Halil Berktay

Halil Berktay ( born August 27, 1947 in Izmir) is a Turkish historian and professor at Sabancı University in Istanbul, as well as a columnist for the Turkish daily Taraf. He was an avowed Maoist for two decades and is one of the few Turkish experts who openly deal with the genocide of the Armenians.

Life

Halil Berktay was born into an intellectual Turkish displaced family from Crete. After 1964, the Robert College successfully completed, Berktay studied economics at Yale University, where he received a Bachelor of Arts in 1968 and 1969, the Master of Arts. There, founded the organization Students for a Democratic Society. His Ph.D. he received in 1990 at the Birmingham University. Between 1969 and 1971, and from 1978 to 1983, he worked as a lecturer at the University of Ankara.

Between 1992 and 1997 he taught at the Middle East Technical University ( ODTÜ ) and at Bosphorus University. He had in 1997 a lecturer at Harvard University and taught at the Sabanci University, before returning to Harvard in 2006.

Berktays Research the history and historiography are of Turkish nationalism in the 20th century. He wrote about the construction of the collective memory of Turkey.

In September, 2005, Berktay and other historians, including Murat Belge, Edhem Eldem and Selim Deringil, from an academic conference on the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire.

Berktay revealed that the Turkish government destroyed evidence and documents on the genocide of the Armenians in the Turkish archives. Accordingly, the cleaning was especially " performed by Muharrem Nuri Birgi, the former Turkish ambassador to London and NATO and Secretary General of the Turkish Foreign Ministry. " Berktay confirmed, " that at the time when he compared the archives, Nuri Birgi regularly with a met mutual friend and confessed in regard to the Armenians: ' We have really slaughtered. ' "

" Why do not we make again to this idea, a commission? The Turkish government appoints ten Turkish historians and still takes five Armenian or five derived from the Armenian diaspora to historians. And the Armenian government also appoints ten Armenian and five Turkish or originating from the Turkish diaspora historian. Then there are a total of thirty historians who together get ten international historians to the are neither Turks nor Armenians. Then we would have in this case now a genuine dialogue. "

Works (selection)

  • Kabileden Feodalizme, Kaynak Yayınları, 1983
  • Cumhuriyet ve İdeolojisi Fuad Koprulu, Kaynak Yayınları, 1983
  • Bir dönem Kapanırken, Pencere Yayınları, 1991
  • New Approaches to State and Peasant in Ottoman History ( eds. Halil Berktay and Suraiya Faroqhi ), ISBN 0-7146-3468-9
İzmir Maoism
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