Far Away Trial

News

Inside Higher Ed (Washington, DC)
August 11, 2005

By Doug Lederman

Academics and human rights advocates are warily monitoring a trial
unfolding in an Armenian courtroom, in which a Duke University doctoral
student from Turkey faces up to eight years in prison for allegedly
taking used books out of the country illegally.

Scholarly groups, which have waged a campaign to defend him, fear the
smuggling charges are a subtext for the Armenian government to crack
down on a researcher who is studying a politically sensitive period in
the country’s tangled history with Turkey.

Yektan Turkyilmaz, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in cultural anthropology
at Duke, in May became the first Turkish citizen to request and receive
access to the Armenian National Archives, where he sought information
for his dissertation, `Imagining `Turkey,’ Creating a Nation: The
Politics of Geography and State Formation in Eastern Anatolia, 1908-1938.’

Turkyilmaz is said to be one of a handful of Turkish scholars who have
critically assessed the killing of 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman in
1915 and 1916, which Armenians and most scholars have long characterized
as genocide, and the means by which Turkey took control of the eastern
region of the country known as Anatolia.

On June 17, according to the Social Science Research Council (which
supports his work with a field grant) and the Science and Human Rights
Program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science,
authorities at Yerevan Airport in Armenia pulled Turkilman off an
airplane as he prepared to leave the country. They seized in the
neighborhood of 100 books that he had bought at secondhand stores and
compact disks that contained the fruits of his research in the Armenian
archives.

He was held without bail for nearly a month before being charged, on
July 21, with violating an article in the Armenian Constitution that
bars transportation out of the country of drugs, nuclear weapons and
certain `raw materials or cultural values’ without prior permission.
According to the scholarly groups’ reports, Armenian customs regulations
require travelers to declare books that are at least 50 years old, as
seven of Turkyilmaz’s books reportedly were.

Turkyilmaz’s supporters say that if he violated the customs policy, he
did so unknowingly, and that he is being far more harshly than the
charges warrant. They say that the first few days he was held in custody
were dominated by interrogation about his research and his political
convictions, and that the Armenian authorities pored over his archival
material, which arguably had nothing to do with the alleged book smuggling.

The arrest, the AAAS said in its report on the case, `sends a negative
signal that Armenia does not encourage independent scholarly research
into its history.’

More than 200 academics from around the world signed a letter to
Armenia’s president urging that Turkmilyaz be released and his archival
materials returned. Richard H. Brodhead, the president of Duke, where
Turkmilyaz is a John Hope Franklin Institute fellow, sent a similar
letter, in which he called Turkmilyaz a `scholar of extraordinary
promise.’ `His exceptional command of many languages is, I am told,
unique among scholars of this period and gives him an equally unique
opportunity, therefore, to help illuminate this critical historical
period,’ Brodhead wrote.

He added: `As the leader of a great country, you have the ability to
intervene in this matter and to determine the appropriateness of the
actions of your government and the Armenian prosecutors and police. You
also have the ability to release Mr. Turkyilmaz. With respect, I urge
you to do so.’

International PEN, the writers’ group, issued an alert on Turkyilmaz’s
behalf, and the former presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. Bob Dole
weighed in with a letter.

Those pleas did not stop the trial, which began Tuesday but was promptly
delayed, according to a report by Radio Free Europe. The agency reported
that Turkyilmaz’s new lawyer said he needed more time to familiarize
himself with the case, and that a delay was granted until tomorrow.

Ayse Gul Altinay, an assistant professor at Istanbul’s Sabanci
University and an organizer of the campaign for Turkyilmaz, said in an
e-mail message Wednesday that `we are hoping that the trial process will
not last long and that Yektan will be freed soon. It is also very
important that they return his research material, together with his
personal things, when he is released.’

For more information on Yektan Turkyilmaz, see: