ANCA Challenges Institute of Turkish Studies on Genocide Denial

[Yervant1]

ANCA Challenges Institute of Turkish Studies on Genocide Denial
Published on Feb 5, 2014

Institute of Turkish Studies (ITS) Treasurer Edward Erickson responded angrily to Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) questions about his position on the Armenian Genocide and his organization's ties to the Turkish government, threatening to have ANCA Government Affairs Director Kate Nahapetian removed from a lecture he gave this afternoon at Georgetown University.

"Can we get her out of here?" was Dr. Erickson's response to Nahapetian's inquiry about whether he believed the murder of 1.5 million Armenians constituted genocide. "This is not Turkey," retorted Nahapetian, noting that those holding positions not shared by the lecturer cannot simply be silenced in the U.S.

The ITS had arranged for Dr. Erickson to lecture at the Georgetown University Center for Contemporary Arab Studies Boardroom on his latest book.

Referencing Dr. Erickson's opening assertion that history has an agenda, that "resources drive policy" and "resources determine policy," ANCA Executive Director Aram Hamparian asked Dr. Erickson to clarify the Institute of Turkish Studies ties to the Turkish government and its policy of genocide denial. Dr. Erickson acknowledged that the ITS was founded by a grant by the Turkish government but claimed that "the ITS has no strings attached, is not a puppet or an organ of the Turkish Government. It operates as a separate entity. It makes its own decisions and its agenda has nothing to do with anything Armenian or the denial of the genocide."

Nahapetian challenged that assertion, reminding Dr. Erickson and attendees that former ITS Chairman Donald Quataert felt compelled to relinquish his position with the organization following a meeting with then Turkish Ambassador to the U.S. Nabi Sensoy, precipitated by an article Quataert had written acknowledging the Armenian Genocide. In a 2008 "Inside Higher Ed" article, Quataert told reporter Scott Jaschik that the Ambassador "made it clear that if I did not separate myself as chairman of the board that funding for the institute would be withdrawn by the Turkish government and the institute would be destroyed." Jaschik's complete article on the topic, titled "Is Turkey Muzzling U.S. Scholars?" is available at:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/20...

ITS ties with the Turkish government were explored extensively in the Spring, 1995, Holocaust and Genocide Studies article "Professional Ethics and the Denial of Armenian Genocide" by Dr. Roger W. Smith, Dr. Eric Markusen and Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, the full text of which is available here:
http://www.anca.org/assets/pdf/armeni...

Voice of America reporter Arsen Kharatyan and other attendees including Lee Jundanian and Dikran Dourian asked questions, expressed their concerns about Dr. Erickson's flawed scholarship and his ties to Turkey's international campaign of genocide denial. In what was perhaps the most puzzling moment of the talk, when questioned a second time on his position regarding the Armenian Genocide, this time by Kharatyan, Dr. Erickson replied, "There are days I wake up and I think 'It's probably genocide.' There are days I wake up and I think 'probably not'."

Following the lecture, Hamparian commented, "We saw today yet another angry attempt by an Ankara-funded organization, this time the Institute of Turkish Studies, to enforce - right here in America - Turkey's shameful gag-rule on the Armenian Genocide."

 

Just watch this shocking 40-second clip from a Georgetown University event yesterday. It was taped at an event shamelessly trying to re-define the Armenian Genocide as a counter-insurgency campaign, somehow attempting to cast the innocent victims of this crime as terrorist targets. Edited February 6, 2014 by Yervant1

[Yervant1]

TURKEY'S TAKE BACK: THE INSTITUTE OF TURKISH STUDIES HAS BEEN ACCUSED OF PUSHING THE TURKISH STATE'S AGENDA ...

Inside Higher Education
Dec 22 2015

Turkey's Take Back

The Institute of Turkish Studies has been accused of pushing the
Turkish state's agenda on the Armenian genocide. Now the Turkish
government has withdrawn its funding. Why?

December 22, 2015 By Elizabeth Redden

A controversial institute supporting research in Turkish studies has
lost its funding from Turkey's government, raising questions about
whether an institute that has long been perceived by some in the field
of Ottoman and Turkish studies as pushing the Turkish state's agenda
had grown too independent for the government's liking.

The Institute of Turkish Studies, a nonprofit based at Georgetown
University, has been accused of toeing the Turkish state position on
the Armenian genocide. The Turkish government objects to the use of
the term "genocide" to refer to the massacre of Armenians in 1915,
arguing that Armenian deaths were not the result of a systematic
campaign of ethnic cleansing -- a broadly shared view among historians
of the subject -- but instead were a consequence of "intercommunal
conflict" and the privations of World War I.

In 2006, Donald Quataert, a historian (now deceased) at the State
University of New York at Binghamton, resigned from his position as
chair of ITS's board, saying the Turkish ambassador had pressured
him to either quit or see the institute's funding withdrawn after he
used the word "genocide" in a book review. Quataert's resignation,
combined with the institute's Turkish government funding source and
its current or former associations with some prominent scholars who
have challenged the use of the term "genocide" -- specifically the
institute's founding director and governor emeritus, Heath Lowry,
and former board member Justin McCarthy -- have contributed to
suspicion that the institute functioned as a kind of academic front
for the Turkish state. A 1995 article published in the Holocaust
and Genocide Studies journal exposed correspondence in which ITS's
founding director, Lowry, drafted a letter on behalf of the Turkish
ambassador criticizing a book that discussed what Lowry described as
"the so-called 'Armenian genocide.'" (Lowry could not be reached
for comment.)

Jenny White, an anthropologist at Boston University and a longtime
member of ITS's governing board, said the perception that the institute
is in the Turkish government's pocket is just not true. In the case of
Quataert, she said the board would have had his back -- "I told him,
'Donald, we're never going to submit to this, the board has your
back, let us handle it'" -- but that he resigned before they had the
chance. Moreover, she said that scholars on the institute's board
"have a variety of different views on hot-button issues in their
field. That's exactly as it should be. We're not in the business of
selecting people who are ideologically one way or another."

White described ITS as an "independent and impartial supporter of
Turkish studies," powered by a group of scholars who volunteer their
time to evaluate research proposals.

Indeed, White is among those who speculate that ITS's intellectual
independence may be what led the Turkish government to revoke its
funding. Interest from a $3 million trust established by the Turkish
government to fund ITS has been used to support dissertation-writing
grants, undergraduate scholarships and language study awards. Funding
from the trust has also supported lecture series and workshops,
graduate fellowships, and research and travel grants. All told,
ITS has since 1982 awarded 1,313 grants to individuals and academic
institutions, including 53 seed-funding grants to incentivize the
creation of new faculty positions at 43 different institutions and
199 grants to pay for library resources in Turkish studies.

"Whenever anyone said you should be doing more to push Turkey's agenda,
we would say we give grants. That's all we do. We give grants, and
our director goes around to universities giving talks about Turkey
and trying to get scholars and the institutions themselves interested
in starting Turkish studies programs, Turkish language programs,"
White said.

White said that ITS strives to be nonpolitical in its event
programming, but that the board does include political scientists who
"as professional scholars have been speaking and writing about what's
going on in Turkey in ways that may not be perceived as particularly
flattering. That could have been part of it."

She suggested that it is the Turkish government's perception of ITS's
work -- not the work itself -- that has changed. "The fact that we
only want to do scholarly events, that we insist on not having an
ideological program, but we focus only on scholarly merit in choosing
our grants -- that sort of thing, I suppose, is not valued as much
as it was, say, 10 years ago or 30 years ago," White said.

Many experts observe that the Turkish government has become
increasingly authoritarian under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The
Turkish Embassy in Washington declined to comment on the reasons for
ending ITS's funding, as did the institute's executive director,
Sinan Ciddi. Turkey's ambassador to the U.S., Serdar Kilic, is a
nonvoting member and honorary chairman of the ITS board.

In withdrawing financial support, White said, the Turkish government
invoked a technicality. The trust established to support ITS was
supposed to be renewed after five years. It apparently never was. But
since that means the trust would technically have expired in 1988,
scholars are still left with questions as to why the government is
choosing to end its support for ITS now.

Kent F. Schull, an associate professor of Ottoman and modern Middle
East history at SUNY Binghamton and a member of the associate board
at ITS -- the body of scholars that evaluates grant proposals -- said
his speculation (and he emphasized it was speculation) "is perhaps
this is the Turkish government pushing back, saying, 'OK, you've
crossed lines, we'll find someone who's more supportive of our views.'"

Schull said that ITS has over the last five years or so "in my view
attempted to improve its reputation in terms of academic freedom and
openness to a variety of controversial issues related to Turkey,"
including issues related to ethnic and religious minority groups
in Turkey.

Schull had initially been skeptical of the institute's claims to
independence, but said he personally tested them in applying for
a library grant for Binghamton specifically for materials related
to Kurdish studies -- a highly sensitive subject in Turkey. ITS
awarded it.

"I said, this is my test. If you would support something like this,
then things are changing around here -- at least what I assumed the
Institute of Turkish Studies stood for before is changing -- and I'd
like to be a part of that change."

As for the most controversial of all the issues, Schull noted that the
institute has indirectly supported publication on the genocide question
through subventions for The Journal of Ottoman and Turkish Studies,
which he edits. In the spring, the journal published a lengthy review
titled "Ottoman Historiography and the End of the Genocide Taboo."

Heghnar Watenpaugh, an associate professor of art history and an
Ottomanist at the University of California at Davis, is "dubious" of
the idea that ITS is being punished for its scholarly independence. In
general, she said, their grantees are people who work on early modern
or other nonsensitive topics. (A list of grants awarded can be found
on the institute's website.)

Watenpaugh's best guess is that ITS's defunding may be a matter of
Turkish party politics. "I wonder about the timing of this defunding
-- does it correspond with the [November] elections? That would be my
speculation, and the fact that the opposition party that is associated
with its parent trust" was not successful in those elections, she
said. Tax documents filed for the Institute of Turkish Studies Trust --
which is a separate legal body from the institute -- list two managers:
Kilic, the current Turkish ambassador to the U.S., and Sukru Elekdag,
a former ambassador and a member of the Republican People's Party,
the main opposition party to the ruling Justice and Development Party.

Watenpaugh thinks ITS has had a "pernicious" effect on Ottoman and
Turkish studies. "ITS is very pernicious not only because in my view
they have proactively supported [genocide] denialists but they also
promote this atmosphere of censorship, where people self-censor and
money is always dangled in the middle," she said.

"Many of us have been saying this for years: the ITS was a way for the
Turkish government to influence Ottoman and Turkish studies in American
academia, promote Armenian genocide denial, and interfere with studies
critical of Turkey's human rights record," Keith David Watenpaugh,
an associate professor of modern Islam, human rights and peace at UC
Davis (and Heghnar Watenpaugh's husband), wrote in a Facebook post.

Fatma Muge Gocek, a professor at the University of Michigan who once
sat on ITS's associate board and whose most recent book examines
Turkey's denial of collective violence against the Armenians, said
that the Internet has made it harder for the government to control
knowledge about the genocide and that a new generation of scholars
is more prone to question the Turkish state's account. "Knowledge
expansion about Turkey and the politics of knowledge control are
of course two separate things, and the boundaries are not clear,"
she said.

"Obviously, the primary target was always the political agenda,"
Gocek said of the Turkish government's support for ITS. "Once it's no
longer useful for them, they also get rid of all of the other stuff,
which has been positive, like teaching Turkish language."

The vast majority of ITS's funding has come from the trust
established by the Turkish government. In 2013, the institute reported
contributions from just two sources: $392,000 from the trust and
$10,500 from the estate of Mark Pinson.

The institute is now seeking new sources of funds so it can continue
to support Turkish studies in the U.S. Since 1982 it has contributed
about $3 million in support for the field.

"If ITS stopped functioning, there's a huge gap in support for
Turkish studies in the United States," said White, the member of its
governing board.

"Young scholars who need help getting subventions for their book, who
need dissertation write-up money, scholars who need research money,
where else are they going to get that?"

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/12/22/turkey-ends-funding-controversial-research-institute

[Yervant1]

TURKEY ENDS FUNDING FOR CONTROVERSIAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE

3 hours ago 23/12/15

Institute of Turkish Studies

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Inside Higher Ed News)--A controversial institute
supporting research in Turkish studies has lost its funding from
Turkey's government, raising questions about whether an institute
that has long been perceived by some in the field of Ottoman and
Turkish studies as pushing the Turkish state's agenda had grown too
independent for the government's liking.

The Institute of Turkish Studies, a nonprofit based at Georgetown
University, has been accused of pushing the Turkish state's agenda on
the Armenian genocide. The Turkish government objects to the use of
the term "genocide" to refer to the massacre of Armenians in 1915,
arguing that Armenian deaths were not the result of a systematic
campaign of ethnic cleansing -- a broadly shared view among historians
of the subject -- but instead were a consequence of "intercommunal
conflict" and the privations of World War I.

In 2006, Donald Quataert, a historian (now deceased) at the State
University of New York at Binghamton, resigned from his position as
chair of ITS's board, saying the Turkish ambassador had pressured
him to either quit or see the institute's funding withdrawn after he
used the word "genocide" in a book review. Quataert's resignation,
combined with the institute's Turkish government funding source and
its current or former associations with some prominent scholars who
have challenged the use of the term "genocide" -- specifically the
institute's founding director and governor emeritus, Heath Lowry,
and former board member Justin McCarthy -- have contributed to
suspicion that the institute functioned as a kind of academic front
for the Turkish state. A 1995 article published in the Holocaust
and Genocide Studies journal exposed correspondence in which ITS's
founding director, Lowry, drafted a letter on behalf of the Turkish
ambassador criticizing a book that discussed what Lowry described as
"the so-called 'Armenian genocide.'" (Lowry could not be reached
for comment.)

Jenny White, an anthropologist at Boston University and a longtime
member of ITS's governing board, said the perception that the institute
is in the Turkish government's pocket is just not true. In the case of
Quataert, she said the board would have had his back -- "I told him,
'Donald, we're never going to submit to this, the board has your
back, let us handle it'" -- but that he resigned before they had the
chance. Moreover, she said that scholars on the institute's board
"have a variety of different views on hot-button issues in their
field. That's exactly as it should be. We're not in the business of
selecting people who are ideologically one way or another."

White described ITS as an "independent and impartial supporter of
Turkish studies," powered by a group of scholars who volunteer their
time to evaluate research proposals.

Indeed, White is among those who speculate that ITS's intellectual
independence may be what led the Turkish government to revoke its
funding. Interest from a $3 million trust established by the Turkish
government to fund ITS has been used to support dissertation-writing
grants, undergraduate scholarships and language study awards. Funding
from the trust has also supported lecture series and workshops,
graduate fellowships, and research and travel grants. All told,
ITS has since 1982 awarded 1,313 grants to individuals and academic
institutions, including 53 seed-funding grants to incentivize the
creation of new faculty positions at 43 different institutions and
199 grants to pay for library resources in Turkish studies.

"Whenever anyone said you should be doing more to push Turkey's agenda,
we would say we give grants. That's all we do. We give grants, and
our director goes around to universities giving talks about Turkey
and trying to get scholars and the institutions themselves interested
in starting Turkish studies programs, Turkish language programs,"
White said.

White said that ITS strives to be nonpolitical in its event
programming, but that the board does include political scientists who
"as professional scholars have been speaking and writing about what's
going on in Turkey in ways that may not be perceived as particularly
flattering. That could have been part of it."

She suggested that it is the Turkish government's perception of ITS's
work -- not the work itself -- that has changed. "The fact that we
only want to do scholarly events, that we insist on not having an
ideological program, but we focus only on scholarly merit in choosing
our grants -- that sort of thing, I suppose, is not valued as much
as it was, say, 10 years ago or 30 years ago," White said.

Many experts observe that the Turkish government has become
increasingly authoritarian under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The
Turkish Embassy in Washington declined to comment on the reasons for
ending ITS's funding, as did the institute's executive director,
Sinan Ciddi. Turkey's ambassador to the U.S., Serdar Kilic, is a
nonvoting member and honorary chairman of the ITS board.

In withdrawing financial support, White said, the Turkish government
invoked a technicality. The trust established to support ITS was
supposed to be renewed after five years. It apparently never was. But
since that means the trust would technically have expired in 1988,
scholars are still left with questions as to why the government is
choosing to end its support for ITS now.

Kent F. Schull, an associate professor of Ottoman and modern Middle
East history at SUNY Binghamton and a member of the associate board
at ITS -- the body of scholars that evaluates grant proposals -- said
his speculation (and he emphasized it was speculation) "is perhaps
this is the Turkish government pushing back, saying, 'OK, you've
crossed lines, we'll find someone who's more supportive of our views.'"

Schull said that ITS has over the last five years or so "in my view
attempted to improve its reputation in terms of academic freedom and
openness to a variety of controversial issues related to Turkey,"
including issues related to ethnic and religious minority groups
in Turkey.

Schull had initially been skeptical of the institute's claims to
independence, but said he personally tested them in applying for
a library grant for Binghamton specifically for materials related
to Kurdish studies -- a highly sensitive subject in Turkey. ITS
awarded it.

"I said, this is my test. If you would support something like this,
then things are changing around here -- at least what I assumed the
Institute of Turkish Studies stood for before is changing -- and I'd
like to be a part of that change."

As for the most controversial of all the issues, Schull noted that the
institute has indirectly supported publication on the genocide question
through subventions for The Journal of Ottoman and Turkish Studies,
which he edits. In the spring, the journal published a lengthy review
titled "Ottoman Historiography and the End of the Genocide Taboo."

Heghnar Watenpaugh, an associate professor of art history and an
Ottomanist at the University of California at Davis, is "dubious" of
the idea that ITS is being punished for its scholarly independence. In
general, she said, their grantees are people who work on early modern
or other nonsensitive topics. (A list of grants awarded can be found
on the institute's website.)

Watenpaugh's best guess is that ITS's defunding may be a matter of
Turkish party politics. "I wonder about the timing of this defunding
-- does it correspond with the [November] elections? That would be my
speculation, and the fact that the opposition party that is associated
with its parent trust" was not successful in those elections, she
said. Tax documents filed for the Institute of Turkish Studies Trust --
which is a separate legal body from the institute -- list two managers:
Kilic, the current Turkish ambassador to the U.S., and Sukru Elekdag,
a former ambassador and a member of the Republican People's Party,
the main opposition party to the ruling Justice and Development Party.

Watenpaugh thinks ITS has had a "pernicious" effect on Ottoman and
Turkish studies. "ITS is very pernicious not only because in my view
they have proactively supported [genocide] denialists but they also
promote this atmosphere of censorship, where people self-censor and
money is always dangled in the middle," she said.

"Many of us have been saying this for years: the ITS was a way for the
Turkish government to influence Ottoman and Turkish studies in American
academia, promote Armenian genocide denial, and interfere with studies
critical of Turkey's human rights record," Keith David Watenpaugh,
an associate professor of modern Islam, human rights and peace at UC
Davis (and Heghnar Watenpaugh's husband), wrote in a Facebook post.

Fatma Muge Gocek, a professor at the University of Michigan who once
sat on ITS's associate board and whose most recent book examines
Turkey's denial of collective violence against the Armenians, said
that the Internet has made it harder for the government to control
knowledge about the genocide and that a new generation of scholars
is more prone to question the Turkish state's account. "Knowledge
expansion about Turkey and the politics of knowledge control are
of course two separate things, and the boundaries are not clear,"
she said.

"Obviously, the primary target was always the political agenda,"
Gocek said of the Turkish government's support for ITS. "Once it's no
longer useful for them, they also get rid of all of the other stuff,
which has been positive, like teaching Turkish language."

The vast majority of ITS's funding has come from the trust
established by the Turkish government. In 2013, the institute reported
contributions from just two sources: $392,000 from the trust and
$10,500 from the estate of Mark Pinson.

The institute is now seeking new sources of funds so it can continue
to support Turkish studies in the U.S. Since 1982 it has contributed
about $3 million in support for the field.

"If ITS stopped functioning, there's a huge gap in support for
Turkish studies in the United States," said White, the member of its
governing board.

"Young scholars who need help getting subventions for their book, who
need dissertation write-up money, scholars who need research money,
where else are they going to get that?"

http://asbarez.com/143523/turkey-ends-funding-for-controversial-research-institute/