InternationalPolitics, scholarship, and the Armenian Genocide
Perspectives on the ITS Scandal
Published: Saturday July 19, 2008
Sükrü Elekdag at the Hudson Institute, April 17, 2007. Armenian Reporter
Minneapolis - While the identity of the Ankara-based officials who allegedly threatened to defund the Washington-based Institute of Turkish Studies in 2006 remains an open question, three past or present Turkish ambassadors controlled the scholarly institute's endowment at that time, Internal Revenue Service records show. Among them was Sükrü Elekdag, the institute's founding honorary chairperson and a forceful opponent of Armenian Genocide recognition.
ITS board chairperson Donald Quataert, who stepped down in December 2006 after he acknowledged the Armenian Genocide in a book review, allegedly was forced to resign under pressure from the Turkish Embassy, which has denied the charges (Armenian Reporter, May 31). Several other board members have resigned in protest, citing concerns about academic freedom. With the scandal of Prof. Quataert's ouster, the 26-year old institute finds itself once again at the crossroads of politics, scholarship, and the Armenian Genocide.
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The long-simmering internal controversy over Prof. Quataert's departure boiled over on May 27, 2008, when the Middle East Studies Association issued an open letter of protest to Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
"Dr. Quataert's relinquishment of his position came after he refused to accede to the request of ITS's honorary chairman, Ambassador [Nabi] 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. "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," she added.
MESA's open letter called for Prof. Quataert to be reinstated and its endowment funds to be placed in "an irrevocable trust immune from political interference and infringement of academic freedom."
On June 30, Ambassador Sensoy replied that "contrary to recent assertions," he had not exerted "improper influence" on the Binghamton University historian. "It is obvious that claims contained in your letter insinuating that my actions had forced Professor Quataert to resign from the Chair of the ITS are not only unfounded and misleading, but they also run contrary to the facts," he retorted in an open letter at the MESA website.
"As the Honorary Chairman of the ITS Board, my one and only right is to attend the meetings of the Board of Governors and to offer, if need be, my views on matters related to its governance," Ambassador Sensoy wrote. "I lack the prerogative to vote and have no authority to appoint or remove any board member or approve or reject any grant requests."
The ambassador's demurral did not specifically address MESA's concern about ITS endowment funds. There are two Washington-based, tax-exempt private foundations that bear the name "Institute of Turkish Studies": the scholarly Institute of Turkish Studies, Inc. (ITS, Inc.) and itsits funding source, the Institute for Turkish Studies Trust (ITS Trust), both created in the early 1980s.
Describing itself as "the only nonprofit, private educational foundation in the United States exclusively dedicated to the support and development of Turkish Studies in American higher education," the ITS, Inc., is governed by a board of area scholars, corporate executives, and diplomats. The current chairperson is retired U.S. ambassador Robert Pearson. Successive Turkish ambassadors have served as honorary chairperson, which made each an ex-officio board member. Past board members include ex-World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz, former U.S. ambassadors to Turkey Richard Barkley and Marc Parris, and the late Atlantic Records executive Ahmet Ertegün.
A few years ago, when some ITS, Inc., board members checked on the ITS Trust endowment, which they had assumed was an irrevocable blind trust, they were surprised to discover it was "a gift that could be revoked by the Turkish government," Prof. Quataert told Inside Higher Ed. IRS filings state that the government's initial contribution of $3 million will "eventually" be returned to Ankara.
Executive Director David Cuthell confirmed that the ITS, Inc., receives nearly all itsitsfunding from the ITS Trust, which according to IRS filings was established solely for this purpose. In 2004 and 2005, the last years for which ITS, Inc., records are available, the endowment's annual contributions of approximately $275,000 made up 97 percent of the scholarly institute's revenue.
ITS Trust filings for those same years were signed, respectively, by Ambassador O. Faruk Logoglu and his successor, Ambassador Sensoy, using their diplomatic title. The trustees in 2004 were Ambassador Logoglu and Aydin Hakimoglu; incoming Ambassador Sensoy joined them in 2005. In 2006, the three trustees in charge of the growing $4.7 million ITS Trust endowment were Ambassadors Sensoy and Logoglu, listed with their titles, and former ambassador Elekdag. The filing was signed by Ambassador Sensoy, again in his official capacity.
All three ambassadors, during their tenure in Washington, had voiced Ankara's official denial of the Armenian Genocide, none more forcefully than Mr. Elekdag throughout the 1980s. "The public relations/propaganda of the decade of Elekdag are so profuse and so organized that to monitor them all, to attend all the events, to gather and file all the relevant printed matter dealing with them would require a small, independent research institution all by itself," declared Speros Vryonis in his 1991 study, The Turkish State and History.
