Article on Taner Akçam

I can't remeber if this guy has been already mentioned in here, but he would definitely be a controversial academic.

QUOTE

History that dares to speak its name

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 Akçam 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 Akçam 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 Akçam’s flight, but also had information on the historian’s past, including a 1974 arrest for pro-*test*-('")ing at Turkey’s invasion of northern Cyprus, that had never had been in the media.

So who gave the tip-off? Akçam 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, Akçam’s friend and fellow intellectual, the Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor Hrant Dink, was murdered in broad daylight on an Istanbul street. His crime, like Akçam, 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.

Akçam 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,” Akçam 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, Akçam 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 Akçam. 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 Akçam 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.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol...icle2277131.ece

how come that every descent turk is branded as a traitor?

QUOTE (Duke-Nukem @ August 18, 2007 11:14 am)

how come that every descent turk is branded as a traitor?

This is natural for semidemocratic states. But dont forget we had the same conditions for a half of a century in Greece.

Well... It's a fact that he's currently on the payroll of the Armenian Research Center (ARC) at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. :)

Taner Akcam was born in Kars — a province where there is a sizeable number of Turkified Armenian families lives.

He was also implicated in the murder of a journalist in the 70ies if I'm not mistaking. greekturkish/hmmm.gif

QUOTE (Kayakiran @ August 19, 2007 05:03 am)

He was also implicated in the murder of a journalist in the 70ies if I'm not mistaking. greekturkish/hmmm.gif

Mate, he had finger in a lot of terrorist activities of 70s. He was prisoned for 9 years and later escaped to Germany.

His beef with Turkey goes a long way back.

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"He was granted political asylum in Germany after receiving a ten-year prison sentence in Turkey for his involvement in producing a student journal, which resulted in his adoption in 1976 by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience."

from the back flap of
Akcam, Taner; trans. Paul Bessemer. A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility. Henry Holt and Company (New York, 2006).

I believe what the dust jacket says is alot more accurate than the Fasistler attacking his reputation by saying he killed a journalist or was a terrorist.

QUOTE (Nikephoros @ November 27, 2007 09:12 pm)

I believe what the dust jacket says is alot more accurate than the Fasistler attacking his reputation by saying he killed a journalist or was a terrorist.

I think you subconsciously have wired yourself to believe anything negative about the Republic of Turkey.

BTW: I just saw your sig. I promise you that you do not own this Turk.

QUOTE ("Stupid Turk who I allegedly do not own said")

He was also implicated in the murder of a journalist in the 70ies if I'm not mistaking.

QUOTE ("Taner Akcam in reputable American source says")

http://www.lawandpolitics.com/minnesota/Is...0e0c6dcf76.html

Now, this is important to understand because of the ongoing Turkish campaign in the United States to discredit me as a terrorist. The story begins with my arrest in 1974 for leafleting. ...

In order to distribute a leaflet in Turkey you had to go to the central police station and get special permission. You had to have this permit in your possession while distributing literature. However, even if you had this permit -- as I did -- you could still get arrested and held in jail for two or three days; which is exactly what happened to me. That was my "terrorist act": distributing leaflets -- with permission, mind you -- which said I opposed the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. I was against war. So the police arrested me and I spent two days in prison. ...

Definitely there are Turkish diplomats who nourish these sites with information. I mean, who could have given TallArmenianTale.com the exact date of my arrest in 1974? Even I had forgotten that! It was for leafleting! And there is no record of this in any journal or newspaper. This is what that Web site claims is a terrorist act. There must be some police officer in Ankara from whom they got the information. All these groups that I mentioned (ATAA, Turkish Forum, TallArmenianTale.com, some diplomats and police officers from Turkey) are very well connected.

Nothing to do but see Turks repeat the same old lies from sites like TallArmenianTale which is a joke. While Akcam is a visiting Genocide Scholar and asked to speak at important conferences, they slink and make lies on the web and Wikipedia to cause him trouble.

I can't say i'm a big fan of Akçam. He gets too obsessed with Turks sometimes. But Taner Akçam's knowledge on Armenian genocide is thousand times more than people who criticise him. Speculations linking Taner Akçam with terrorist acts are just propaganda bullshit. Akçam replied all those alleges and shut everyone's mouths on that case.

Hi guys,

Sorry that my first post has to be by bumping a year-old topic, but I couldn't resist. Akcam is long-labeled a "terrorist" through some heavy hate campaign against him. The sad truth is that these campaigns are often successful, and people will keep reciting the same unproven arguments over and over again just because they've heard it from someplace. Many people still believe Hrant Dink was an "enemy of the state" without reading a whole article he wrote.

Anyway, a good start to getting to know Akcam is through the following interview he gave to BBC:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/hardtalk/6970332.stm

Btw, I'm impressed by the rich smiley collection on this forum.

greekturkish/fiddle.gif