Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Armenia Report
Tuesday 9, August 2005
http://www.armenialiberty.org/armeniareport/report/en/2005/08/3AFE52B2-182F-470F-8E5B-7B56A90A3E83.ASP

Trial Of Arrested Turkish Scholar Opens In Yerevan

By Ruzanna Khachatrian

A Turkish scholar who researched Ottoman history in Armenia's state
archives went on trial in Yerevan on Tuesday nearly two months after
his controversial arrest on smuggling charges which caused an uproar in
U.S. and Turkish academic circles.

Yektan Turkyilmaz, a 33-year-old doctoral student at the U.S. Duke
University, is facing between four and eight years in prison for trying
take old books out of Armenia without a mandatory government
permission. 

The opening session of the trial adjourned less than an hour after
its beginning at the request of one of Turkyilmaz's newly hired lawyers
who said he needs more time to familiarize himself with the case. The
presiding judge at the court of first instance in Yerevan's
Malatia-Sebastia district scheduled the next hearing for Friday. Among
those attending the first hearing were local human rights activists and
officials from the U.S. embassy in Armenia.

Turkyilmaz, who became last May the first Turkish scholar to be
granted access to the Armenian National Archive, was charged under
Article 215 of Armenia's Criminal Code which envisages equally tough
punishment for smuggling of cultural treasures and weapons of mass
destruction. He insisted during the pre-trial investigation that he was
unaware of Armenian laws regulating the export of old books and other
artifacts and therefore does not deserve imprisonment.

Turkyilmaz has attracted strong support from fellow academics in
the United States, Turkey and Armenia. More than 200 of them have
signed an open letter to President Robert Kocharian describing the
accusations as "disproportionate" and calling for his release. Also
demanding his liberation was Bob Dole, a former pro-Armenian member of
the U.S. Senate. "To detain him on grounds as dubious as these calls
into question Armenia's commitment to democracy in the first place,"
Dole wrote to Kocharian last week. 

Individuals convicted of smuggling have rarely ended up in jail in
Armenia. Hence, growing questions about reasons for the severity of the
charges leveled against the Turkish national of Kurdish extraction. The
chief prosecutor at the trial, Koryun Piloyan, refused to explain them
on Tuesday.

"You don't look at the issue correctly," Piloyan told RFE/RL.
"[Turkyilmaz's] deed corresponds to that article of the Criminal Code."

"Yektan is a good man, there is nothing bad I can say about him,"
said Sevan Deirmenjian, an ethnic Armenian citizen of Turkey who is
pursuing a doctoral degree at Yerevan State University and befriended
Turkyilmaz after meeting the latter in Armenia.

Avetik Ishkhanian of the Armenian Helsinki Committee, a human
rights group, was also at the trial and urged the authorities not to
give the defendant a prison sentence. "This is not the kind of case
where we should demonstrate the strictness of the law," he said,
arguing that Turkyilmaz is among the few Turkish historians who
question Ankara's official line on the 1915-1918 mass killings and
deportations of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.

Ishkhanian was among those who were allowed to visit the arrested
scholar at a maximum security prison in Yerevan. "He wasn’t
particularly unhappy with conditions there," he told RFE/RL. "His main
grievance was his detention. I also remember him saying that he could
imagine being arrested in Turkey but never thought that could happen in
Armenia."