Scholar/detainee: Turkyilmaz Photo: Chris Hildreth

Yektan Turkyilmaz was reveling in scholarly satisfaction.Having spent two months poring over archival collections--an interlude critical to wrapping up his dissertation work--he was sitting in an airport lounge, finishing off a cigarette and talking with three friends who had come to see him off.

The airport is just a few miles outside Yerevan, Armenia's capital. Turkyilmaz was looking forward to the two-hour, late-night flight to Istanbul. There he would continue his research as a sixth-year Duke graduate student in cultural anthropology. The single-runway airport is called Zvartnots, which has at least two meanings: "celestial angels" or "vigilant forces." In the past two weeks, he had become somewhat vigilant, somewhat uneasy. He had noticed several men clustered just outside his apartment building, seemingly at all hours of the day and night. And he had learned that a number of Armenian acquaintances had been questioned about his work in the country.

Documented: tourist visa that allowed entry into Armenia

He walked through the security checkpoint, then through passport control, where the officer appeared strangely alarmed in his presence and quickly stamped his passport. After taking a couple of steps toward the gate, he was rushed by seven or eight security agents. Moments later, he was in handcuffs, his pockets emptied, his luggage seized. He was told that he wouldn't be seeing a lawyer anytime soon. The friends who saw him off at the airport were instructed to forget about him, to avoid discussing his arrest. He was thrown in jail at the headquarters of the National Security Service, still referred to as the KGB, and held under tight security.

What did Yektan Turkyilmaz do for his summer? He became a subject of news accounts all over the world. He helped set in motion a scholarly network that transcends national and disciplinary boundaries. And he became a symbol of ethnic rivalries that have simmered for decades.

To his Armenian inquisitors, even his name was a maddening, and menacing, study in contradictions. "Turkyilmaz," in Turkish, means "indomitable Turk"; "Yektan," in Kurdish, means unique. Back in the days of the Ottoman Empire, Turks had committed atrocities against Armenians that, in the view of most scholars, amounted to genocide. Since the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the government has clamped down on Kurdish aspirations for cultural and political autonomy. Turkyilmaz--a citizen of Turkey who is of Kurdish origin and who is hardly likely to tow the Turkish party line--had been researching the period of the genocide. He had earned some acclaim as the first Turkish national to gain access to Armenia's National Archives.

The Armenian KGB arrested him on June 17, having targeted him as a spy. "All scholars are spies," one of the investigators told him. All of his research materials, including some 20,000 images saved on more than thirty CDs, were confiscated, along with a backup set of CDs that he had left with a friend. He was asked to prove that he had permission to reproduce every one of those images, which were scrutinized, one by one, to see whether they revealed state secrets. He was questioned about his politics, dissertation topic, motivations for learning the Armenian language, and knowledge of the Turkish military and intelligence communities.

None of that revealed anything of interest to investigators, he says. And so the espionage suspicions evaporated. But after being held without bail for more than a month, he was charged, on July 21, with attempting to remove prohibited articles from the country, specifically, 108 books and pamphlets dating from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries. They had all been purchased openly and legally, he says, at flea markets and secondhand booksellers within sight of the presidential palace. Most of them related to the activities of Armenian nationalist parties in the Ottoman Empire and so, he says, would contribute to his doctoral studies. He adds that he has for years collected Armenian books and recordings, and that his collection has been tapped by other Turkish students for their research.

The claim of innocence carried no weight with prosecutors. They argued that he had violated an article of the Armenian Criminal Code that prohibits transporting drugs, ammunition, or nuclear weapons out of the country. Also barred is the export of certain "raw materials or cultural values" without permission from the Ministry of Culture. Turkyilmaz said that he had never heard of the law. Reportedly, this was the first time that it had been applied to a person carrying books.

The person who wrote the book on Armenia--specifically, a two-volume history--was among Turkyilmaz's prominent defenders. Richard Hovannisian, who holds a chair in Armenian history at the University of California at Los Angeles, is the founder of the Society for Armenian Studies. On hearing of Turkyilmaz's case, he sent messages to the Armenian president and the foreign ministry, flew to Armenia, and met with the lead prosecutor to attest to the character of the young scholar and plead for his speedy release. He says, "I've met Yektan, and I have a very high opinion of him as an objective scholar, one who tries to understand what occurred in the very controversial and confusing history of modern Turkey, who does not necessarily accept the state's narrative of events and the mythology that has been created in Turkey, and who is willing to challenge it. He is among those who are asking the very fundamental question, If there were two-million Armenians living in Turkey in 1915 and there are none here now, what happened to them? They did not simply get up and walk away. They were eliminated."

Hovannisian says he told the prosecutor, "Look, if this man were really intending to smuggle books, he certainly would not have put them on a plane headed for Istanbul, which would have been suspicious for anyone. He would have found a circuitous route to have gotten those books out of the country." All he received in reply was "something of a semi-bureaucratic response, a message that we are, after all, the defenders of the law, even though on a personal level we might sympathize with this young man," he says. "It was a lot of double-talk."

In late August, after two months in prison, Turkyilmaz was given a two-year suspended prison sentence and set free. The court had convicted him of two counts of smuggling. But it chose not to impose additional prison time. State prosecutors had cited his partial acknowledgment of his guilt and cooperation with investigators. "I now want to concentrate on my doctoral dissertation," he told the journalists present at the trial. "I was, I am, and I will remain a friend of the Armenians."

Even before that public statement of friendship, Turkyilmaz would have been a strange candidate for a Turkish spy. He is a member of Turkey's Kurdish minority, which has a history of being marginalized, and worse: While the Kurds make up more than 20 percent of the population of Turkey, the government has shut down Kurdish political parties, banned the Kurdish language, imprisoned advocates of separatism, and systematically withheld economic resources from the Kurdish region. It also has violently fought a Kurdish nationalist movement, displacing an estimated million villagers in the process. Until a few decades ago, the government wouldn't even acknowledge a Kurdish minority, instead applying labels like "Mountain Turks."

Turkyilmaz grew up in what he calls "a multicultural environment" in southeastern Turkey. From an early age, he was sensitive to historical tensions that would later contribute to his project as a scholar. He's drawn to questions related to geography, maps, and borders; he's curious about how different ethnic groups conceive their homelands, sometimes through competing claims. "Armenians became Armenians through these strong experiences. So did Kurds. So did Turks. The history that I want to write is not just about history. It's about today. I want to understand why we are as we are today, and why we have these problems."

"I'm not particularly interested in Armenians or Kurds or Turks," he says. "I'm more interested generally in ethnic conflict. Why do people decide that they should kill each other? Why do people want to maintain conflicts rather than settling the issues? What does the formation of a state tell us about ethnic groups? What is a state, anyway? And is it possible to find a common identity beyond ethnic boundaries?" His dissertation is titled "Imagining 'Turkey,' Creating a Nation: The Politics of Geography and State Formation in Eastern Anatolia, 1908-1938."