The Fund for the Support of Historical Research, 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.
The International Hrant Dink Foundation has formed a jury in line with the above stated aim and scope, consisting of Prof. Taner Akçam (Clark University), Prof. Ayhan Aktar (Bilgi University), Prof. Edhem Eldem (Boğaziçi University), Prof. Raymond Kevorkian (Paris 8 University), Prof. Hans-Lukas Kieser (Zürich University), and Prof. Boğos Zekiyan (Venedik Ca' Foscari University)
The Jury evaluated the applications applying accepted norms of the scientific community, concerning research method, presentation and references, considering truth and originality of the content, strength of observation, depth of research and quality of interpretation and decided to support the following two researchers.
GEORGE SHIRINIAN: Executive director of the Zoryan Institute in Canada and Joint Board Member of the Journal Genocide Studies and Prevention. He was awarded a fellowship of 1.750 Euros for his project entitled 'Turks who saved Armenians'.
VAHE TACHJIAN: PhD degree on History and Civilisation from Paris Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). Executive and Project Director of the site www.houshamadyan.org describing the Armenian lives in Anatolia. He was awarded a fellowship of 2.250 Euros for his work entitled “Diary of Catastrophe and Struggle: The Death of Shoghagat in Salamiyya”.
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.