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Today’s News
Friday, May 27, 2005
Academic Conference in Turkey on Armenian Question Is Canceled
Under Government Pressure
By AISHA LABI
An academic conference on the 1915 killing of 1.5 million Armenians by
Ottoman Turkish forces was canceled on Tuesday, a day before it was
scheduled to take place at Istanbul’s Bogaziçi University. The
conference, “Ottoman Armenians During the Decline of the Empire: Issues
of Scientific Responsibility and Democracy,” was organized by historians
from three of Turkey’s leading universities, Bogaziçi, Istanbul Bilgi,
and Sabanci.
The organizers said the conference would have been the first in Turkey
on the Armenian question not set up by state authorities or
government-affiliated historians. Government officials had pressured the
organizers, first to include participants of the government’s choosing,
then to cancel the event.
Armenians, most of whom are Christians, have long said that the killings
amounted to genocide, and several European nations have even passed
legislation agreeing with this view. With Turkey pressing for admission
to the European Union, which would make it the first predominantly
Muslim country to join the bloc, the Armenian issue has become freshly
contentious. European heads of state have repeatedly raised the subject
with Turkey’s government, which, despite its eagerness to demonstrate
its European credentials, flatly rejects the notion that what occurred
amounted to genocide.
The conference at Bogaziçi University, which is also known in English as
Bosphorus University, would have marked the culmination of several years
of newly invigorated academic discussion on the Armenian issue. Fatma
Müge Gocek is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of
Michigan at Ann Arbor and was on the advisory committee for the
conference. She is working on a book called /Deciphering Denial: Turkish
Historiography on the Armenian Massacres of 1915,/ and says that the
Armenian issue is a hot topic for Turkish historians now, in part
because of Turkey’s European Union bid.
“All of these human-rights issues are being taken on the agenda now,”
Ms. Gocek said, “and this one is so closely connected with the issue of
Turkish nationalism that it becomes extremely difficult to separate the
two in people’s minds.”
Ms. Gocek and colleagues have been conducting scholarly workshops on the
Armenian issue in the United States and Europe. When they decided that
the time was right to hold such a discussion in Turkey, they decided to
invite only participants of Turkish origin. “We wanted to make a stand,
saying that the ones saying this are not foreigners, it is Turks
themselves.”
According to Ms. Gocek, government officials asked the organizers to
include participants who would represent the official state thesis,
which holds that there was no genocide. After the organizers declined to
include government-affiliated historians, the governor of Istanbul
called Ayse Soysal, the rector of Bogaziçi University, on Tuesday
morning and asked her to cancel the meeting. She declined, Ms. Gocek
said, and also rebuffed government requests later that day for copies of
the papers that would be presented at the conference. The Michigan
professor added that the request for the papers could not have been met
because none had been circulated before the conference.
With interest building — some 720 observers had registered to attend
the sessions and listen to the discussions — the conference also became
a subject of heated discussion on the floor of the nation’s parliament.
On Tuesday, Justice Minister Cemil Cicek called the conference a “dagger
in the back of the Turkish people” and said it amounted to “treason.”
In such a polarized and tense climate, Ms. Gocek said, the organizers
decided that security might become a problem and chose to postpone the
conference.
Some education officials who had taken issue with the conference agenda
later said they regretted the organizers’ decision to postpone it. “We
believe this is a mistake,” said Aybar Ertepinar, vice president of the
Council of Higher Education, a government-financed organization that
oversees Turkey’s universities.
He explained that the government had been uncomfortable with some of the
organizers’ plans, which it viewed as one-sided. “They stated that they
are going to invite speakers of a certain breed plus a certain audience,
and that it is not open to everybody,” Mr. Ertepinar said. “That makes
it ideological rather than scientific, and we found that rather
unfortunate. That doesn’t sound scholarly. You could hold such a meeting
in a hotel conference room, but if you call it a scientific meeting, it
should be open to all views, all audiences, and not restricted. For
example, nobody from the higher-education council was invited to take
part.”
Still, Mr. Ertepinar said he thought that if the conference had gone
ahead, the organizers “would have seen their mistake.”
Mr. Ertepinar insists that he is in favor of open academic discourse on
the Armenian issue. “The universities should all have Armenian
institutes,” he said, but Europe cannot be allowed to dictate the
academic agenda.
For Ms. Gocek, who was still in Istanbul early today, along with many
others who had planned to attend the conference, the Armenian issue has
taken a back seat to the more fundamental issue of academic freedom.
“What is worrisome about this is the attack on freedom of expression
that is supposed to be guarded at universities,” she said. “These are
supposed to be bastions of free expression. All this fuss was about the
papers of a conference and the people attending it, without even giving
them the chance to give the papers or talk about the issues. That’s the
most egregious part. It would be fine if they listened and disagreed and
took a stand after listening.”
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Background article from /The Chronicle:/
* Academic Exchanges Set for Turkey and Armenia
<; (5/19/2000)
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Copyright © 2005 by The Chronicle of Higher Education