Scholars Petition President of Armenia on Behalf of Jailed Ph.D. Candidate
By AISHA LABI

Chronicle of Higher Education
Monday, August 1, 2005

More than 200 academics from the United States, Armenia, Turkey,
and elsewhere have signed an open letter to the president of Armenia
expressing their “grave concern” at the arrest and detention of a
Ph.D. candidate from Duke University. The student, Yektan Turkyilmaz,
a Turkish citizen, was arrested on June 17 as he was leaving Armenia
for Turkey with about 100 secondhand books he had legally purchased.

Mr. Turkyilmaz, who has been in jail in the Armenian capital of
Yerevan since then, was charged last week with customs violations for
attempting to remove books that are more than 50 years old from the
country without permission. The prohibition against doing so falls
under an article of the Armenian criminal code that mentions items
such as narcotics; radioactive materials; firearms; nuclear, chemical,
and biological weapons; and “technologies which can also be used for
the creation or use of mass-destruction weapons or missile-delivery
systems.”

Mr. Turkyilmaz has been charged under a provision relating to the
removal of “cultural values for the transportation of which special
rules are established.”

Ayse Gul Altinay, an assistant professor at Sabanci University in
Istanbul who is coordinating efforts on Mr. Turkyilmaz’s behalf,
said that many of the scholars she has contacted, including Armenians
and Armenian-Americans, were “shocked” to find out that Armenian law
treats customs violations relating to books in the same way it does
violations to do with nuclear weapons. If convicted, Mr. Turkyilmaz
faces a jail sentence of four to eight years.

Mr. Turkyilmaz is a candidate for a degree in cultural anthropology,
and his dissertation is to be called “Imagining ‘Turkey,’ Creating
a Nation: The Politics of Geography and State Formation in Eastern
Anatolia, 1908-1938.”

Relations between Turkey and Armenia have long been strained, and
the period that Mr. Turkyilmaz is studying is at the heart of the
tension. In 1915 Ottoman Turkish forces killed 1.5 million Armenians
in Eastern Anatolia. Armenians characterize the killings as genocide,
but Turkey attributes the deaths to civil war and other factors,
and emphasizes that many Turks also perished.

Orin Starn, Mr. Turkyilmaz’s dissertation supervisor at Duke, described
him as a “humane and lovely person, as well as the model of a top-notch
researcher and scholar” who has won many awards and grants, including
a Social Science Research Council fellowship that is supporting his
work in Armenia. “His work is very interdisciplinary. He is very
interested in culture and the politics of culture, and his research
is much more historically focused,” said Mr. Starn. “It connects very
much to political science and international relations and geography.”

Ms. Altinay, who also completed her Ph.D. under Mr. Starn’s supervision
at Duke, said that the research Mr. Turkyilmaz is doing is highly
original. “This was a very violent moment in the history of this
region, and it’s also a very complicated moment, when different
nationalisms clashed with one another, ideologically and physically.
This is the formation period of Turkish nationalism, of Kurdish
nationalism, and of Armenian nationalism,” she said.

“Scholars so far have focused on one of these issues,” she said, “and
have not looked at how these different nationalisms have influenced,
formed, and affected one another.”

Mr. Turkyilmaz is fluent in modern and Ottoman Turkish and different
dialects of Armenian, as well as French and English.

“Yektan loves Armenia. He learned the language and is fascinated
by all things Armenian,” said Mr. Starn. “He made a lot of friends
there, and part of the reason he’s there and has been collecting books
is that he’s fascinated and engaged by Armenian culture.” This was
Mr. Turkyilmaz’s fourth trip to Armenia and he had become the first
Turkish scholar to be allowed to conduct research in the Armenian
National Archive.

“His work involves a lot of copying documents in the archives and
getting ahold of old books, early 20th-century books related to his
work,” said Mr. Starn. “All these books were purchased from secondhand
booksellers who sold them openly. There was no secret sale or purchase
of these books.” It is common for scholars and especially historians to
acquire or collect books from the period they study, Mr. Starn pointed
out. “This was clearly an unknowing violation of the law,” he said.

Last week Ms. Altinay visited Mr. Turkyilmaz in prison. She was the
first person to be allowed to do so other than his lawyers. They spoke
in what she described as an interrogation room, in the presence of
a National Security Service agent, and neither was allowed to take
notes. “I tried to explain that there are a number of people doing
all they can to address his situation,” she said. “He explained to
me what he thought was happening. He had no idea that he had to have
permission to take these books out of the country.”

Mr. Turkyilmaz told Ms. Altinay that he had been very excited by
the “wonderful material” the archives had yielded, but that all his
research, including CD’s with his work from the national archives, had
been confiscated. A backup set of CD’s he had left with a friend was
also confiscated. “This was one of the signs that this is not a customs
investigation,” Ms. Altinay said. “He didn’t even have these with him.”

The open letter to Armenia’s president, Robert Kocharian, says of Mr.
Turkyilmaz: “We understand that he has been questioned about his
research and theoretical orientations, and the digital copies
of his archival research have been confiscated. There can be no
justification for this treatment.” The letter goes on to note that
“the current law places no obligation on the sellers of old books
to inform the purchasers that special permissions will be needed to
take the books out of the country and makes no distinction between
violations involving nuclear weapons and books.”

Mr. Starn plans to travel to Armenia on August 12, unless Mr.
Turkyilmaz is released before then. No trial date has been set, but
the judge who will hear the case has said that it would take place
around August 15.

Duke University officials have contacted members of Congress about
Mr. Turkyilmaz’s situation and have also sought the help of prominent
Armenian-Americans. Mr. Starn said Mr. Turkyilmaz would pay whatever
fine and turn over whatever historical volumes the Armenian authorities
demanded. “The really big issue is that a four-to-eight-year jail
term and being detained now for six weeks is a very severe penalty
for such an unknowing mistake.”

As of this morning, President Kocharian had not responded to the
letter, which was sent to him on Friday with about 100 signatures. An
updated version with an additional 100 signatures was sent today.

“This letter in and of itself has become a peace project,” said Ms.
Altinay. “The kind of people who have come together on this have never
come together before on any other issues. There are prominent genocide
researchers who have signed this document who have dedicated their
whole lives to criticizing Turkey and Turks. That they are coming
and signing this document, written by Turks, in support of Yektan,
criticizing the actions of the Armenian government, is very crucial.”

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress