Murat Belge

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Murat Belge, born 1943 in Ankara, Turkey, is a Turkish intellectual, translator, literary critic, scholar, civil rights activist and academic.

He is the son of political journalist Burhan Asaf Belge, nephew of Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu, and the grandson of a former governor of Bursa. He received his PhD from İstanbul University in 1966 on leftist criticism in English literature. Since his student years in the 1960s until the early 1980s, he has been an active participant of a closely knit left wing group of scholars at the Department of English Language and Literature at Istanbul University. His fellow scholars of those years included Berna Moran, Mina Urgan, Cevat Capan, Aksit Gokturk and Vahit Turhan. After March 12, 1971 and September 12, 1980 military coups, he had to leave academic life and went into publishing left wing classics from Iletisim Press in İstanbul. Since 1996 he has been teaching at Istanbul Bilgi University as professor of comparative literature. His wife is Hale Soygazi, who is a famous Turkish actress.

Belge is a member of the organizing committee of a two-day academic conference starting on September 24, 2005, held at Bilgi University in Istanbul, entitled "Ottoman Armenians During the Decline of the Empire: Issues of Scientific Responsibility and Democracy", which offered an open dispute of the official Turkish account of the Armenian Genocide.

"This is a fight of 'can we discuss this thing, or can we not discuss this thing?'" Belge said during the conference opening. "This is something that's directly related to the question of what kind of country Turkey is going to be."

The gathering was denounced by nationalists as treacherous.

A Turkish military memo, dated November 2006 was leaked to the press, and was reported by Nokta in March 2007. This memo lists journalist deemed "trustworthy" and "untrustworthy" by the Turkish Armed Forces. Murat Belge is listed as "untrustworthy".^[1]

Belge translated works of James Joyce, Charles Dickens, D. H. Lawrence, William Faulkner and John Berger into Turkish. He is an active member of the Helsinki Citizens Assembly.