Turkish-Armenian writer shunned silence
By Chris Morris
BBC News
pe/6280687.stm
Published: 2007/01/19 19:01:17 GMT
Hrant Dink spoke with quiet intensity about Turkey’s most controversial
issue.
He wrote about it openly and bravely.
His murder is another challenge to the forces of modernisation in a country
locked in a bitter internal debate about how it should deal with its past.
Dink was very clear about had happened to his ancestors in 1915, in the
fading years of the Ottoman Empire.
He called it genocide, and said the word did not need to be accepted by other
Turks for it to remain true in his mind.
The Turkish state admits that hundreds of thousands of Armenians were killed
in 1915 in widespread fighting on the eastern front of World War I.
He lacked some of the visceral bitterness towards modern Turkey that
can be found within the Armenian diaspora
But it disputes the genocide charge, and the suggestion that the death toll
was well over a million.
Dink broke taboos by discussing the killings of 1915 so openly.
He also challenged other pre-conceptions – it was his newspaper for example
that reported that the adopted daughter of Turkey’s founding father, Kemal
Ataturk, was in fact an Armenian orphan whose father had been killed in 1915.
No bitterness
But he lacked some of the visceral bitterness towards modern Turkey that can
be found within the Armenian diaspora.
Many Armenians say Turkey should be punished, that it should pay huge
financial compensation, for the actions of the Ottoman leadership.
Hrant Dink’s view was that Turkey needs to come to terms with its history,
and accept that enormous wrongs were committed in the past.
But he also had Turkish friends and supporters.
In one interview he said the difference between him and Armenians abroad was
that he was living with the Turks of today, while they were still living with
the Turks of 1915.
Hrant Dink refused to be silent
In fact there are tens of thousands of Armenians in modern Istanbul – they
have their own churches, their own schools.
As long as they do not raise the past too publicly, as Hrant Dink did, they
are left to get on with life.
It is in eastern Anatolia, in eastern Turkey, that the Armenians and their
culture have all but disappeared.
Where there were more than a million Armenians 100 years ago, there are only
a few scattered families left.
Silence has brought a degree of protection to Turkey’s remaining Armenian
communities.
But Hrant Dink refused to be silent.
It brought him into constant conflict with the law. And in some eyes it made
him a traitor.
Scared
In a newspaper column written just this week, Dink said he had received many
death threats by e-mail, his computer was full of them, and that he was
scared.
Who knows what other injustices I will be up against
Hrant Dink
Prediction in his last column
Tragically, he was right to be so.
Political leaders in Turkey have been quick to condemn the murder.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called it an attack on national unity.
All too late for Hrant Dink, who said he had received no protection from the
authorities despite his complaints.
Dink ended his last column by predicting that 2007 would be difficult, but
that he would survive it.
"For me, 2007 is likely to be a hard year," he wrote. "The trials will
continue, new ones will be started. Who knows what other injustices I
will be up against."