I WAS NOT A FRIEND OF HRANT DINK
Monday, January 22, 2007
Turkish Daily News
php?ed=ariana_ferentinou
I did not know that Hrant Dink had so many friends in Turkey. Close
friends that now, after his untimely death would cry so loud through
their columns about the loss of such a man of ‘immense courage,
professional integrity, outspokenness, kindness, friendliness, etc.’
Ariana Ferentinou
"When I heard it, I felt so bad, I threw up twice. I could not
sleep. All night I had nightmares about trains passing over me loudly,"
my Rum journalist friend on the other end of the line was trying
to describe his reactions after hearing the news of Hrant Dink’s
assassination last Friday.
He was a friend of his, a family friend. He knew the family, the wife,
the daughters; he had appeared with him many times on discussion
panels over – what else? – the rights of minorities in Turkey. He
had heard – as all of us did – the criticism hurled against him by
Armenian patriarchate circles for raising his voice too loud, for
rocking the boat too much. "He was, after all, doing nothing more than
defending the legal rights of his community," said my friend, and in
his broken voice I could clearly read his deeper message: "He was,
after all defending the rights of his community, as we all are, too."
I did not know that Hrant Dink had so many friends in Turkey. Close
friends that now, after his untimely death would cry so loud through
their columns about the loss of such a man of "immense courage,
professional integrity, outspokenness, kindness, friendliness,
etc." And I did notice that many of today’s friend’s were nowhere to be
seen when Dink was tried for "insulting Turkishness," while being very
keen in stirring up their Turkish readers and viewers against anybody
who would dare to bring up the issue of "Armenian genocide," here or
abroad. Furthermore, I noticed that no famous Turkish intellectuals
who benefited from the "Armenian genocide" debate in Europe and the
United States came out to count themselves as "Hrant’s friends."
I was not a friend of Hrant Dink and I am not a member of the minority
of the Rums who have felt the chilling fear of a politically motivated
racial killing at their doorstep.
But I am worried about how history can be abused as a tool of the
present. And how our modern technological world can facilitate the
misuse of historical memory and the overemphasis on feelings at the
expense of a rational, scientific, historical assessment. In other
words, how a neighborhood Internet café can be a more dangerous
medium than any method of dissemination of knowledge we knew before.
I was not Hrant Dink’s friend, I am not a member of a historical
ethnic minority in modern Turkey. But I do wish that his death would
provoke an attitude of temperate objectivity against the misuse of
history for the small benefit of the present.
The problem is that I have lived long enough in this country to be
skeptical enough to know that I am asking too much.
–Boundary_(ID_JczBu0nS/O1WX+cAjsvk3g)–
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
