Hrant Dink (1954-2007)
by Ronald Grigor Suny

The Nation., NY
Jan 22 2007

Hrant Dink, the courageous editor of the Armenian-Turkish newspaper
Agos, was murdered in the middle of the day on Friday, January 19,
on a city street in front of his office in Istanbul, by a 17-year-old
man he had never met. Shot three times in the nape of the neck,
he lay face down on the sidewalk, the blood pooling under him. His
killer fled, brandishing his pistol and shouting, "I have killed
an Armenian!" Dink was not killed for any deed or personal grudge
but for who he was and for his words–words that were thought by
nationalist Turks and right-wing opponents to be a threat to the
Turkish state and to "Turkishness." He was 52 years old, a man of
enormous energy and passion, someone who embraced those who met him,
enveloping them both physically and with his charm and charisma. The
circles of his admirers extended far beyond the small, beleaguered
community of Turkish Armenians.

Thousands gathered in Istanbul’s central square, Taksim, in the
hours after his killing and chanted, "We are all Armenians! We are
all Hrant Dink!" For those who loved him or were moved by his words,
it is impossible to believe he is dead.

Whatever the immediate motives of the young assassin from Trebizond to
stop Dink’s pen, Dink knew that he was extraordinarily vulnerable in
the corrosive political atmosphere gathering in Turkey, an atmosphere
enflamed by state prosecutions of dissident voices and nationalist
media. "My computer’s memory," he wrote in his last editorial, "is
loaded with sentences full of hatred and threats. I am just like a
pigeon…. I look around to my left and right, in front and behind
me." Like novelist Elif Shafak and Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk,
both of whom have raised the issue of the genocidal deportations
and massacres of hundreds of thousands of Armenians at the end
of the Ottoman Empire, so Dink had been brought before Turkish
courts and accused under the infamous Article 301 of "insulting
Turkishness." And like the others he had not been jailed but given
a suspended sentence, a gesture signaling that the Turkish state was
still wavering between adopting the legal norms of Europe and turning
its back on the invitation to join the European Union.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other officials from the
government condemned the murder, and the culprit–Ogun Samast–was
quickly apprehended. But in statements from the authorities some of
the blame was placed on those outside Turkey who have brought forth
parliamentary resolutions, as in France recently, to recognize the
events of 1915 officially as a genocide. For eleven years Dink had
edited Agos, a small-circulation newspaper, and though it had but
6,000 subscribers, its resonance was like a bell in a quiet night. In
an interview with the Committee to Protect Journalists in February
2006, he remarked, "The prosecutions are not a surprise for me. They
want to teach me a lesson because I am Armenian. They try to keep
me quiet." When asked who "they" are, he answered as many in the
Turkish opposition answer: "the deep state in Turkey," referring to
the dark forces within the military and power ministries, as well
as nationalist elements, to which even the mildly Islamist Erdogan
government must defer.

The paradox of Dink’s death is that he was killed in the name of a
particularly narrow notion of patriotism while he was himself a fervent
Turkish patriot. His vision of his native country was of a modern
democratic, tolerant state on the eastern edge of Europe, in which
his own people, the Armenians, could live with Turks, Kurds, Jews,
Greeks and the other peoples who had coexisted, however uneasily,
in the cosmopolitan empire out of which the Turkish Republic had
emerged. What he could not tolerate was the denial of the shared
history of those peoples, a history that involved mass killing of
Armenians and more recent repression of Kurds. Dink was an active
participant in the vital civil society in Turkey, key members of which
have taken up the question of the Armenian genocide as an opening wedge
to investigate the blank spots of Turkey’s past. He participated in
international meetings that included Armenian and Turkish scholars
exploring the causes and consequences of the policies of the Young
Turk government during World War I. Last year he spoke at a Turkish
academic conference on this theme at Istanbul’s Bilgi University,
a breakthrough meeting that clearly frightened those nationalists
who want to bury the inconvenient past.

While he was vitally interested in setting the record straight on
1915, Dink was more interested in the movement for Turkish democracy
than in international recognition of the Armenian massacres as a
genocide. Democracy in Turkey, he believed, would easily settle that
historical matter. For some Armenians in the diaspora who know Turks
far less well than their compatriots who live in Turkey, Dink’s lack of
fanaticism on this issue made him suspect, though his outspokenness in
the face of official sanction gave him a heroic aura. Last year the
Norwegians awarded him the Bjornson Academy Prize for protection of
freedom of expression. In his speech at Bilgi University last year,
he told the largely Turkish audience, "We want this land; not to take
it away but to lie under it!"

uny

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress