Letter to Robert Kocharian regarding Yektan Türkyılmaz

Sunday, July 31, 2005
Turkish Daily News
By Elif SAFAK

We, a group of Turkish intellectuals, are sending a letter to Armenian President Robert Kocharian. The letter concerns Yektan Türkyılmaz, a Turkish citizen and academic in the United States who has been held by the National Security Service [...], in Yerevan since June 17.

Türkyılmaz is doing his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology at Duke University.[...].He particularly focused on a highly turbulent period extending from the 1900s to the 1940s by managing to stay equally distant from and objectively independent vis-à-vis the competing nationalist projects that had once pummeled the region and are still alive today. [...].
[...]
Türkyılmaz unknowingly violated an old law. He did not know it was a crime to take books out of Armenia; no one had warned him about this. He did not know that he had to “declare” all books over 50 years of age at customs. [...].
[...]
Understandably, Türkyılmaz made a mistake by failing to get special permission for the books in his suitcase. But obviously he is not a drug dealer or nuclear weapons smuggler. He is a scholar, an independent-minded researcher whose only mistake was to take the research material he was studying along with him on his flight back from Armenia.[...].

[...] {We} sincerely hope and respectfully urge Armenian authorities and the Armenian president to intervene in order to bring this sad and unexpected episode to an amicable end.
[...]

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.