Halil Berktay

Life and career

Berktay was born into an intellectual Turkish Communist family. His father, Erdogan Berktay, was a member of the old clandestine Communist Party of Turkey. As a result of this 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. He took part in the founding of the Yale chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society.

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.

Berktay's research areas are the history and historiography of Turkish nationalism in the 20th century. He studies social and economic history (including that of Europe, and especially medieval history) from a comparative perspective. 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.

As a supporter of open dialogue in Turkey regarding the Armenian Genocide and Turkey's denial, Berktay has received threats in his country. He has two daughters, Ada Berktay and Aslıgül Berktay, from two separate marriages.

Berktay 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 cleaning 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.’”

Why don’t we reconsider this idea of a commission? The Turkish government appoints ten Turkish historians but also picks and appoints 5 Armenian or Diaspora Armenian historians. And the Armenian government, likewise, appoints 10 Armenian and 5 Turkish or Turkish Diaspora historians. Then these thirty historians collectively appoint ten international historian, non-Turks and non-Armenians. Now in that case we would have real dialogue.