Baskın Oran (born 26 July 1945 in Izmir) is a Turkish academic, politician and human rights activist. Currently, he is a teacher in

Faculty of Political Science, Ankara University The Faculty of Political Science of the University of Ankara ( tr, Ankara Üniversitesi Siyasal Bilgiler Fakültesi, more simply known as "''SBF''") is the oldest faculty of social science in Turkey, being the successor of the "Mekteb-i Mülkiye" ( ...

Biography

Baskın Oran finished his high school in

Turkey Turkey ( tr, Türkiye ), officially the Republic of Türkiye ( tr, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti, links=no ), is a list of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country located mainly on the Anatolia, Anatolian Peninsula in Western Asia, with ...

. He attended high school Saint-Joseph, which explains his Francophonie then Izmir Atatürk High School. He then entered

Ankara University Ankara University ( tr, Ankara Üniversitesi) is a public university in Ankara, the capital city of Turkey. It was the first higher education institution founded in Turkey after the formation of the republic in 1923. The university has 40 vo ...

and studied for

Political Science Political science is the scientific study of politics. It is a social science dealing with systems of governance and power, and the analysis of political activities, political thought, political behavior, and associated constitutions and ...

. He graduated in 1968. Later in 1969, he started his academic career as a teaching assistant in the Department of

International Relations International relations (IR), sometimes referred to as international studies and international affairs, is the Scientific method, scientific study of interactions between sovereign states. In a broader sense, it concerns all activities betwe ...

. In 1971, following the coup, he was suspended for the first time from his post and was reinstated by the Council of State (Danıştay) in 1972. He completed his doctorate in 1974. He continued his studies and by 1975 he finished his

postdoctoral A postdoctoral fellow, postdoctoral researcher, or simply postdoc, is a person professionally conducting research after the completion of their doctoral studies (typically a PhD). The ultimate goal of a postdoctoral research position is to pu ...

Geneva Geneva ( ; french: Genève ) frp, Genèva ; german: link=no, Genf ; it, Ginevra ; rm, Genevra is the second-most populous city in Switzerland (after Zürich) and the most populous city of Romandy, the French-speaking part of Switzerland. Situ ...

on international minorities. In 1982, when he was an assistant professor, he was again suspended from

docent The title of docent is conferred by some European universities to denote a specific academic appointment within a set structure of academic ranks at or below the full professor rank, similar to a British readership, a French " ''maître de con ...

1980 Turkish coup d'état The 1980 Turkish coup d'état ( tr, 12 Eylül Darbesi), headed by Chief of the General Staff General Kenan Evren, was the third coup d'état in the history of the Republic of Turkey, the previous having been the 1960 coup and the 1971 coup ...

. He was not reinstated until 1990 by court order. In 1991, he was appointed Senior Lecturer in the Department of International Relations and, finally, in 1997, he received the title of professor. At the university he taught and worked on subjects of minorities,

nationalism Nationalism is an idea and movement that holds that the nation should be congruent with the State (polity), state. As a movement, nationalism tends to promote the interests of a particular nation (as in a in-group and out-group, group of peo ...

globalization Globalization, or globalisation (English in the Commonwealth of Nations, Commonwealth English; American and British English spelling differences#-ise, -ize (-isation, -ization), see spelling differences), is the process of foreign relation ...

, Turkish foreign policy and relations between State and religion. He was officially retired in 2007 but continued teaching at the Faculty of

of Ankara University as well as giving lectures and courses at foreign universities. Meanwhile, he started writing for Turkish newspapers, He was an editorialist in the daily Birgün from 2004 to 2006, Radikal 2. since February 2000 he has also been writing for the bilingual weekly – Turkish and Armenian –

Agos ''Agos'' (in hy, Ակօս, " furrow") is an Armenian bilingual weekly newspaper published in Istanbul, Turkey, established on 5 April 1996. ''Agos'' has both Armenian and Turkish Turkish may refer to: *a Turkic language spoken by the Turks ...

, newspaper, founded byhis publisher friend,

Hrant Dink Hrant Dink ( hy, Հրանդ Տինք; Western ; 15 September 1954 – 19 January 2007) was a Turkish-Armenian intellectual, editor-in-chief of '' Agos'', journalist and columnist. As editor-in-chief of the bilingual Turkish-Armenian newspa ...

. who was the founder and the director of publication He also worked for Büyük Meclis magazines and newspapers (La Grande Assemblée), (New Daily), Ikibin'e doğru (Around 2000), Tempo, Aydınlık (Clarity) from 1985 to the year 2000. Since 2003, he has been Chair of the Subcommittee on

Cultural rights The cultural rights movement has provoked attention to protect the rights of groups of people, or their culture, in similar fashion to the manner in which the human rights movement has brought attention to the needs of individuals throughout t ...

and

Minority rights Minority rights are the normal individual rights as applied to members of racial, ethnic, class, religious, linguistic or gender and sexual minorities, and also the collective rights accorded to any minority group. Civil-rights movement ...

of the Human Rights Advisory Council attached to the Ministry of Human Rights. A publication in 2004 of a controversial report earned him and Professor Ibrahim Kaboğlu judicial and death threats from

ultra-nationalist Ultranationalism or extreme nationalism is an extreme form of nationalism in which a country asserts or maintains detrimental hegemony, supremacy, or other forms of control over other nations (usually through violent coercion) to pursue its s ...

groups. On 1 June 2007, he participated in the parliamentary elections in the second

Istanbul Istanbul ( , ; tr, İstanbul ), formerly known as Constantinople ( grc-gre, Κωνσταντινούπολις; la, Constantinopolis), is the List of largest cities and towns in Turkey, largest city in Turkey, serving as the country's economic, ...

constituency in the platform list of the Collective of Independent Candidates (Ortak Bağımsız Aday Platformu).

Journalism activity

Meanwhile, he started writing for Turkish newspapers, He was an editorial writer in the daily Birgün from 2004 to 2006,

Radikal ''Radikal'' () was a daily liberal Turkish language newspaper, published in Istanbul. From 1996 it was published by Aydın Doğan's Doğan Media Group. Although Radikal did not endorse a particular political alignment, it was generally considere ...

2. since February 2000 he has also been writing for the bilingual weekly – Turkish and Armenian –

, newspaper, founded byhis publisher friend,

. Buskin also wrote for magazines and newspapers Büyük Meclis (The Grand Assembly) Yeni Gündem (New Daily), Ikibin'e doğru (Around 2000), Tempo, Aydınlık (Clarity) from 1985 to the year 2000.

A committed personality

Baskın Oran is "National Liaison Officer" for

to the Commission against Racism and intolerance of the Council of Europe. On 15 December 2008, Baskin Oran with Ahmet İnsel, Ali Bayramoğlu, Cengiz Aktar and more than a thousand Turkish intellectuals introduced the "I Apologize" campaign, thus opposing deliberately organized collective obliviousness in Turkey. This version of history understates the responsibility of the government in the era of deportations and

massacres A massacre is the killing of a large number of people or animals, especially those who are not involved in any fighting or have no way of defending themselves. A massacre is generally considered to be morally unacceptable, especially when per ...

of Armenians. Baskın Oran is an independent personality who continues to stimulate the conscience in Turkey despite the legal problems and threats. He is one of the representatives of this vanguard of the civil society fighting for Turkey to complete its democratic transformation. He does not hesitate to speak of the"second revolution" in progress, the first being that of the establishment of the republic by

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, or Mustafa Kemal Pasha until 1921, and Ghazi Mustafa Kemal from 1921 until 1934 ( 1881 – 10 November 1938) was a Turkish field marshal, revolutionary statesman, author, and the founding father of the Rep ...

in 1923. Baskın Oran was an

assistant professor Assistant Professor is an academic rank just below the rank of an associate professor used in universities or colleges, mainly in the United States and Canada. Overview This position is generally taken after earning a doctoral degree and gene ...

, but twice in 1971 and 1982 he was banned from teaching by the

military junta A military junta () is a government led by a committee of military leaders. The term ''junta'' means "meeting" or "committee" and originated in the national and local junta organized by the Spanish resistance to Napoleon's invasion of Spain in ...

Identity Conflicts

Baskın Oran claims that most of the conflicts in Turkey are due to the Republic's choice to rely on Turkish identity (

ethnic An ethnic group or an ethnicity is a grouping of people who identify with each other on the basis of shared attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Those attributes can include common sets of traditions, ancestry, language, history, ...

– blood based) instead of choosing the land, He feels sorry that the name of the people "Türk" is chosen instead of "Türkiyeli" (from Turkey). In the Ottoman era, the Turks were one of the "millet" (infra-identity) that made up the empire ruled by the Ottomans (supra-identity). The other "millets" were

Greeks The Greeks or Hellenes (; el, Έλληνες, ''Éllines'' ) are an ethnic group and nation indigenous to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea regions, namely Greece, Greek Cypriots, Cyprus, Greeks in Albania, Albania, Greeks in Italy, ...

Armenians Armenians ( hy, հայեր, '' hayer'' ) are an ethnic group native to the Armenian highlands of Western Asia. Armenians constitute the main population of Armenia and the ''de facto'' independent Artsakh. There is a wide-ranging diaspora ...

Kurds ug:كۇردلار Kurds ( ku, کورد ,Kurd, italic=yes, rtl=yes) or Kurdish people are an Iranian peoples, Iranian ethnic group native to the mountainous region of Kurdistan in Western Asia, which spans southeastern Turkey, northwestern Ir ...

, Syriacs,

Arabs The Arabs (singular: Arab; singular ar, عَرَبِيٌّ, DIN 31635: , , plural ar, عَرَب, DIN 31635: , Arabic pronunciation: ), also known as the Arab people, are an ethnic group mainly inhabiting the Arab world in Western Asia, ...

, etc. The mistake of Atatürk's nationalism is to have replaced the supra-identity "neutral" by one of the infra-identities instead of building the nation on land, (the Ottomans were not Turkish in an ethnic sense, moreover they did not recognize themselves as such). He rejected the myth that

kemalism Kemalism ( tr, Kemalizm, also archaically ''Kamâlizm''), also known as Atatürkism ( tr, Atatürkçülük, Atatürkçü düşünce), or The Six Arrows ( tr, Altı Ok), is the founding official ideology of the Republic of Turkey.Eric J. Zurcher ...

was the source of an egalitarian society. He created an acronym to designate on which sociotype the ideology and the dominant class are based: -- Sunni

Hanafi The Hanafi school ( ar, حَنَفِية, translit=Ḥanafiyah; also called Hanafite in English), Hanafism, or the Hanafi fiqh, is the oldest and one of the four traditional major Sunni schools ( maddhab) of Islamic Law (Fiqh). It is named ...

and

secular Muslim Secularism—i.e. the separation of religion from civic affairs and the state—has been a controversial concept in Islamic political thought, owing in part to historical factors and in part to the ambiguity of the concept itself. In the Muslim ...

Turkish ), they are, according to him, the equivalent in Turkey of what the WASP (

White Anglo-Saxon Protestant In the United States, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants or WASPs are an ethnoreligious group who are the white, upper-class, American Protestant historical elite, typically of British descent. WASPs dominated American society, culture, and politi ...

) are in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., federal district, five ma ...

From Kemalism to Social Democracy

Baskın Oran, who comes from a family of the Kemalist and secular bourgeoisie always likes to mention that he grew up in favor of the

nationalists Nationalism is an idea and movement that holds that the nation should be congruent with the state. As a movement, nationalism tends to promote the interests of a particular nation (as in a group of people), Smith, Anthony. ''Nationalism: Th ...

of his country. He was a leftist activist while still a student feeling close to

communists Communism (from Latin la, communis, lit=common, universal, label=none) is a far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology and current within the socialist movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, a ...

as were many other people at that time (in 1968, he was 23 years old). In 1986, he wrote about The question of the Turkish minority in Greece and about Turkish-Greek relations. He was then contacted by a

Kurd ug:كۇردلار Kurds ( ku, کورد ,Kurd, italic=yes, rtl=yes) or Kurdish people are an Iranian ethnic group native to the mountainous region of Kurdistan in Western Asia, which spans southeastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, northern Ira ...

ish personality, who points out to him that Kurds live a similar situation in Turkey, following this discussion, he focuses his work on the problem of minorities and

inside Turkey. Later, in 2003, he was asked by the government that as an expert on this subject to co-write a report, which, despite the wrath of justice, will become the book "Türkiye'de Azınlıklar, Kevramlar – Teori – Lozan – İç mevzuat – İçtihat – Uygulama"(Minorities in Turkey: concepts, theory, Lausanne, domestic legislation, jurisprudence, practice). This book became a "bestseller" in Turkey. Another meeting in 1993 was also decisive. Baskın Oran received a call from

, a journalist who said he was very moved by his writings, especially by the fact that he was a Turkish who wrote them. (it must be remembered here that the subject of what he wrote was taboo in Turkey, from the emergence of the Republic and in the name of the sacrosanct national unity). They met again and remained closely linked until the journalist's assassination on 19 January 2007 separated them. Baskin now proclaims himself as a

social democrat Social democracy is a political, social, and economic philosophy within socialism that supports political and economic democracy. As a policy regime, it is described by academics as advocating economic and social interventions to promote soc ...

, without being affiliated with any political party.Oran Aims for Opposition Outside Parliament
/ref>

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Oran, Baskin Turkish activists Human rights in Turkey Ankara University people 1945 births Living people