The Daily Star, Lebanon
Jan 26 2007

Turkey is changing, despite Dink’s murder
By Rayyan al-Shawaf
Commentary by
Friday, January 26, 2007

Less than a week before Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was
assassinated, his compatriot Orhan Pamuk, winner of the 2006 Nobel
Prize in Literature, was made editor-in-chief for a day at Radikal, a
small but influential newspaper. In a front-page article, Pamuk drew
attention to the throngs of security personnel needed to ensure that
Greek Orthodox religious ceremonies, considered provocative by
Turkish ultra-nationalists, passed without incident. The lead
article, however, discussed the persecution of writers and
intellectuals in Turkey. Pamuk focused on Nazim Hikmet (1902-1963),
Turkey’s poet laureate, who was vilified in the press for his
communist convictions and spent his last years in exile.

It is ironic that the assassination of Dink should have come so close
on the heels of Pamuk’s lament, as though to confirm the continued
vulnerability of Turkish writers. Yet the outpouring of grief and
condemnation by Turks of virtually all political stripes signaled a
major shift in the public’s perception of free speech. This political
maturation may lead to pressure on the state to further enshrine
intellectual freedoms.

Many of the reforms Turkey has recently pushed through have
admittedly come at the behest of the European Union, which is using
its leverage with membership-hungry Turkey to spur democratic change.
Yet Turkish intellectuals have played a leading role in challenging
taboos. And though much of this activism has traditionally emanated
from the political left, even this trend may be changing. After all,
the ruling Justice and Development Party – which has accelerated
Turkey’s reform drive – is conservative in orientation. Many of its
prominent members – including Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan –
have roots in political Islam. The right itself, whether nationalist
or Islamist, is not monolithic. Alongside the mainstream media’s
condemnation of Dink’s assassination, the headline of the Islamist
newspaper Yeni Safak read: "Our Hrant is Murdered." Make no mistake:
Political culture in Turkey is changing.

This has been a long time coming. Over half a century ago, Hikmet
made a moving – albeit brief – reference to the slaughter of
Armenians in his poem "Evening Stroll." World-renowned Turkish
novelist Yasar Kemal, who is of Kurdish origin, repeatedly condemned
his country’s treatment of its Kurdish minority, and was jailed on
several occasions. Beginning in 1977, Ragip Zarakolu and his wife
Ayse Nur Zarakolu, who died in 2002, used their Belge Publishing
House to release trailblazing works dealing with minorities in
Turkey. And in 2005 Pamuk condemned the silence regarding treatment
of Armenians and Kurds.

Dink himself openly called the massacres of Armenians in 1915-1918 a
genocide, something unthinkable in the 1980s and 1990s, when the
Armenian question didn’t exist in Turkey. Indeed, in those days it
was considered treasonous to take a stand for Kurdish rights, a
position which has since become commonplace. Parliamentarian Leyla
Zana spent 1994-2004 in jail, in part for having addressed the
Turkish Parliament in Kurdish. Laws restricting communication in
Kurdish and other languages were softened in 2002.

In recent years, a number of Turkish academics have addressed the
Armenian tragedy, exposing painful truths and urging their
compatriots to acknowledge the suffering of the Armenians. Many of
these scholars were involved in a landmark event in 2005, the
ramifications of which continue to reverberate in Turkey.

It was in September 2005, at Istanbul’s Bilgi University, that a
twice-delayed conference dedicated to discussing "Ottoman Armenians
during the decline of the Empire" was finally convened. The
conference, which brought together Turkish academics from around the
world, represented the first "official" attempt by a Turkish body to
deal with the Armenian question. Claims of genocide were openly
discussed. No outstanding issues were resolved, but the "final taboo"
had been broken.

The Turkish government, eager to emphasize its belief in free
intellectual inquiry, gave its full support to the idea of the
symposium. When ultra-nationalist pressure threatened to scuttle the
conference, Erdogan intervened to guarantee that it take place.

There was opposition to the event, yet much had happened to stoke
public curiosity in Armenian issues. In 2004, a Turkish-language book
with the bland title "My Grandmother" appeared on bookshelves. It
would spark widespread interest in a long-suppressed facet of Turkish
history: the conversion of thousands of Armenians to Islam in the
waning days of the Ottoman Empire as a means of escaping persecution.
The author, Fethiye Cetin, related how her grandmother was adopted
and raised by a Turkish Muslim family after her kin had been killed.
Thanks to the book, acknowledgment by many Turks of their Armenian
heritage started to become acceptable. Fittingly, Cetin, a lawyer by
trade, served as Dink’s counsel in his constant battles with the
judiciary, which prosecuted him for "insulting Turkishness."

Reformist intellectuals have long agonized over how to confront this
issue of Turkishness. Acclaimed British novelist Moris Farhi, who is
of Turkish-Jewish origin, has one of his characters make the
following claim in his novel "Young Turk" of 2004: "True Turkishness
means rejoicing in the infinite plurality of people as we rejoice in
the infinite multiplicity of nature!" Then, not without irony, the
same character pursues this line of thought to its logical
conclusion: "It means rejecting all the ‘isms’ and ‘nesses’ –
including Turkishness."

Will Turkey succeed in disentangling ethnicity from Turkishness? Can
Turkishness become inclusive enough to embrace groups – like Kurds,
Armenians, and others – that are not ethnically Turkish? If so, this
will likely remove one of the last major impediments to a thorough
reappraisal of Turkish history. For if ethnic nationalism ceases to
be the ideological glue of the country, recognizing the history of
non-Turkish groups will no longer be perceived as threatening to
national unity. Perhaps then Turkey can fully integrate people who
have for centuries constituted a part of Ottoman and now Turkish
society.

Rayyan al-Shawaf is a freelance writer and reviewer based in Beirut.
He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress