News & Observer, NC
Oct 16 2005
Freedom isn’t just academic to him
Out of Armenian jail, Duke scholar resumes his work
By JANE STANCILL, Staff Writer
DURHAM — Stuck in a jail cell that steamed to more than 100 degrees
in the daytime, the prisoner couldn’t eat the rice, cabbage soup and
boiled potatoes provided by the guards. The lights stayed on all
night, making sleep difficult. The screams of other inmates
punctuated long days of fear and worry.
The accused criminal was Yektan Turkyilmaz, 33, a soft-spoken Duke
University scholar who spent 60 days in an Armenian prison over the
summer.
The crime, apparently, was his love of books.
Turkyilmaz, a Turkish citizen of Kurdish descent, wasn’t a spy or a
drug smuggler. He was a scholar, and he learned firsthand that
scholarship can be hazardous. He will never again take academic
freedom for granted.
When the captors released Turkyilmaz in August, he walked on wobbly
legs into the sunshine, eyes squinting at the natural light he hadn’t
seen in two months. Now he is back at Duke, quietly working on his
doctoral dissertation and ready to talk about his ordeal.
Accused of smuggling books in the small country in southwestern Asia,
Turkyilmaz underwent what he described as KGB-style interrogations
and a trial that drew worldwide attention. Academics from the United
States and beyond rushed to his defense, signed petitions, created a
Web site and mounted a global campaign for his release from Armenia,
formerly part of the Soviet Union. U.S. politicians and the U.S.
embassy jumped in, exerting pressure on the Armenian government.
The subject of his dissertation is so sensitive that his work is
viewed with suspicion by historic enemies, Armenia and Turkey. And he
believes it may have landed him behind bars.
Turkyilmaz’s research is about how modern Armenian, Kurdish and
Turkish nationalism developed after a traumatic conflict in which
more than a million Armenians were killed starting in 1915. The facts
of the genocide have long been disputed from the Turkish side. It’s a
painful but important chapter in 20th-century history, and one that
Turkyilmaz is said to be uniquely qualified to dig into.
He speaks four languages — Armenian, Kurdish, Turkish and English —
and can read French. He was the first Turkish scholar allowed in the
Armenian national archives to conduct research.
“His trip was unprecedented for a Turkish citizen and also a huge
feather in his cap for his academic career,” said Charles Kurzman, an
associate professor of sociology at UNC-Chapel Hill and one of
Turkyilmaz’s advisers. “That’s high-risk, high-gain research.”
Books spark trouble
Turkyilmaz, who first traveled to Armenia in 2002, has been there
five times. He went back in April and worked for two months, while
also engaging in one of his hobbies — book collecting. He had picked
up more than 100 used books and pamphlets at a flea market in
Yerevan, the Armenian capital. Turkyilmaz already had a collection of
10,000 books, so it was not unusual for him to leave the country with
two heavy suitcases full of books.
The day he was to leave Armenia, Turkyilmaz began to notice something
odd at the airport. A strange man behind him at the security
checkpoint spoke to him in broken English, even though Turkyilmaz had
been speaking Armenian.
“I realized that something was up,” he recalled.
Just after his passport was stamped, he was surrounded by more than
half a dozen agents from the National Security Service, which
Turkyilmaz says “loves to be called KGB.” The agents told him to
empty his pockets. They confiscated his luggage.
He tried to explain that scholars carry books. “I kept telling them I
was a historian, because if I said I am a cultural anthropologist it
doesn’t make any sense to them,” he said.
It became clear, he said, that they already knew a lot about him.
They took the books out of his suitcase one by one and spent seven
hours doing paperwork in the airport, meticulously copying the
titles. At times, Turkyilmaz helped the Russian-educated agents
translate titles that were written in old Armenian.
One of the agents started making accusations, poking a pen at his
stomach.
“He started shouting and cursing at me and said, ‘OK, you are taking
these books to Turks to be destroyed.’ I said, ‘What?'”
But Turkyilmaz and others believe the books were not important to the
Armenian authorities, who dragged them around in plastic bags or
piled them on the floor.
The agents started asking questions that had nothing to do with the
books: What are your political views? What is your family’s ethnic
background? What is your research about? Why did you come to Armenia?
Whom do you know in Armenia?
The arrest came as such a shock that Turkyilmaz said he didn’t really
have time to get scared. “I never thought that they would, like, you
know, detain me. I thought it was something silly.”
They wouldn’t let him call his parents in Turkey. His friends in
Armenia were too frightened to contact his family. For almost 24
hours, his parents didn’t know what had happened to him.
Spy accusations fly
Turkyilmaz was put in a small cell in Yerevan. For the first month,
he said, agents interrogated him almost daily. They went through his
computer files and CDs, and soon Turkyilmaz realized where they were
headed: They would accuse him of being a spy.
An espionage charge could carry a 15-year prison term, he said. One
of his interrogators, Turkyilmaz recalled, told him, “All scholars
are spies. Just tell us whom you are working for.”
On the third day after his arrest, he was charged with an obscure
violation of taking books more than 50 years old out of the country
without permission — a regulation that was unfamiliar to even the
booksellers. The charge fell under a law that also covered drug
smuggling and the transport of guns, explosives and weapons of mass
destruction. It carried a possible prison term of four to eight
years.
In his cell, Turkyilmaz ate fruit and the hazelnut spread Nutella —
items his friends could bring him. He refused food from the jailers.
He was allowed one shower a week.
He had a couple of cellmates who were accused of petty crimes and had
little contact with the outside world, though he did hear occasional
reports of his case on Radio Free Europe.
As word of Turkyilmaz’s detention spread, scholars in North Carolina
and the larger higher education community began to organize.
Turkyilmaz’s professors had initially been told he would be released
any day, but days turned into weeks.
“The nightmare scenario was that the hard-liners in the Armenian
government would try to make an example of Yektan and sentence him to
eight years,” said Kurzman, who started a Web site, ,
to raise awareness of his ordeal.
Human-rights groups, scholarly organizations and the Duke community
sent letters and petitions signed by hundreds of students and faculty
around the globe. Duke President Richard Brodhead wrote the Armenian
president, calling Turkyilmaz “a scholar of extraordinary promise.”
Former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole, who had experience with Armenian affairs,
wrote to President Robert Kocharian and said, “Your treatment of
Yektan makes Armenia look bad — with good reason. Armenia has many
friends in the United States, but we cannot and will not defend the
indefensible.”
Officials at the Armenian embassy in Washington did not return phone
calls about the Turkyilmaz case.
As the summer wore on, Orin Starn, a professor of cultural
anthropology at Duke and primary adviser to Turkyilmaz, monitored the
case and became more concerned that a prison term was likely for his
student.
“The whole idea that you could be sentenced to years in prison for
taking used books out of the country was preposterous,” Starn said.
Refocusing on research
Starn, who attended the trial, watched as Turkyilmaz was led into the
courtroom in handcuffs. In attendance, at some risk to themselves,
were Armenian friends, including booksellers, an accountant, a
janitor and a medical student.
“People love Yektan,” Starn said. “He has friends everywhere. …
People were very willing to do whatever they could to try to get him
out.”
On Aug. 16, a judge convicted Turkyilmaz but gave him a two-year
suspended sentence. After 60 days in prison, he was free but not
allowed to leave the country for two weeks.
E-mail messages and news reports announced his release, and
Turkyilmaz is now a celebrity in his field. But he also worries about
the implications. He may have difficulty traveling in that part of
the world, which could hamper his research. He now has a criminal
conviction on his record, something that could cause him trouble with
U.S. authorities when his visa expires in a few months.
Yet, he said he’s not bitter about the experience, which has cemented
his desire to pursue an academic career in the United States.
“I’m so glad to be back,” he said. “I feel so safe here, so secure. I
just want to go back to my work. That’s the only thing I want to do
with my life.”