The Chronicle of Higher Education <; Today's News Friday, May 27, 2005 Academic Conference in Turkey on Armenian Question Is Canceled Under Government Pressure By AISHA LABI An academic conference on the 1915 killing of 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turkish forces was canceled on Tuesday, 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 not set up by state authorities or government-affiliated historians. Government officials had pressured 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 even passed legislation agreeing with this view. With Turkey pressing 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, which is also 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 Gocek is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and 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,/ and says that 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," Ms. Gocek 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. Gocek 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. "We wanted to make a stand, saying that the ones saying this are not foreigners, it is Turks themselves." According to Ms. Gocek, 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 to include government-affiliated historians, the governor of Istanbul called Ayse Soysal, the rector of Bogaziçi University, on Tuesday morning and asked her to cancel the meeting. She declined, Ms. Gocek said, and also rebuffed government requests later that day for copies of the papers that would be presented at the conference. The Michigan professor added that the request for the papers could not have been met because none had been circulated before the conference. 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. On Tuesday, Justice Minister Cemil Cicek called the conference a "dagger in the back of the Turkish people" and said it amounted to "treason." In such a polarized and tense climate, Ms. Gocek said, the organizers decided that security might become a problem and chose to postpone the conference. Some education officials who had taken issue with the conference agenda later said they regretted the organizers' decision to postpone it. "We believe this is a mistake," said Aybar Ertepinar, vice president of the Council of Higher Education, a government-financed organization that oversees Turkey's universities. He explained that the government 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. That doesn't sound scholarly. You could hold such a meeting in a hotel conference room, but if you call it a scientific meeting, it should be open to all views, all audiences, and not restricted. For example, nobody from the higher-education council was invited to take part." Still, Mr. Ertepinar said he thought that if the conference had gone ahead, the organizers "would have seen their mistake." Mr. Ertepinar insists that he is in favor of open academic discourse on the Armenian issue. "The universities should all have Armenian institutes," he said, but Europe cannot be allowed to dictate the academic agenda. For Ms. Gocek, who was still in Istanbul early today, along with many others who had planned to attend the conference, the Armenian issue has taken a back seat to the more fundamental issue of academic freedom. "What is worrisome about this is the attack on freedom of expression that is supposed to be guarded at universities," she said. "These are supposed to be bastions of free expression. All this fuss was about the papers of a conference and the people attending it, without even giving them the chance to give the papers or talk about the issues. That's the most egregious part. It would be fine if they listened and disagreed and took a stand after listening." ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Background article from /The Chronicle:/ * Academic Exchanges Set for Turkey and Armenia <; (5/19/2000) ------------------------------------- ----------------------------------- Copyright © 2005 by The Chronicle of Higher Education