Diplomat and politician Gündüz Aktan dead at 67

Veteran diplomat and the deputy of an opposition party Gündüz Aktan, 67, passed away yesterday due to cardiac problems that besieged him for two months.

"I and the Aktan family lost our father. This is a big pain and loss. The Turkish nation lost its invaluable son who dedicated all of his life to Atatürk’s Republic," said his son Uygar Aktan, in a brief statement to the press in front of the Ankara hospital where his father died.

His treatment in Turkey began after he was diagnosed with kidney tumor in the United States, said Aktan’s doctor Adnan Bulut, adding that he died at 02:10 a.m. from heart and liver failure."Unfortunately, there was a delay in diagnosis of the disease but later everything that needed to be done was done. The death was the will of God," said his son. Gündüz Aktan, who served as Turkey’s ambassador to Greece, Japan and the UN Office in Geneva, joined the ranks of the Nationalist Movement Party, or MHP, and as an elected member of Parliament in the July 22, 2007 elections. Aktan’s death brings the number of vacant seats in Parliament to four and the MHP seats to 69.

"The Turkish diplomacy lost a distinguished member; the MHP lost a valuable deputy," said leader of MHP Devlet Bahçeli. "Our pain is very grave." He called Aktan a "successful diplomat" and a "nationalist intellectual." MHP deputies as well as other political party leaders and ministers visited the hospital and offered condolences to the Aktan family.

"Today is a painful day for all of us," said Deputy Prime Minister Cemil Çiçek who knew Aktan since the time of late President Turgut Özal. "His death comes early and as a surprise. May he rest in peace." President Abdullah Gül said Aktan’s death was a big loss for Turkey and noted he had represented Turkey very well.

Aktan left the Foreign Ministry in 1998. He chaired the Ankara-based think tank, the Center for Eurasia Strategic Studies Center, or ASAM, and regularly wrote columns in daily Radikal on domestic and foreign policy developments between 1998 and 2007. But after joining politics, he chose to stop writing.

"At a historic juncture full of dangers, reason suggests that continuing writing is more preferable than joining politics. I think my columnist colleagues are cleverer than me," Aktan said to his readers in a farewell article published in Radikal on June 9, 2007, one month before the early elections when the country was indulged in crisis over the failure to elect a president. He wrote that he would start doing a job he had never known but said his only hope was the conviction that everyone was a "political creature" by birth. "While bidding a farewell I don’t know what to say to my readers or, to put it correctly, to those who read my articlesÉ I don’t say ’Goodbye’ as I’m not going too far," concluded Aktan in his last column.

I'm not going too far
His special area of interest was the Armenian question and was a former member of a commission advising the government on countering genocide allegations. Aktan proposed genocide claims could be countered through international arbitration and believed Turkish-Armenian relations could be normalized only after a resolution of disagreements.

"Normalization of bilateral ties is out of the question without progress on the genocide claims and the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute," he once told the Hürriyet Daily News. He was one of the lobbying deputies in the United States against a measure labeling the killings of Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire as genocide. The genocide resolution was marked-up by a U.S. House committee in 2007, straining ties with Washington.

Speaking with the Daily News at the time, Aktan called for tough sanctions against the United States in retaliation. "Turkey’s reaction must be to do what is expected: shut down İncirlik air base and slow down U.S. logistics to Iraq via Habur border gate," he stated then.

A funeral ceremony will take place at the Foreign Ministry and in Parliament today and then he will be buried in Istanbul.