The Fund for the Support of Historical Studies, created with the kind assistance of Dr. Alper Öktem, one of the supporters of the Hrant Dink Foundation, promotes research on humanistic acts during 1915, with the aim to search and find people who with a clear conscience serve as an example for mankind, and consequently to disclose an unsufficiently investigated aspect of history.

Through the Fund, support will be given to research, academic work and biographies on people – in modern parlance; human rights defenders – who through their humanist acts in Anatolia during 1915 influenced other peoples lives. Such people and their acts may already be known or not known yet. In the latter case, the research should help to reveal these people and that their acts be exposed to public knowledge.

This year’s Support Fund for Research in History Studies, whose jury consists of Prof. Dr. Taner Akçam (Clark University), Prof. Dr. Ayhan Aktar (Bilgi University), Prof. Dr. Edhem Eldem (Boğaziçi University), Prof. Raymond Kevorkian (Paris 8 University), Prof. Hans-Lukas Kieser (Zürich University), and Prof. Bogos Levon Zekiyan (Venice Ca’ Foscari University), has been awarded to Ishkhan Chiftjian.

ISHKHAN CHIFTJIAN: After gaining his Diplom in 2007 from Leipzig University’s Theology Department; Ishkhan Chiftjian continued to pursue his doctoral studies at the same university, focusing on genocide, language and collective identity. He taught Postmodern Theology at Leipzig University. He taught also Genocide Studies at Haigazian University (Beirut). Currently he is teaching at Hamburg University. He is the editor of two books, Voices from Germany and New Voices from Germany, which include interviews with and texts by German scholars about the Armenian Genocide.

Chiftjian’s work focuses on Garabet Faracıyan of Sis (now Kozan) and his family, who took shelter in Hafız Osman Çamurdan’s household in 1920-22 and the reunion of the surviving family members of both sides later on. The jury crowned this work with a 2.000 € prize.

Information on Dr.Alper Öktem, the supporter of the Fund for the Support of Historical Research

Born on 11 March 1954 in the Turkish town of Dikili, he finished his primary education in Burdur. He started to pursue his secondary education at the Maarif Koleji in Eskişehir, continued in Konya and finished it in Istanbul at the Kadıköy Maarif Koleji. In 1978, he graduated from Faculty of Medicine at Hacettepe University in Ankara. He went to Germany for specialization in radiology. In the 1980s he helped Turkish refugees who underwent torture. He has been supporting the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey for more than twenty years. Moreover, he is a board member of the Democratic Turkey Forum in Germany. Dr. Öktem has been assisting Cem Özdemir, Co-Chairman of the Unity 90/Green Party, especially on the topics of human rights, peace and democracy in Turkey, ever since Özdemir was first voted into parliament in 1993. In 2000-2001 he published the weekly supplement Perşembe for the German daily newspaper Die Tageszeitung. Perşembe aimed at bringing together German society and migrants on equal ground in the same media platform, making migrants equal members of society, especially through deepening the dialogue in the media, and reporting human rights violations in Turkey. Dr. Alper Öktem is married, has two children and lives in Bielefeld, Germany, where he works as a radiologist.