Campaign Of Intimidation <--- By The Turkish Government

[Aratta-Kingdom]

 

 

HISTORY THAT DARES TO SPEAK ITS NAME

 

The Times

August 18, 2007

 

Giles Whittell talks to a writer whose view of the past has put his

life at risk

 

IT'S 9.30AM IN MINNEAPOLIS. The bridge over the Mississippi that used

to take Taner Akcam to work won't be rebuilt for a year, but that's

not what's vexing him. His problem is the Turkish Secret Service.

 

Professor Akcam is a Turk and an historian. In 1999, 84 years after

the event, he completed a harrowing doorstop of a book on the Armenian

genocide - densely factual and unsparing of the Turkish culprits -

now published in English. As a result, he is being hounded from

Istanbul to his Midwestern academic exile by ultranationalists from

his home-land . . . and by spooks.

 

That's his theory, anyway. How else to explain what happened in

Montreal in February when he was detained by airport police who said

that they had grounds to suspect he was a terrorist. Those grounds

turned out to be hostile postings on amazon. com and his own Wikipedia

page, doctored by people who had also, apparently, not only alerted

precisely the airport personnel who would be handling Akcam's flight,

but also had information on the historian's past, including a 1974

arrest for protesting at Turkey's invasion of northern Cyprus, that

had never had been in the media.

 

So who gave the tip-off? Akcam laughs wearily. He doesn't know.

 

"But my arrival was known of by the Turkish consul. He was even

invited to my lecture."

 

There might be something comical about this Wiki-assisted harassment -

except that two weeks earlier, Akcam's friend and fellow intellectual,

the Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor Hrant Dink, was murdered in

broad daylight on an Istanbul street. His crime, like Akcam, was

to have used the "G-word" to refer to the state-sponsored murder of

between 300,000 and 1.3 million Anatolian Armenians in 1915 with the

term reserved by the 1948 UN convention on genocide.

 

Akcam foretold his friend's death to his face a few days earlier. They

were in Istanbul, chatting about a presidential campaign that was

fuelling tensions between nationalists and liberals. "I told Hrant

there would be political assassinations," Akcam remembers. "And I told

him, 'Hrant, if I made a list of the people who will be assassinated I

would put you No 1. Please leave Turkey, at least until the end of the

election.' He didn't want to. He was, I think, expecting his death."

 

For his own part, even in Minneapolis, even after 30 years of

opposition to Turkey's denial of responsibility for the genocide,

Akcam says he has never been as scared as he is now.

 

Next week he travels to the Edinburgh Book Festival to talk about

the the fight for freedom of expression. The prospect of travel is

hardly soothing, "but I have to do it because it is what they want

us not to do. They want us to shut up and sit down."

 

He is not talking about Turkey's elected government, but the unelected

military and bureaucratic hierarchies he blames for a "culture of

hatred and animosity" towards an honest reckoning with the past.

 

He says that he feels that hatred whenever he returns to Istanbul,

which is about once a year. Once spotted by the nationalist press,

the vilification starts swiftly. He is branded a traitor, a foreign

agent and a liar, even though he is the only Turkish historian to

have based his analysis of 1915 on official Ottoman documents.

 

"On the second or third day you get the feeling that you should not

be showing yourself much in public."

 

Small wonder that of his fellow historians inside Turkey, almost none

are actively researching topics related to the Armenian question.

 

This is Turkey, a nation three years ago accepted as a candidate for

EU accession and which could be a member by 2015. Shouldn't it show

that it can uphold the most basic democratic freedoms and then reapply?

 

Absolutely not, says Akcam. For the EU to go cold on Turkish membership

now would be to set the country on "the path to authoritarianism".

 

Membership offers the only hope of cutting down the unelected

hierarchies and ending official denials.

 

Seven years ago, Professor Akcam sued his critics for libel for calling

him a German spy. In January, he lost on appeal. "So the ultimate

decision from the judiciary is that it is the right of everybody to

accuse me of being on the payroll of the German government because I

am using the genocide term. This is outrageous. You cannot criminalise

talking about history. It is unbelievable." And, for a man whose only

crime was to brave his country's archives, very frightening.

 

A SHAMEFUL ACT: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish

Responsibility by Taner Akcam

 

Constable and Robinson, £9.99; 600pp

 

Buy the book here at the offer price of £8.99 (free p&p)

 

Taner Akcam is at the at Edinburgh International Book Festival on

Monday August 27 at 11am. Call 0845 3735888 www.edbookfest.co.uk