Taner Akcam: Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Hi, Professor Akcam. Please tell us a little about yourself or give us a brief overview of your life.
I was born in 1953 in a small village on the Russian border, so the northeastern part of Turkey. Growing up, we had no electricity or running water at all, so it was pretty poor and underdeveloped. My parents were teachers in the village and when I was around seven or eight we moved to the capital city of Turkey, Ankara. But even after we left our village, I spent every summer there until 1974 and even then the village had no running water or electricity. But I loved it there and you can definitely call me a country boy.
            Anyway, I graduated from the Middle Eastern Technical University in Ankara. This is an American University established in Turkey for the purpose of creating a new young Turkish generation. Here, I got involved in politics at a very young age. This was partly due to my father’s role of Vice-Presidency in the Turkish Teacher’s Union but also because Turkey was facing many problems in this time regarding freedom of speech and democratic and civil rights. Turkey was governed at the time by a very conservative military government. When I explain what we were fighting for back then to American students now, they hardly believe me. We started off fighting for our basic rights of free expression and peacefully assembling as students on campus. Here in America it is one of the most common and normal rights of students – to form student activities clubs and have their voices heard within the administration. However, the fact that we couldn’t, reflected a larger problem within Turkish society. So my friends and I began demanding something more for ourselves and more for Turkey.
            This is how we began to form our Democratic Students Organization. We immediately began publishing our own journals and writing in them our ideas and hopes for Turkey’s democratic future. I was editor of chief of this journal, actually, and we wrote about every major issue in Turkey at the time. It soon became larger than just a student newspaper, but turned into a larger medium for expressing the hopes for Turkey as a whole. Eventually, because of the articles that I had published in this journal, I was arrested and sentenced to 10 years imprisonment. However, after one year I escaped and fled Turkey, first into Syria then later to Germany.
 
How did you manage to escape prison?
I dug a tunnel. If you know anybody in the filmmaking business, let me know, because I would love to have a movie made on the escape of my friends and I from prison. We worked for around six or seven months. We dug a tunnel from one of the buildings to the other. Actually, we dug it with spoons we had collected from mealtimes and created a system where a few of us would be digging and another couple was keeping watch. We would let each other know if a guard was approaching switching a light bulb on and off, which the diggers were keeping down in the tunnel. When we reached the other building, it had a window that looked onto the main street going off of the prison. We managed to get through the bars of the window, reach the big street and run off into freedom.
 
 
So what did you do once you got to Germany?
My dream had always been to become a scholar. Before I was imprisoned, I was actually on the lookout for a good PhD program. Once I got to Germany I resumed that search and subsequently got my Doctorate from Hannover University.
 
And when did you become interested in the Armenian Genocide?
While I was in the process of getting my PhD, I began working in a social research institute in Germany on the history of torture. I began my research on the history of torture in the Ottoman Empire. I actually met a half-German half-Armenian girl who worked in the library of our institute, and it was her that told me about the importance of the Armenian Genocide. At first I was very hesitant to believe her, because I had been always taught that such a thing never happened. Turkey still denies their role in the estimated 1 million deaths of Armenians in the year of 1915 to this day, although it is commonly known and accepted around the world as a fact. But because of this denial in Turkey, I myself was very unsure and hesitant when approaching this subject. Eventually, my torture research came to an end and this girl kept pushing me, so I gave in. I knew I was entering into dangerous territory, because it was, and still is, such a contested issue. I wish I could’ve stopped, actually, but once I saw the Turkish government’s attitude or denial and refusal to accept the past, I said, “okay, if you make this a problem for me, then let’s go!”
 
What is your ultimate goal of researching on this topic?
I want to, and I know I can, contribute a lot to the genocide field and am very happy on what I’ve managed to do so far. The only thing I am disappointed with is the fact that I don’t have enough time or resources to study in detail every subject and area that I would like to. But I am very optimistic about where my research is going and what it can do for the future of genocide studies.
 
And one last thing, is it true that you are facing, or have faced, serious danger and threats because of your line of work?
It was a serious problem until 2008/2009. One of my dear friends in Turkey, an Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, was assassinated in broad daylight in front of his newspaper’s headquarter. So, there was an imminent threat for everybody in Turkey that had spoken openly on the subject of the Armenian Genocide. However, this threat was eliminated in most part after that. This is because the threats were not coming directly from the government or from political authorities. They were coming from ultra-nationalist organizations, from semi-secretive circles organized within the military and paramilitary groups within the police. But after the assassination of Hrant Dink, the Turkish government, and the Islamist government I want to add, started a huge investigation against these extreme right-wing organizations and these shadowy illegal structures within the military, police, and bureaucracy. Today, I would say, there is not much of an imminent threat in Turkey against us. However, scholars and activists such as myself should always be very careful about not being in the spotlight and public eye too much, because there are always crazy radicals out there that might get lucky and harm you at a given opportunity. It is always good to be careful with these things.
 
Thank you very much, Professor, and good luck with all of your further research!