Arab News, Saudi Arabia
Jan 22 2007

Editorial: In the Name of Turkishness
22 January 2007

The murder of Hrant Dink, the Turkish journalist, has caused widespread
anger and revulsion in the country. Once, while many Turks would
privately have deplored such a crime, it would have been mainly the
"usual suspects," left-wing lawyers, artists and academics who would
have protested publicly. Dink’s assassination, however, has produced
genuine regret and concern from a variety of quarters.

The Turkish police are to be congratulated for making rapid progress
in their investigation. Thanks to a father dutiful enough to report
his own teenage son to the authorities after he thought he recognized
him running away from the scene of Dink’s murder, seven suspects have
been arrested in northern Turkey. The 17-year old boy has allegedly
confessed to killing Dink because, in his view, the journalist insulted
Turkey and Turkishness.

Dink’s crime was to write about what happened in eastern Turkey
in the closing years of the Ottoman Empire under its young Turk
leadership. Unwisely lured into World War I on the side on the
German-led Central Powers, the Ottoman leadership was fighting a war
on three fronts – in Mesopotamia, Arabia and Thrace. It did not need
a new front opening up in the east. Egged on first by czarist and
then Bolshevik agents, there was a series of increasingly threatening
rebellions among the large Armenian community in the east. Armenians,
along with Greeks, Jews and other non-Turks had played an important
part in Ottoman society as officials, generals and businesspeople.

Many Turks and Kurds – the other principal inhabitants of the eastern
area of Ottoman Turkey – were slaughtered in the initial stages
of the rebellion. At one point however, these people, particularly
the Kurds, who had long nursed commercial and cultural resentments
against Armenians, struck back. That retaliation has been the source
of the deepest sensitivity to the modern Turkish Republic which, it
might be argued, had nothing to do with any official policy to crush
the rebellious Armenians. Over the years, the Turkish authorities
have sponsored learned books and collections of source documents
from the Ottoman archive, all setting out to deny first that there
were large-scale massacres, certainly not bordering on genocide,
but rather a military and militia campaign in which many civilians
perished. Nearly a century on, the immensely proud Turks still bridle
at any suggestion to the contrary.

Journalists such as Dink therefore could not fail to cause pain and
anger as they continued to maintain the massacres did indeed happen
with official approval, if not by official orders. Finding Dink’s
assassins and any extremists who supported them in the murder will
sadly not heal this sensitive wound. That will require a far deeper
examination of Turkish hearts and minds. Whatever the truth of what
happened in eastern Turkey all those years ago, modern Turkey cannot
afford to continue reacting so sensitively to allegations of massacre.