An interview series by Gonca Sönmez-Poole
Prof. Taner Akçam is the Kaloosdian/Mugar Professor at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, MA. Born in Ardahan by the Georgian border of Turkey, Akcam is the first Turkish scholar who has openly recognized, and written about the Armenian genocide. He comes from a political family of modest means. Both parents were teachers; his father was a writer, journalist and an activist. It didn’t take long for Akcam to become involved in Turkey’s revolutionary youth movements of the seventies. Prior to his arrests and subsequent imprisonment in 1976, Prof. Akçam was the editor-in-chief of Devrimci Gençlik (Revolutionary Youth), a student-run journal.
So what would be the first thing on the agenda for you at the time? What did you want to accomplish?
Our first goal was of course a “democratic university”, where we, the students, would have our voices heard, and where we would be represented in the universities’ administrative structures. In order to achieve this goal, we organized democratic elections throughout Ankara universities based on a grassroots model, and we created a student platform with the representative from each university, a thoroughly basic democracy… In my own university (ODTU-Middle East Technical University), we created a list of demands following several meetings and discussions including all departments. For example, science students developed a list of the items that were missing from the labs. In short, we wanted to have the right of official representation and wanted to be part of the decision making process…We were distributing fliers, organizing boycotts and I was arrested during these activities. …And later, I was arrested in March 1976 because of the articles I wrote as editor-in chief of Devrimci Gençlik. I was writing about the social and political issues of Turkey at the time, basically freedom of speech, the Kurdish question and the like. I was sentenced to eight years, nine months and 20 days of imprisonment. After sitting in prison for a year, I escaped and ended up in Germany.