Ottawa Citizen
January 28, 2007 Sunday
Final Edition

The death of a hero

by David Warren, The Ottawa Citizen

Hrant Dink, a Christian Turk of Armenian extraction, was the editor
of Agos, a prominent weekly in Istanbul. He campaigned fearlessly for
recognition in Turkey of historical facts surrounding the forced
expulsions and massacres of Armenians in 1915-17, when the "Young
Turks" governed the collapsing Ottoman Empire. He also campaigned for
Turkish-Armenian reconciliation, thus earning the enmity of radicals
on both sides. And he campaigned for open democracy.

Last year, he was tried and convicted under Article 301 of the
Turkish penal code, for "insulting Turkishness." That is an article
that has been used repeatedly to silence discussion of the Armenian
holocaust. He wrote in his newspaper of the pain he felt, at being
taken as an enemy of his own country. Also of the pain of receiving
constant death threats and having to behave like a pigeon, "always
alert, looking right, left, in front, behind."

Hrant was gunned down on Jan. 19. Ogun Samast, a 17-year-old high
school dropout, has confessed the murder, declaring that Hrant had
"dirtied Turkish blood." Turkish police have made several further
arrests, for the boy was obviously not acting entirely on his own.

>From an account of the funeral, by an eyewitness in Istanbul:

"It started with a memorial service in the street in front of the
Agos offices. His widow gave a passionate speech, written in the form
of a letter to her husband. Speaking of the killer, she wrote, ‘We
know he was once a baby. Without questioning the darkness that can
turn a baby into a killer, nothing will change.’ She also quoted John
15:13: ‘No one can have greater love than to lay down his life for
his friends.’

"In spite of being surrounded by tens of thousands of people, during
much of the service a white dove stayed on top of the black vehicle
that held Hrant’s coffin."

This last is the sort of detail journalists instinctively delete from
copy, since it will be disputed no matter how many witnesses there
were. (The dove was one of many released at the funeral.) But the
fact that, according to Turkish press, as many as 100,000 walked the
eight-kilometre route of the procession is itself remarkable. And the
fact that many chanted, "We are all Armenians!" in Turkish, when they
were mostly Turks, must serve to remind my reader that no country can
be painted in one colour.

The Columbia Journalism Review has described Turkish penal code 301
as "a law that stinks of suppression of speech." For once I agree
with the CJR. And yet before we think, smugly, that we do not have
such laws in the West, we must look at the whole tendency of
"political correctness," which is to stink in like manner.

Everywhere I can see, we are losing the finest achievement of
liberalism. Not of "gliberalism," as I call it — the degenerate
child of liberalism, which embraces its forms and denies its content
— but of the fine tradition itself, of opening rat’s nests of state
and clerical privilege, and exposing human claims to free enquiry.

True liberalism originated in the impulse to tell the truth, and in
so doing, "vindicate the ways of God to man."

Free speech in all its forms, including freedom of the press,
airwaves, and web, is something beyond law that goes into the dye and
fabric of a society. It is not licence, and it dies when it becomes
licentious. It exists, while it survives, for a purpose — "that we
may know the truth, and the truth will set us free." Free speech
exists so that the truth may be defended, and so that ugly lies,
dressed up as pretty platitudes and plausibilities, can be exposed
and destroyed.

Hrant was a true hero of journalism — though few of his licentious
colleagues around the world will ever remember his name or care for
his mission. The massacre of around 1.5 million Armenians is not
something that will ever stay swept under a Turkish carpet.

Its denial by Turkish nationalists and Muslim chauvinists can serve
no honest cause. Lies serve only lies.

Yet freedom is indivisible. Hrant had last made news in October, when
he attacked a French parliamentary bill that would have made denial
of the Armenian holocaust a criminal offence. He called this the flip
side of the coin, and said: "Those who restrict freedom of expression
in Turkey and those who try to restrict it in France are of the same
mentality."

David Warren’s column appears Sunday, Wednesday and Saturday.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress