Yusuf Halaçoğlu

Yusuf Halaçoğlu (born 10 May 1949, in Kozan, Adana) is a Turkish historian and politician. He is a former president of the Turkish Historical Society and November 2015. In November 2015, the MHP nominated him for Parliamentary Speaker, where he finished on fourth place. In 2017 he left the MHP to be a founding member of a new party, the Good Party. He was deselected as a candidate for the 2018 Election After the 2018 elections, he resigned from the Good Party. He places the number of deaths during the deportations, which he calls "forced relocations", at no higher than 9,000-10,000 (as opposed to the 600,000 to 1,500,000 that is widely stated by those who acknowledge the genocide). His views are parallel to the official Turkish state thesis according to which the massacres and death marches did not constitute genocide. In 2008 Halaçoğlu was dismissed from his post as the head of the Turkish Historical Society for his controversial claims about Armenians and Kurds. In regards to Kurds he denied the Kurd referred to an own ethnicity in Ottoman times, but that this was used as a general denomination for the nomads.

In the year 2004 he was prosecuted in Winterthur, Switzerland after he denied the Armenian genocide in a speech he held at the Turkish Association in Winterthur.

In 2007, Halaçoğlu claimed that he had a list of crypto-Armenians living in Turkey and threatened to publish it. He also claimed that the Dersim Alevis are Armenian.