The Chronicle of Higher Education
June 10, 2005, Friday
Conference in Turkey on Armenian Question Is Canceled Under
Government Pressure
AISHA LABI
An academic conference on the 1915-23 killing of 1.5 million
Armenians by Ottoman Turkish forces was canceled last month, a day
before it was scheduled to take place at Istanbul’s Bogaziçi
University.
The conference, “Ottoman Armenians During the Decline of the Empire:
Issues of Scientific Responsibility and Democracy,” was organized by
historians from three of Turkey’s leading universities,
Bogaziçi, Istanbul Bilgi, and Sabanci.
The organizers said the conference would have been the first in
Turkey on the Armenian question that was not set up by state
authorities or government-affiliated historians. Government officials
had pressed the organizers, first to include participants of the
government’s choosing, then to cancel the event.
Armenians, most of whom are Christians, have long said that the
killings amounted to genocide, and several European nations have
passed legislation agreeing with this view.
With Turkey pushing for admission to the European Union, which would
make it the first predominantly Muslim country to join the bloc, the
Armenian issue has become freshly contentious. European heads of
state have repeatedly raised the subject with Turkey’s government,
which, despite its eagerness to demonstrate its European credentials,
flatly rejects the notion that what occurred amounted to genocide.
The conference at Bogaziçi University, known in English as
Bosphorus University, would have marked the culmination of several
years of newly invigorated academic discussion on the Armenian issue.
Fatma Müge Göçek, an associate professor of
sociology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, was on the
advisory committee for the conference. She is working on a book
called “Deciphering Denial: Turkish Historiography on the Armenian
Massacres of 1915.” She said the Armenian issue is a hot topic for
Turkish historians now, in part because of Turkey’s European Union
bid. “All of these human-rights issues are being taken on the agenda
now,” she said, “and this one is so closely connected with the issue
of Turkish nationalism that it becomes extremely difficult to
separate the two in people’s minds.”
Ms. Göçek and colleagues have been conducting scholarly
workshops on the Armenian issue in the United States and Europe. When
they decided that the time was right to hold such a discussion in
Turkey, they decided to invite only participants of Turkish origin
and hold it at a public university, like Bogaziçi. “We wanted
to make a stand, saying that the ones saying this are not foreigners,
it is Turks themselves,” she said.
According to Ms. Göçek, government officials asked the
organizers to include participants who would represent the official
state thesis, which holds that there was no genocide. After the
organizers declined, the governor of Istanbul called Ayse Soysal, the
rector of Bogaziçi University, and asked her to cancel the
meeting. She declined, Ms. Göçek said, and also rebuffed
government requests later that day for copies of the papers that
would be presented at the conference.
Debate in Parliament
With interest building — some 720 observers had registered to attend
the sessions and listen to the discussions — the conference also
became a subject of heated discussion on the floor of the nation’s
Parliament. Justice Minister Cemil Cicek said the conference amounted
to “treason.”
In such a polarized and tense climate, Ms. Göçek said,
the organizers decided that security might become a problem and chose
to postpone the conference.
Aybar Ertepinar, vice president of the Council of Higher Education, a
government-financed organization that oversees Turkey’s universities,
said the council had been uncomfortable with some of the organizers’
plans, which it viewed as one-sided.
“They stated that they are going to invite speakers of a certain
breed plus a certain audience, and that it is not open to everybody,”
Mr. Ertepinar said. “That makes it ideological rather than
scientific, and we found that rather unfortunate.”
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress