By Hambersom Aghbashian
Murat Belge (born March 16, 1943 in Ankara, Turkey) is an outspoken left-liberal Turkish intellectual, academic, translator, literary critic, columnist, and civil rights activist. Sin
ce 1996 he has been a professor of comparative literature at Istanbul Bilgi University. For several years he wrote columns for the daily Radikal, before shifting to Taraf in June 2008. Belge has translated works of James Joyce, Charles Dickens, D. H. Lawrence, William Faulkner and John Berger into Turkish.
Murat Belge was a member of the organizing committee for a two-day academic conference that started on September 24, 2005, held at Bilgi University in Istanbul, titled “Ottoman Armenians During the Decline of the Empire: Issues of Scientific Responsibility and Democracy”. The conference offered an open dispute of the official Turkish account of the Armenian Genocide, and was denounced by nationalists as treacherous. This is a fight of “can we discuss this thing, or can we not discuss this thing?”. This is something that’s directly related to the question of what kind of country Turkey is going to be.(Belge, during the conference opening). Belge’s remarks led to his facing a ten-year jail sentence for criticizing the judicial ban; he was acquitted.(1)
The conference was held after two previous attempts which were blocked by the Turkish government. The self-avowed goal of the conference was to call into question the official Turkish account of events. The participants discussed the plight of the Armenians in the final days of the Ottoman Empire, a politically correct way in Turkey of saying the Armenian Genocide. It was the first time this subject was ever discussed so openly in Turkey. Discussing the mass killings of Armenians has long been taboo in Turkey, and scholars who use the word genocide can be prosecuted under a clause in the Turkish penal code on insulting the national character.(2)
http://www.opendemocracy.net mentioned that ” Murat Belge, one of the Turkish journalists facing trial in Istanbul over public discussion of the 1915 Armenian massacres, sees his case as an emblem of Turkey’s struggle against the country’s anti-democratic “deep state”.(3)
Murat Belge’s book, titled “Armenians in Literature”, was published in Turkey by Yayın İletişim publishing house (News.am- Sept.23, 2013). The new work by Belge, who is known for his studies on the Armenian Genocide, is devoted to the Armenians that lived in the Ottoman Empire. The book looks into what role the Armenians had in which period and in which novel, how the Armenians—who were a part of the Ottoman society—became enemies, and how the Armenians are portrayed in the post-Genocide novels.
To note, Murat Belge was a friend of Hrant Dink, founder and chief editor of Istanbul’s Agos Armenian bilingual weekly, who was gunned down in 2007 in front of his office building. During a discussion in Armenia, Belge had stressed that Turkey should recognize the Armenian Genocide.(4)
—————————————————————————
1- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murat_Belge
2- http://www.armeniapedia.org/index.php?title=Conference:_Ottoman_Armenians_During_the_Decline
3- http://www.opendemocracy.net/author/murat-belge
4- http://news.am/eng/news/172746.html
Also Published on Nor Or, May 8, 2014