CONTROVERSIAL CONFERENCE ON GENOCIDE HELD IN TURKEY
Aisha Labi
The Chronicle of Higher Education
October 7, 2005, Friday
An academic conference on Turkey’s controversial “Armenian question”
took place last month in Istanbul, despite legal maneuvering by Turkish
nationalists that had threatened to prevent it. The conference was
originally to have taken place in May, but was postponed at the last
minute under pressure from government officials.
The meeting was rescheduled at Bogaziçi University, also known
in English as Bosphorus University, but was once again postponed
on the eve of its opening, this time because of a legal challenge
that questioned its scientific validity and the qualifications of
its participants. The challengers also said it was inappropriate
for Bogaziçi, a public university, to be the venue for such
a gathering, which they said contravened its mission.
Academics from Istanbul Bilgi University, Bogaziçi, and Sabanci
University, three of Turkey’s leading higher-education institutions,
organized the meeting, which they described as the first conference
on the Armenian issue in Turkey not organized by state authorities
or government-affiliated historians. Bilgi and Sabanci are private.
Armenians have long contended that the killings of up to 1.5 million
Armenians in 1915 and subsequent years, during the waning days of
the Ottoman Empire, constituted genocide by Ottoman Turkish forces.
Turkey officially rejects that view. Turkish historians and other
academics have become increasingly outspoken in challenging the
nationalist line on the issue, however, and growing international
attention has also focused on the matter. Talks on Turkey’s bid
to join the European Union began last month, and the government’s
inflexibility on the Armenian question remains a sticking point.
The conference, titled “Ottoman Armenians During the Demise of
the Empire: Issues of Democracy and Scientific Responsibility,” was
postponed in May after its organizers could not guarantee participants’
safety.
Last month participants had arrived in Istanbul and the rescheduled
meeting looked set to begin on time when the fresh legal challenge
against it came to light. A three-judge panel of an administrative
court had ruled, 2 to 1, that a legal investigation of the conference’s
validity should take place, even though its organizers were notified
of the decision only the day before the conference was to begin.
With that inquiry pending, Bogaziçi could no longer play
host to the conference without being held in contempt of the court’s
ruling. Organizers hastily shifted the venue to Bilgi so the conference
could proceed.
‘Anti-Democratic Development’
The official response to the threat to the rescheduled conference
differed starkly from the government’s approach in May, when the
justice minister took to the floor of Parliament to brand the meeting
“treason” and a “dagger in the back of the Turkish people.” This time,
in comments broadcast on television, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan said he was saddened by the new threat to the conference. He
characterized the legal challenge as an “anti-democratic development”
to which he was opposed.
Aybar Ertepinar, vice president of the Council of Higher Education,
a government-financed organization that oversees all Turkish
universities, said that although his group had not been invited to
take part, the conference should have been allowed to proceed at
Bogaziçi.
“Our Constitution grants academic and scientific freedom to
universities,” he said. Taking up the opponents’ challenge “was an
unfortunate decision of the court that went beyond the borders of
its responsibility,” he said.
With the more than 350 participants once again assembled in Istanbul,
the conference’s organizers decided that “we can either do this now or
we cannot do it all again,” said Fatma Müge Gocek, an associate
professor of sociology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
who was on the meeting’s advisory committee.
Organizers had selected Bogaziçi as the venue for the meeting
precisely because it is a public institution, but they decided they
had no choice but to relocate to Bilgi. The rectors of all three
sponsoring universities welcomed the participants, who met in marathon
sessions to condense into two days a program that was to have been
spread over three.
Because the conference had received so much attention in the Turkish
news media, participants did not even need to be notified of the
change, said Ms. Gocek. Opponents were also aware of the new location,
and about 100 protesters showed up to heckle participants and pelt
them with eggs and tomatoes, she said.
As the conference concluded, Ms. Gocek said she felt a real “paradigm
shift” had occurred. “We had lots of Turkish journalists there who said
they are not going to use the word ‘alleged’ from now on, in terms
of talking about the genocide. They may refer to ‘genocide claims,’
but they will no longer talk of an ‘alleged genocide,'” she said.
Papers from the conference will be published immediately in Turkish,
which was the working language of the gathering, and as soon as
possible in English, Ms. Gocek said.