InternationalInstitute of Turkish Studies chair was ousted for acknowledging Genocide
Middle East scholars protest Turkish government interference in academic freedom
Published: Saturday May 31, 2008
Minneapolis - In a sharply worded protest to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Middle East Studies Association on May 27 condemned the forced resignation of Donald Quataert from the chair of the Institute of Turkish Studies after Prof. Quataert affirmed in a book review that "what happened to the Armenians readily satisfies the U.N. definition of genocide."
"After the long lapse of serious Ottomanist scholarship on the Armenian question, it now appears that the Ottomanist wall of silence is crumbling," Prof. Quataert (pronounced KWA-tairt) had written in the August 2006 Journal of Interdisciplinary History. "Although it may provoke anger among some of my Ottomanist colleagues," he added, avoidance of the term genocide in his essay "runs the risk of suggesting denial of the massive and systematic atrocities that the Ottoman state and some of its military and general populace committed against the Armenians." Describing Ottomanists as falling "into a camp of either silence or denial -- both of which are forms of complicity," Prof. Quataert urged his colleagues "to take their rightful responsibility to perform the proper research" on 1915 and its aftermath.
"Dr. Quataert's relinquishment of his position came after he refused to accede to the request of ITS's honorary chairman, Ambassador Nebi Sensoy, that he issue a retraction of a scholarly book review he wrote about the killings of Armenians (1915-1918) in the Ottoman Empire," wrote MESA president Mervat Hatem in the open letter to Mr. Erdogan. "We are enormously concerned that unnamed high officials in Ankara felt it was inappropriate for Professor Quataert to continue as chairman of the board of governors and threatened to revoke the funding for the ITS if he did not publicly retract statements made in his review or separate himself from the Chairmanship of the ITS," Prof. Hatem added. Prof. Quataert resigned in December 2006.
It was members of the Turkish Studies Association, "scandalized by the news of Professor Quataert's mistreatment at the hands of the Institute of Turkish Studies," who raised the issue at the TSA annual business meeting, which was held in conjunction with MESA's annual meeting in November 2007. The TSA board referred the case to MESA's Committee on Academic Freedom and expressed support for its response, the letter explained.
The ITS, a nonprofit educational foundation established in 1982, distributes the proceeds of a $3 million endowment from the Turkish government to support Turkish studies in the United States.
"The reputation and integrity of the ITS as a non-political institution funding scholarly projects that meet stringent academic criteria is blackened when there is government interference in and blatant disregard for the principle of academic freedom," MESA declared. "A clear message is sent to those who would apply for ITS funds or participate in ITS activities that the board does not stand behind the principle of academic freedom, and that politics can vitiate professional standards." Such concerns are not new. In the Spring 1995 issue of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, scholars Roger W. Smith, Erik Markusen, and Robert Jay Lifton exposed a longstanding arrangement by which ITS founding executive director Heath Lowry served the Turkish government in its campaign to discredit scholarship on the Armenian Genocide.
A professor of history at the State University of New York at Binghamton, Mr. Quataert chaired the ITS board of governors from 2001 until December 13, 2006. In 1985, as an associate professor at the University of Houston, he was among the 69 Ottoman, Turkish, and Middle Eastern area scholars who petitioned against a House Joint Resolution that memorialized "the one and one half million people of Armenian ancestry who were victims of genocide perpetrated in Turkey between 1915 and 1923."
As he recalled the emerging Ottoman and Turkish area scholarship of the 1980s from a vantage point twenty years later, Prof. Quataert wrote in his book review, "the authors were not writing critical history but polemics" and "many of their works were directly sponsored and published by the Turkish government." To date, said MESA, most of the scholarship in this area still fails to adhere to the highest professional standards "and as such serves neither the field of Ottoman- Turkish studies nor the interests of the Republic of Turkey and its citizens."
Nevertheless, both Prof. Quataert in his review and MESA with its 2005 Academic Freedom Award lauded the new wave of critical thinking in this field - specifically mentioning a conference held at Istanbul's Bilgi University "despite official intimidation and public harassment," as Prof. Quataert recalled. Prominent among the organizers and presenters of that conference were members of the Workshop for Armenian/Turkish Scholarship, including WATS co-founder Fatma Müge Göçek, a sociologist at the University of Michigan.
Prof. Göçek, who did not sign the "69 scholars" petition, said she was surprised to learn from MESA's letter that she was still an ITS board member.
"One problem at ITS seems to be that neither the process through which who gets invited from among the associate members to review the grants, nor the proceedings of the Board meetings is shared with the rest of the ITS body," she wrote in an open letter to the other board members. If Prof. Quataert "was indeed punished in his capacity as the Board chairman for what he wrote in his capacity as a research scholar," she added, "then I would regard that as an infringement on his academic freedom." Prof. Göçek confirmed for the Armenian Reporter that in the wake of MESA's letter, two ITS board members had already resigned and two more in addition to herself were considering whether to do so.
