By Hambersom Aghbashian
Halil Berktay (born August 27, 1947 ) , is a Turkish historian and social scientist at Sabancı University and columnist for the daily Taraf. He is the son an 
intellectual Turkish Communist family. As a result of his family’s influence, Halil Berktay remained a Maoist for two decades, before becoming “an independent left-intellectual”.
After graduating from Robert College in 1964, Berktay studied economics at Yale University receiving his Bachelor of Arts in 1968 and Master of Arts in 1969. He went on to earn a PhD from Birmingham University in 1990. He worked as lecturer at Ankara University between 1969–1971 and 1978–1983.Between 1992–1997, he taught at both the Middle East Technical University and Boğaziçi University. He was a visiting scholar at Harvard University in 1997, and taught at Sabancı University before returning to Harvard in 2006. His research areas are the history and historiography of Turkish nationalism in the 20th century. He has also written on the construction of Turkish national memory. In September 2005, Berktay and fellow historians, including Murat Belge, Edhem Eldem, Selim Deringil, convened at an academic conference to discuss the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
Berktay has uncovered that the Turkish government purged many of the evidence’s and documents regarding the Armenian Genocide found in the Turkish archives. According to him, the archive cleansing was “most probably implemented by Muharrem Nuri Birgi, a former Turkish ambassador to London and NATO, and Secretary General of the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” Berktay also claims that “at the time he was combing the archives, Nuri Birgi met regularly with a mutual friend and at one point, referring to the Armenians, ruefully confessed: ‘We really slaughtered them.’(1)
In an interview with K.Muradian (Aztag Daily- Beirut, Nov. 12, 2005,), Prof. Berktay said “I had been saying in Turkey and in other international forums that in some sense what happened in 1915 was genocide or it was proto-genocide or, even leaving aside the word “genocide”, It was clear that the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire were rounded up, socially deracinated and deported, and, therefore, in the process, comprehensively uprooted and dispossessed, for no other reason than that they were Armenians and it was very clear that simultaneously, extra-legal secret orders for massacres to be organized were sent out to the Teskilât-ı Mahsusa, the special organization of the Committee of Union and Progress.(2)
According to Radikal newspaper (Istanbul, June 30, 2000), Nese Duzel asked Berktay in an Interview ” The Armenian genocide question has again been put on the agenda. In Turkey this subject is taboo. We cannot even discuss it amongst ourselves. No one fully understands the matter’s internal dimensions or where these claims originated. In what year and how he events that are the subject of the genocide claim began? Prof. Berktay replied that “Violence reached its peak in 1915 but these were events that had continued since the 1890s. That is to say that the events began much before the 24th and 25th of April 1915, which the Armenians symbolically mark as a national day of mourning. On the 24th and 25th of April the leaders of Armenian organizations in Istanbul were arrested”. As an answer to another question he sais ” In that period 1.75 million Armenians lived in eastern Anatolia. The official decision to expel the Armenians made by the military regime of the triumvirate was organized in a way to include without exception the entire Armenian population of the region. (3)
As a supporter of open dialogue in Turkey regarding the Armenian Genocide and Turkey’s denial, Berktay has received threats in his country.(1)
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1- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halil_Berktay
2- https://www.google.com/search?q=berktay&ie( The Specter of the Armenian Genocide Halil Berktay)
3- http://www.atour.com/~aahgn/news/20010105d.html