Dr. Taner Akçam, often described as the first Turkish scholar to call the 1915 massacres of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks a genocide, will speak at California State University, Fresno at 3 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 21.
Akçam, a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota, will speak about his new book, “A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility” in the Leon S. and Pete P. Peters Educational Center, which is in the Student Recreation Center (at Shaw and Woodrow avenues). The lecture is free and open to the public. Free parking is available in Lot V.
Akçam made use of Turkish, European and American records to tell the full story of what the Ottoman Turks actually planned, intended and did to their Armenian population.
One of the very few Turkish historians to acknowledge the genocide, he follows the chain of events that led to the killings and reconstructs their systematic orchestration by government officials, civil servants, party loyalists, state-run local militias and the army.
A sociologist and historian, Akçam was born in the province of Ardahan, Turkey in 1953. He became interested in Turkish politics at an early age. As the editor-in-chief of a student political journal, he was arrested in 1976 and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Amnesty International adopted him as one of its first prisoners of conscience, and a year later he escaped to Germany, where he received political asylum.
In 1988, Akçam began work as a research scientist at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. While researching the late Ottoman Empire and early Republic, especially the history of political violence and torture in Turkey, he became interested in the Armenian Genocide.
In 1996 he received his doctorate from the University of Hanover with a dissertation entitled “The Turkish National Movement and the Armenian Genocide Against the Background of the Military Tribunals between 1919 and 1922.” He has been a visiting associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota since 2002.
Akçam is the author of 10 books and numerous articles in Turkish, German, English and other languages. Copies of “A Shameful Act” will be on sale at the lecture.
For more information contact the Armenian Studies Program at 559.278.2669.
http://www.fresnostatenews.com/2006/12/turkishscholar.htm
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