Examining his own persecution, Akçam's opinion was that:
The group who organizes the campaign against me in Turkey and here in the U.S. is a part of what we call the "Deep State," the military-bureaucratic complex.... behind the campaign to discredit Genocide scholars....Kufi Seydali is a member of the Senior Advisory Board Committee of the Turkish Forum, and the Chairman of its Advisory Board Committee on Issues of Turkish Cyprus and Western Thrace.
Here in the U.S. there are some groups organized and controlled mostly by Turkish diplomats. I can give three names:
- ATAA (Assembly of Turkish American Associations);
- Turkish Forum (an e-mail group, coordinated between different initiatives in different states in the U.S.) and a Web site,
- TallArmenianTale.com (one of the most popular Armenian Genocide denial sites).
Obviously, while I'm proud to have earned such enemies, I'm not keen to cross them.
I will continue to defend myself here, and in academic work; but I may not argue with Seydali in the media, because it would only offer Seydali opportunities to repeat his libels, and give nationalists chances to remember my resistance, and thus it would make me an easier target for nationalist campaigns.
Akçam, T and Schilling, P. 2007: "Is it still genocide if your allies did it?" Minnesota Law and Politics, 20th December. Available at: http://www.lawandpolitics.com/minnesota/Is-It-Still-Genocide-if-Your-Allies-Did-It/cef7381e-fe46-102a-aeb9-000e0c6dcf76.html
Hardy, S A. 2010: "Cypriot antiquities rescue from the Turkish deep state: the rescue of forgeries, and the death of Stephanos Stephanou". Paper presented at the International Conference on Archaeology in Conflict, Vienna, Austria, 6th-10th April. Available at: http://human-rights-archaeology.blogspot.com/2010/04/archaeology-conflict-antiquities-rescue.html
[I added line breaks to long quotations to make them easy to read in a blog post; but the quotations themselves remain word-for-word the same.]
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment