He believed his love for his country would save him: Murdered editor Hrant
Dink did more than most dared hope to bring Turkey – and his two peoples –
towards peace
FIACHRA GIBBONS
The Guardian – United Kingdom
Jan 22, 2007
The last time I met Hrant Dink he joked that he was "not dead
yet". The next time I saw him was on television last Friday, murdered
outside the newspaper he founded in Istanbul. Even with all the death
threats, he believed his clear love of his country would save
him. "They don’t shoot pigeons here." Dink was an orphan. He was
given up by his parents when he was still a small boy. To be an
orphan in Turkey, a country where family is all, is a heavy burden.
To be an Armenian orphan in Turkey is to simultaneously carry the
genocide and the troubled consciences of all you walk among.
Dink spent his life trying to create a new family that could
accommodate people like him and the millions more who do not fit into
the officially prescribed straitjacket of what it means to be a
Turk. He tried to rid his country, and his two peoples of the
nightmare of the death and the denial dividing them.
It is all the more painfully tragic that in his own death he has been
accepted into the Turkish family in a way that he never quite achieved
during his lifetime.
Dink’s murder has shamed Turkey, just as his prosecution under the
preposterous article 301 of the new penal code, which created the
offence of insulting Turkishness, shamed it. All the more so that the
judges – heroes in their own heads no doubt of Turkey’s cherished
secular order – had to horribly distort an article he wrote berating
the Armenian diaspora, somehow claiming that his words poisoned the
blood of Armenians with hatred of Turks, in order to somehow convict
him.
What rankled most with him to the end was that he had been held by the
state to have insulted Turks. "I wish he could hear the thousands of
people lining up all the way from Osmanbey to Harbiye shouting, ‘We
are all Hrant, we are all Armenian!’" a friend of his told me on the
night of the killing.
Only those who know Turkey can possibly imagine the emotional charge
released by those last four words. Just as they will have winced at
what the boy who shot him in the back of the head shouted as he ran
away: "I have killed the gavur [the infidel, the foreigner]." Ogun
Samast, the 16-year-old who has apparently now confessed to killing
Dink, comes from Trabzon, where last spring, after the publication of
the Muhammad cartoons, a boy of 15 walked into a church and shot an
Italian priest in the back of the head.
Trabzon and the whole Black Sea coast was one of the last places in
Turkey where Islam took hold. But, like eastern Anatolia, it was also
a place where many thousands died in the chaos of the Ottoman empire’s
collapse, mainly Greek-speaking Pontian Christians massacred for
aiding the Russian invaders.
Later, faced with flight to Georgia or forced migration to Greece,
many apparently converted to Islam to remain. Even in Turkey, a place
often unhappy in its own skin, there is a particular unease about the
past on the Black Sea. Many of its inhabitants are acutely aware that
a few generations ago they may have been neither Turkish nor Muslim –
like the ancestors of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime
minister.
This often shows itself in self-consciously insistent nationalism or
religious observance, two seemingly irreconcilable credos that have
found common cause as Europe has shown ugly signs of Islamophobia and
Turcophobia and, in the past few months, Turkey’s EU accession process
has stalled.
No one would be angrier than Dink if his death were to give succour to
Austrian or French politicians determined to keep Turkey out of
Europe. He never saw acceptance of the Armenian genocide as a
prerequisite for entry into Europe any more than it was for the
Austrians, French, Poles, Lithuanians or Hungarians to face up to
their part in the Holocaust.
When the French parliament made denial of the Armenian genocide a
crime last year, he even offered go to Paris to be the first to defy
the new law for the sake of free speech. For him it was not just a
matter for Turkey’s conscience, or about rebuilding relations with its
neighbour, Armenia, although all of this was important; most of all it
was for the mental health of Turks. It was Turkey – and not the gavurs
or the Armenian diaspora, who kept bringing it up – that was really
suffering.
Turkey has a long way to go to be at peace with itself, but a process
has begun. And it has already gone further than anyone might have
dared to dream a decade ago, thanks in good part to Hrant Dink. He did
not just preach generosity, bravery and forgiveness, he lived it.
Which is why he walked out of his office on Friday rather than hide
away as if he had anything to be ashamed of. His newspaper is called
Agos, after the Armenian word for opening a furrow for planting. It is
for others now to stand at his plough.
Fiachra Gibbons is writing a book on the Ottoman legacy in Europe
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