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  • Scholars Petition President of Armenia on Behalf of Jailed Ph.D.Cand

    Scholars Petition President of Armenia on Behalf of Jailed Ph.D. Candidate
    By AISHA LABI

    Chronicle of Higher Education
    Monday, August 1, 2005

    More than 200 academics from the United States, Armenia, Turkey,
    and elsewhere have signed an open letter to the president of Armenia
    expressing their "grave concern" at the arrest and detention of a
    Ph.D. candidate from Duke University. The student, Yektan Turkyilmaz,
    a Turkish citizen, was arrested on June 17 as he was leaving Armenia
    for Turkey with about 100 secondhand books he had legally purchased.

    Mr. Turkyilmaz, who has been in jail in the Armenian capital of
    Yerevan since then, was charged last week with customs violations for
    attempting to remove books that are more than 50 years old from the
    country without permission. The prohibition against doing so falls
    under an article of the Armenian criminal code that mentions items
    such as narcotics; radioactive materials; firearms; nuclear, chemical,
    and biological weapons; and "technologies which can also be used for
    the creation or use of mass-destruction weapons or missile-delivery
    systems."

    Mr. Turkyilmaz has been charged under a provision relating to the
    removal of "cultural values for the transportation of which special
    rules are established."

    Ayse Gul Altinay, an assistant professor at Sabanci University in
    Istanbul who is coordinating efforts on Mr. Turkyilmaz's behalf,
    said that many of the scholars she has contacted, including Armenians
    and Armenian-Americans, were "shocked" to find out that Armenian law
    treats customs violations relating to books in the same way it does
    violations to do with nuclear weapons. If convicted, Mr. Turkyilmaz
    faces a jail sentence of four to eight years.

    Mr. Turkyilmaz is a candidate for a degree in cultural anthropology,
    and his dissertation is to be called "Imagining 'Turkey,' Creating
    a Nation: The Politics of Geography and State Formation in Eastern
    Anatolia, 1908-1938."

    Relations between Turkey and Armenia have long been strained, and
    the period that Mr. Turkyilmaz is studying is at the heart of the
    tension. In 1915 Ottoman Turkish forces killed 1.5 million Armenians
    in Eastern Anatolia. Armenians characterize the killings as genocide,
    but Turkey attributes the deaths to civil war and other factors,
    and emphasizes that many Turks also perished.

    Orin Starn, Mr. Turkyilmaz's dissertation supervisor at Duke, described
    him as a "humane and lovely person, as well as the model of a top-notch
    researcher and scholar" who has won many awards and grants, including
    a Social Science Research Council fellowship that is supporting his
    work in Armenia. "His work is very interdisciplinary. He is very
    interested in culture and the politics of culture, and his research
    is much more historically focused," said Mr. Starn. "It connects very
    much to political science and international relations and geography."

    Ms. Altinay, who also completed her Ph.D. under Mr. Starn's supervision
    at Duke, said that the research Mr. Turkyilmaz is doing is highly
    original. "This was a very violent moment in the history of this
    region, and it's also a very complicated moment, when different
    nationalisms clashed with one another, ideologically and physically.
    This is the formation period of Turkish nationalism, of Kurdish
    nationalism, and of Armenian nationalism," she said.

    "Scholars so far have focused on one of these issues," she said, "and
    have not looked at how these different nationalisms have influenced,
    formed, and affected one another."

    Mr. Turkyilmaz is fluent in modern and Ottoman Turkish and different
    dialects of Armenian, as well as French and English.

    "Yektan loves Armenia. He learned the language and is fascinated
    by all things Armenian," said Mr. Starn. "He made a lot of friends
    there, and part of the reason he's there and has been collecting books
    is that he's fascinated and engaged by Armenian culture." This was
    Mr. Turkyilmaz's fourth trip to Armenia and he had become the first
    Turkish scholar to be allowed to conduct research in the Armenian
    National Archive.

    "His work involves a lot of copying documents in the archives and
    getting ahold of old books, early 20th-century books related to his
    work," said Mr. Starn. "All these books were purchased from secondhand
    booksellers who sold them openly. There was no secret sale or purchase
    of these books." It is common for scholars and especially historians to
    acquire or collect books from the period they study, Mr. Starn pointed
    out. "This was clearly an unknowing violation of the law," he said.

    Last week Ms. Altinay visited Mr. Turkyilmaz in prison. She was the
    first person to be allowed to do so other than his lawyers. They spoke
    in what she described as an interrogation room, in the presence of
    a National Security Service agent, and neither was allowed to take
    notes. "I tried to explain that there are a number of people doing
    all they can to address his situation," she said. "He explained to
    me what he thought was happening. He had no idea that he had to have
    permission to take these books out of the country."

    Mr. Turkyilmaz told Ms. Altinay that he had been very excited by
    the "wonderful material" the archives had yielded, but that all his
    research, including CD's with his work from the national archives, had
    been confiscated. A backup set of CD's he had left with a friend was
    also confiscated. "This was one of the signs that this is not a customs
    investigation," Ms. Altinay said. "He didn't even have these with him."

    The open letter to Armenia's president, Robert Kocharian, says of Mr.
    Turkyilmaz: "We understand that he has been questioned about his
    research and theoretical orientations, and the digital copies
    of his archival research have been confiscated. There can be no
    justification for this treatment." The letter goes on to note that
    "the current law places no obligation on the sellers of old books
    to inform the purchasers that special permissions will be needed to
    take the books out of the country and makes no distinction between
    violations involving nuclear weapons and books."

    Mr. Starn plans to travel to Armenia on August 12, unless Mr.
    Turkyilmaz is released before then. No trial date has been set, but
    the judge who will hear the case has said that it would take place
    around August 15.

    Duke University officials have contacted members of Congress about
    Mr. Turkyilmaz's situation and have also sought the help of prominent
    Armenian-Americans. Mr. Starn said Mr. Turkyilmaz would pay whatever
    fine and turn over whatever historical volumes the Armenian authorities
    demanded. "The really big issue is that a four-to-eight-year jail
    term and being detained now for six weeks is a very severe penalty
    for such an unknowing mistake."

    As of this morning, President Kocharian had not responded to the
    letter, which was sent to him on Friday with about 100 signatures. An
    updated version with an additional 100 signatures was sent today.

    "This letter in and of itself has become a peace project," said Ms.
    Altinay. "The kind of people who have come together on this have never
    come together before on any other issues. There are prominent genocide
    researchers who have signed this document who have dedicated their
    whole lives to criticizing Turkey and Turks. That they are coming
    and signing this document, written by Turks, in support of Yektan,
    criticizing the actions of the Armenian government, is very crucial."

    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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