Jailed Duke Graduate Student Glad to be Back at Work

September 8, 2005
Duke News
David Jarmul 919-684-2823 david.jarmul@duke.edu

Durham, N.C. -- Yektan Turkyilmaz wasted no time celebrating his return to Durham on Friday following a two-month detention in Armenia that attracted worldwide attention.

He arrived at his apartment at 11:30 p.m. By midnight, several Duke friends were assembling to welcome him.
[...]
Acknowledging that he had failed to comply with the law prohibiting the export of books older than 50 years without permission, Turkyilmaz said he assumed from the outset that his arrest was politically motivated.
[...]
“I’d gone to Armenia five times and never had a problem,” he said. “But the people who arrested me seemed to have other motives and kept asking me about my political views. They didn’t seem to understand the idea of what a scholar is or why I’d be doing this research. They certainly didn’t know much about cultural anthropology, so I just told them I was a historian. Initially they thought I was a spy but, of course, there was no evidence to support this.”
[...]
The detention “helped me improve my Armenian,” joked Turkyilmaz, who also speaks four other languages. But he said it also was “an attack against academic freedom.”
[...]
[...] “I’m grateful to everyone who helped me, especially to the Duke community and to the many Armenian intellectuals, journalists and officials who supported me. They range from President Brodhead to the Turkish scholar Ayse Gul Altinay and Amatuni Virabian, the head of Armenia’s national archives. I never wanted to be the focus of something like this or to have my name in the news media. At this point, I just want to go back to work.”

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.