and the Turkish political system
put a hold on my dream.

Q. What is your opinion of the controversial resolution

recently approved by the House Foreign Affairs

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Committee, labeling the Ottoman killings of Armenians

during the World War I era a genocide?

A. The Congress's history of failed resolutions in recognition of the

Armenian genocide has started to grow old ... I personally strongly
wish that the United States would change its policy toward Turkey.
If democracy and facing history is good for the United States, the
same should be true for Turkey.

Q. Turkish authorities oppose the use of the term

"genocide" for the events after World War I. Can
Armenians and Turks ever reconcile their stories?

A. Definitely. There is a very strong process of transformation in

Turkey. ... I'm very much confident that this process will move
forward and Turkey will face its own history in an honest way.

Q. Do you often do research in Turkey?

A. My research of course involves going to Turkey, but I am scared

to go and work in the archives. It is still risky for me to work in the
archives or to show myself in certain places regularly. Not because
of the Turkish government, but because of ... ultranationalist
groups.

Q. What kind of relationship do you have with other

Turkish historians?

A. I would say that I am well respected among these critical

scholars. Whether they agree with each of the positions that I have
is another issue. The main problem in Turkey today is freedom of
speech. Because of that, most of the scholars cannot come up and
write and say what they really think about 1915.

Q. Why is it so important that we study the Armenian

genocide?

A. If we don't face our wrongdoings in the past, we cannot create a

democratic future. If we want to prevent further mass killings and
further genocide, we have to understand why it happened in the
past.
Copyright 2010. All rights reserved.
The Chronicle of Higher Education 1255 Twenty-Third St, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037

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