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The Scotsmen
Wed 22 Aug 2007
Taner Akçam whose views have led to death threats
The historian at war with 'history'
MILES JOHNSON
THE houses of history, it is said, are built on unstable foundations, constantly riven by debates over what the study of the past actually is and what it can hope ever to achieve. But for Taner Akçam, those debates are nothing to do with academic self-indulgence, and everything to do with whether what he writes will cost him his freedom or his life.
As one of the first Turkish historians to acknowledge the existence of the Armenian Genocide of 1915, his scholarship has been attacked with the full weight of the Turkish state, which for the last 82 years waged a full-scale war against the memory of more than a million Armenians murdered by the Ottoman government during the First World War.
The Armenian Genocide, the subject to which Taner Akçam has devoted his life's work, is widely seen as one of the "forgotten" genocides of the 20th Century. In his book A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, Akçam explores the reasons for the Turkish state's continued denial of the events of 1915. Born in Ardahan Province in 1953, he was imprisoned for nine years as a student for writing in a journal about the treatment of Turkey's Kurdish minority, a sentence which led to his being recognised by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience. After managing to escape, claiming asylum in Germany, he subsequently studied for his PhD on the Armenian Genocide at the University of Hamburg and, after writing numerous articles and several books, is now a visiting history professor at Minnesota University.
The past he writes of is a brutal one. During the First World War the government of the Ottoman Empire, a crumbling multi-ethnic state that had suffered heavy territorial losses after the Balkan wars of 1912/13, was responsible for the forcible deportation of its Armenian community, resulting in the death of over a million people. Before these desperate days, the final Sultans of the "Sick Man of Europe" adopted different strategies to contain the growing nationalism in the Empire's disparate ethnic communities. Five years after the Young Turk cabal of officers seized power in 1908, the shock of losing the majority of their most valuable land in the Balkans saw these strategies replaced by an exclusive pan-Turkism. This was a worldview that had no place for the Armenian Christians who had resided in Anatolia for a thousand years, and after the Empire's entry into the First World War a decision was taken to annihilate its Armenian population. Today there are little more than 50,000 Armenians left in Turkey.
Hitler, as it is often quoted, uttered these words before his invasion of Poland: "Who remembers the Armenians?" And indeed the Turkish state has continued to strive to ensure that the disappearance of its Armenian population remains a secret. For Akçam, the recognition of Turkey's historical wrongdoing would pave the way for the further democratisation of a Republic that has long been subject to the whims of the military since its establishment in 1923. But, in his view, the driving force behind his government's continued refusal to acknowledge its past is the threat this would present to its own foundational mythology.
"There is a strong connection between the foundation of the Turkish Republic and the Armenian Genocide", he says. "Important founding members of the Republic were either participating in the genocide directly or became rich as a result of it. For us, like any other nation, it is not so easy to call the generation of our founding fathers thieves and murderers. It is like Jefferson owning slaves. You cannot write a national history based on this accusation, and this is the basic problem." Akçam hopes that the acknowledgement of the genocide by the Turkish government would pave the way to further democratisation and its entry into the European Union, a process that has been disrupted in recent years by extreme nationalists and the powerful influence of the military.
It is in this difficult relationship that he also sees the potential for a self-reflection that is so far yet to happen. "Turkey has a chance in this regard too," he says. "The founding father of Turkey, Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, openly condemned the genocide as 'a shameful act', hence the title of my book. This could, and should, encourage Turkey to have the same position as their founding father and start from there."
Yet it is Akçam's intimacy with his homeland that has resulted in the wrath of Turkish nationalist groups. Unlike other writers he cannot simply be discounted as an Armenian propagandist or "imperialist". Today is a tumultuous time for Turkish intellectuals. After the assassination of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in January, targeted for his discussion of the genocide, they have been on high alert, granted police protection by the state that for the first time appears to take seriously the death threats from the ultra-nationalist Right. Since the publication of his book last year Akçam, though a resident of the United States, has been the subject of a co-ordinated campaign eerily reminiscent of the build-up to the murder of his friend Dink.
Much of this intimidation takes place on the internet where Akçam has received death threats via e-mail and, as a result of his Wikipedia biography being vandalised, was detained by immigration en route to a lecture in Canada for being a "terrorist". "I take these threats very seriously because we are all, the Turkish intellectuals, paralysed after Hrant's assassination. We see everything within that context. In January when I was in Ankara, in Hrant Dink's office, he was showing me the threatening e-mails he was getting and saying that he was apprehensive and that he was scared. He was also saying that through the campaign in the press they made him an open target. I am worried this will happen to me."
His temporary detention in Canada occurred after unfounded allegations that he was a "terrorist" were spread throughout Internet forums by the anonymous Turkish American "webmaster" of a denialist website. As the lies spread a number of individuals began to vandalise his Wikipedia page, which eventually ended up in the hands of the Canadian authorities. It was after this incident, and attempted physical assaults at several of his lectures, that he took the decision to unmask the shady webmaster co-ordinating the campaign. The result, a full-blown personal attack by the largest Turkish daily newspaper Hürriyet, was a consequence he could not have expected.
"To be honest I never suspected this figure was getting such big support from Turkey," he says. "It means I maybe hit important members of the Turkish Secret Service in America, or somebody else who has very strong connections in Turkey. After I revealed his identity I got a death threat via e-mail where the person said they are going after me and my friends in Turkey, that they will get them first and then come for me. One week after this e-mail, as if there is no other important news in Turkey, the biggest newspaper in the country wrote this article with my picture on the first page."
The Hürriyet article was a vicious personal attack stating, among other allegations, that he was a traitor "vomiting hatred towards his country". "When I saw this I thought this is unbelievable, unimaginable. That the biggest Turkish newspaper writes that I am working against Turkey and a betrayer of the nation, it is a really incriminating campaign designed to criminalise me and my scholarly work. It makes me a target, as they did with Hrant Dink."
It has been said quite dryly that the Turkish intelligentsia are in a strange position in the modern world, where non-intellectuals pay close attention to what they write, none more so than the state's lawyers. Such scrutiny falls upon anyone who dares to attach the 'G word' to the events of 1915. Article 301 of the Turkish penal code, the law that prohibits "insulting Turkishness" became famous outside of the country last year when an attempted prosecution was brought against the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk for mentioning the "Armenian Question" in a magazine interview.
In spite of such laws and the death threats he has received, Taner Akçam continues to teach and lecture on the events of 1915. It is through an acknowledgement by the Turkish government of the crimes of the past that he hopes his country will build a better future and further the process of an open society. "Just a few days before the recent election the Turkish Prime Minister sent a decree to all governmental agencies inside and outside of Turkey banning the usage of the term 'so-called genocide'," he says. "This is the official language Turkey used when describing 1915, a hugely insulting term to Armenians, and now they will stop. It is these things, the small but important steps, that mean I will always have hope."
• Taner Akçam is at the Book Festival on Monday 27 August at 11am
Related topic
Edinburgh International Book Festival
This article: http://living.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1328472007
Last updated: 22-Aug-07 01:01 BST
Wed 22 Aug 2007
Taner Akçam whose views have led to death threats
The historian at war with 'history'
MILES JOHNSON
THE houses of history, it is said, are built on unstable foundations, constantly riven by debates over what the study of the past actually is and what it can hope ever to achieve. But for Taner Akçam, those debates are nothing to do with academic self-indulgence, and everything to do with whether what he writes will cost him his freedom or his life.
As one of the first Turkish historians to acknowledge the existence of the Armenian Genocide of 1915, his scholarship has been attacked with the full weight of the Turkish state, which for the last 82 years waged a full-scale war against the memory of more than a million Armenians murdered by the Ottoman government during the First World War.
The Armenian Genocide, the subject to which Taner Akçam has devoted his life's work, is widely seen as one of the "forgotten" genocides of the 20th Century. In his book A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, Akçam explores the reasons for the Turkish state's continued denial of the events of 1915. Born in Ardahan Province in 1953, he was imprisoned for nine years as a student for writing in a journal about the treatment of Turkey's Kurdish minority, a sentence which led to his being recognised by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience. After managing to escape, claiming asylum in Germany, he subsequently studied for his PhD on the Armenian Genocide at the University of Hamburg and, after writing numerous articles and several books, is now a visiting history professor at Minnesota University.
The past he writes of is a brutal one. During the First World War the government of the Ottoman Empire, a crumbling multi-ethnic state that had suffered heavy territorial losses after the Balkan wars of 1912/13, was responsible for the forcible deportation of its Armenian community, resulting in the death of over a million people. Before these desperate days, the final Sultans of the "Sick Man of Europe" adopted different strategies to contain the growing nationalism in the Empire's disparate ethnic communities. Five years after the Young Turk cabal of officers seized power in 1908, the shock of losing the majority of their most valuable land in the Balkans saw these strategies replaced by an exclusive pan-Turkism. This was a worldview that had no place for the Armenian Christians who had resided in Anatolia for a thousand years, and after the Empire's entry into the First World War a decision was taken to annihilate its Armenian population. Today there are little more than 50,000 Armenians left in Turkey.
Hitler, as it is often quoted, uttered these words before his invasion of Poland: "Who remembers the Armenians?" And indeed the Turkish state has continued to strive to ensure that the disappearance of its Armenian population remains a secret. For Akçam, the recognition of Turkey's historical wrongdoing would pave the way for the further democratisation of a Republic that has long been subject to the whims of the military since its establishment in 1923. But, in his view, the driving force behind his government's continued refusal to acknowledge its past is the threat this would present to its own foundational mythology.
"There is a strong connection between the foundation of the Turkish Republic and the Armenian Genocide", he says. "Important founding members of the Republic were either participating in the genocide directly or became rich as a result of it. For us, like any other nation, it is not so easy to call the generation of our founding fathers thieves and murderers. It is like Jefferson owning slaves. You cannot write a national history based on this accusation, and this is the basic problem." Akçam hopes that the acknowledgement of the genocide by the Turkish government would pave the way to further democratisation and its entry into the European Union, a process that has been disrupted in recent years by extreme nationalists and the powerful influence of the military.
It is in this difficult relationship that he also sees the potential for a self-reflection that is so far yet to happen. "Turkey has a chance in this regard too," he says. "The founding father of Turkey, Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, openly condemned the genocide as 'a shameful act', hence the title of my book. This could, and should, encourage Turkey to have the same position as their founding father and start from there."
Yet it is Akçam's intimacy with his homeland that has resulted in the wrath of Turkish nationalist groups. Unlike other writers he cannot simply be discounted as an Armenian propagandist or "imperialist". Today is a tumultuous time for Turkish intellectuals. After the assassination of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in January, targeted for his discussion of the genocide, they have been on high alert, granted police protection by the state that for the first time appears to take seriously the death threats from the ultra-nationalist Right. Since the publication of his book last year Akçam, though a resident of the United States, has been the subject of a co-ordinated campaign eerily reminiscent of the build-up to the murder of his friend Dink.
Much of this intimidation takes place on the internet where Akçam has received death threats via e-mail and, as a result of his Wikipedia biography being vandalised, was detained by immigration en route to a lecture in Canada for being a "terrorist". "I take these threats very seriously because we are all, the Turkish intellectuals, paralysed after Hrant's assassination. We see everything within that context. In January when I was in Ankara, in Hrant Dink's office, he was showing me the threatening e-mails he was getting and saying that he was apprehensive and that he was scared. He was also saying that through the campaign in the press they made him an open target. I am worried this will happen to me."
His temporary detention in Canada occurred after unfounded allegations that he was a "terrorist" were spread throughout Internet forums by the anonymous Turkish American "webmaster" of a denialist website. As the lies spread a number of individuals began to vandalise his Wikipedia page, which eventually ended up in the hands of the Canadian authorities. It was after this incident, and attempted physical assaults at several of his lectures, that he took the decision to unmask the shady webmaster co-ordinating the campaign. The result, a full-blown personal attack by the largest Turkish daily newspaper Hürriyet, was a consequence he could not have expected.
"To be honest I never suspected this figure was getting such big support from Turkey," he says. "It means I maybe hit important members of the Turkish Secret Service in America, or somebody else who has very strong connections in Turkey. After I revealed his identity I got a death threat via e-mail where the person said they are going after me and my friends in Turkey, that they will get them first and then come for me. One week after this e-mail, as if there is no other important news in Turkey, the biggest newspaper in the country wrote this article with my picture on the first page."
The Hürriyet article was a vicious personal attack stating, among other allegations, that he was a traitor "vomiting hatred towards his country". "When I saw this I thought this is unbelievable, unimaginable. That the biggest Turkish newspaper writes that I am working against Turkey and a betrayer of the nation, it is a really incriminating campaign designed to criminalise me and my scholarly work. It makes me a target, as they did with Hrant Dink."
It has been said quite dryly that the Turkish intelligentsia are in a strange position in the modern world, where non-intellectuals pay close attention to what they write, none more so than the state's lawyers. Such scrutiny falls upon anyone who dares to attach the 'G word' to the events of 1915. Article 301 of the Turkish penal code, the law that prohibits "insulting Turkishness" became famous outside of the country last year when an attempted prosecution was brought against the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk for mentioning the "Armenian Question" in a magazine interview.
In spite of such laws and the death threats he has received, Taner Akçam continues to teach and lecture on the events of 1915. It is through an acknowledgement by the Turkish government of the crimes of the past that he hopes his country will build a better future and further the process of an open society. "Just a few days before the recent election the Turkish Prime Minister sent a decree to all governmental agencies inside and outside of Turkey banning the usage of the term 'so-called genocide'," he says. "This is the official language Turkey used when describing 1915, a hugely insulting term to Armenians, and now they will stop. It is these things, the small but important steps, that mean I will always have hope."
• Taner Akçam is at the Book Festival on Monday 27 August at 11am
Related topic
Edinburgh International Book Festival
This article: http://living.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1328472007
Last updated: 22-Aug-07 01:01 BST
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