DIPLOMAT AND POLITICIAN GUNDUZ AKTAN DEAD AT 67

Hurriyet
Nov 20 2008
Turkey

ANKARA – Only a little over a year after he was elected as a deputy
from the MHP, respected diplomat and commentator Gunduz Aktan dies at
the age of 67. His special area of interest was the Armenian issue
and he was a former member of a commission advising the government
on countering genocide claims

Veteran diplomat and the deputy of an opposition party Gunduz Aktan,
67, passed away yesterday due to cardiac problems that besieged him
for two months.

"I and the Aktan family lost our father. This is a big pain and
loss. The Turkish nation lost its invaluable son who dedicated all
of his life to Ataturk’s Republic," said his son Uygar Aktan, in a
brief statement to the press in front of the Ankara hospital where
his father died.

His treatment in Turkey began after he was diagnosed with kidney tumor
in the United States, said Aktan’s doctor Adnan Bulut, adding that
he died at 02:10 a.m. from heart and liver failure."Unfortunately,
there was a delay in diagnosis of the disease but later everything
that needed to be done was done. The death was the will of God," said
his son. Gunduz Aktan, who served as Turkey’s ambassador to Greece,
Japan and the UN Office in Geneva, joined the ranks of the Nationalist
Movement Party, or MHP, and as an elected member of Parliament in the
July 22, 2007 elections. Aktan’s death brings the number of vacant
seats in Parliament to four and the MHP seats to 69.

"The Turkish diplomacy lost a distinguished member; the MHP lost a
valuable deputy," said leader of MHP Devlet Bahceli. "Our pain is very
grave." He called Aktan a "successful diplomat" and a "nationalist
intellectual." MHP deputies as well as other political party leaders
and ministers visited the hospital and offered condolences to the
Aktan family.

"Today is a painful day for all of us," said Deputy Prime Minister
Cemil Cicek who knew Aktan since the time of late President Turgut
Ozal. "His death comes early and as a surprise. May he rest in
peace." President Abdullah Gul said Aktan’s death was a big loss for
Turkey and noted he had represented Turkey very well.

Aktan left the Foreign Ministry in 1998. He chaired the Ankara-based
think tank, the Center for Eurasia Strategic Studies Center, or ASAM,
and regularly wrote columns in daily Radikal on domestic and foreign
policy developments between 1998 and 2007. But after joining politics,
he chose to stop writing.

"At a historic juncture full of dangers, reason suggests that
continuing writing is more preferable than joining politics. I think
my columnist colleagues are cleverer than me," Aktan said to his
readers in a farewell article published in Radikal on June 9, 2007,
one month before the early elections when the country was indulged in
crisis over the failure to elect a president. He wrote that he would
start doing a job he had never known but said his only hope was the
conviction that everyone was a "political creature" by birth. "While
bidding a farewell I don’t know what to say to my readers or, to put
it correctly, to those who read my articlesÃ~I I don’t say ‘Goodbye’
as I’m not going too far," concluded Aktan in his last column.

I’m not going too far His special area of interest was the
Armenian question and was a former member of a commission advising
the government on countering genocide allegations. Aktan proposed
genocide claims could be countered through international arbitration
and believed Turkish-Armenian relations could be normalized only
after a resolution of disagreements.

"Normalization of bilateral ties is out of the question without
progress on the genocide claims and the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute,"
he once told the Hurriyet Daily News. He was one of the lobbying
deputies in the United States against a measure labeling the killings
of Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire as genocide. The
genocide resolution was marked-up by a U.S. House committee in 2007,
straining ties with Washington.

Speaking with the Daily News at the time, Aktan called for tough
sanctions against the United States in retaliation. "Turkey’s reaction
must be to do what is expected: shut down Ä°ncirlik air base and slow
down U.S. logistics to Iraq via Habur border gate," he stated then.

A funeral ceremony will take place at the Foreign Ministry and in
Parliament today and then he will be buried in Istanbul.

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