PeaceJournalism.com, Nepal
Open Democracy, UK
Jan 29 2007

Hrant Dink’s assassination and genocide’s legacy
Peter Balakian
29 – 1 – 2007

The killing in Istanbul of the Armenian-Turkish journalist highlights
the need for Turkey to confront the 1915 genocide of the Armenians,
says Peter Balakian.

The assassination of Hrant Dink in front of his newspaper office in
Istanbul on 19 January 2007 is an irreparable loss. One of a group of
brave Turkish intellectuals, Dink gave his life for intellectual
freedom and democracy in Turkey. He was the editor of the bilingual
Armenian weekly Agos, and he spoke and wrote about human-rights
issues and various taboo subjects in Turkey. He was a strong advocate
of the abolition of Article 301 of Turkey’s penal code, which made
"insulting Turkishness" a crime punishable by imprisonment. In
speaking openly about the Armenian genocide of 1915 he had been
charged with a violation of this article.

In the face of repression, Dink stood tall with courage and
integrity. He lived with constant death threats, which he described
as "psychological torture", yet he carried on his work with grace and
fortitude. Everyone who knew Hrank Dink spoke of him as a warm,
humane, gentle man whose goal was to bring peace and reconciliation
between Armenian and Turkish societies (see his openDemocracy article
"The water finds its crack: an Armenian in Turkey", 13 December
2005).

The flame and the candle

Dink’s murder resonates around the world and is an emblem of the
struggle for freedom of speech and thought in the face of
government-sanctioned violence and repression everywhere. But Dink’s
assassination also cuts to the heart of Turkey’s struggle to meet the
standards for European Union admission. At the centre of Turkey’s
problems remain its repressive treatment of minorities today and its
refusal to acknowledge past crimes – most notably its state-sponsored
denial of the Armenian genocide, something the international
community has been urging Turkey to acknowledge.

In the 1990s, according to PEN International and Human Rights Watch,
Turkey had more writers and journalists in legal detention than any
country in the world. Though the situation has improved slightly
since then, in the past decade eighteen journalists have been killed
in Turkey; in the past six years, 241 books have been banned, and in
2006 seventy-seven journalists had to face the courts.

For Armenians and Turks, Dink’s murder bears a particular
significance. Turkey’s modern history of violence against
intellectuals began when 250 Armenian writers, journalists, clergy,
and teachers were arrested in Istanbul (then Constantinople) on 24
April 1915 and transported to prisons in the interior, where almost
all of them were murdered. Now that Hrant Dink has joined the legacy
of those intellectuals of 1915, his own legacy has become profoundly
important.

Turkey’s two faces

However, in the aftermath of the assassination, two dramatically
opposed voices are being heard in Turkey. The 120,000 people who
crowded the streets outside of Dink’s funeral expressing solidarity,
chanting "We are all Hrant Dink", "We are all Armenian", represent an
opposition to Turkey’s violent nationalism that is associated with
the deep state and its military infrastructure; they represent the
hope for democracy, civil rights, and ethnic tolerance.

On the other side are voices of extreme Turkish nationalism,
including from within the state, which blame Dink’s death on calls
from the international community for recognition of the Armenian
genocide (which in turn they source to the Armenian diaspora). The
Turkish newspaper Hurriyet now reports that Ankara wants to "slug it
out" on the issue of the Armenian genocide and will pursue legal
means (whatever folly this may be) to deny the Armenian genocide in
the international courts. The ultra-nationalist groups are making
death threats at other "enemies of the state" like Nobel laureate
Orhan Pamuk ("if you claim to have endured a genocide in 1915, then
you don’t know what a genocide is. A real genocide will begin now"),
and suggested that they will blow up the building in which Agos is
housed.

This is doubly tragic. To claim that the Armenian genocide is the
problem is tantamount to blaming the victims, but it also embodies
the paranoia of nationalists who seek to find scapegoats outside
their country rather than looking inward to see the need for reform.
At the heart of the matter is Turkey’s urgent need to repeal Article
301, a law that enables the ultra-nationalists and others to bring
intellectuals and writers to trial; the law is also a powerful means
of fomenting a culture of repression and race-hatred. Lip-service is
not enough if Turkey is to show where it stands on minority rights
and intellectual freedom.

Turkey’s prospects of joining the European Union are contingent upon
a new age of intellectual freedom and democracy, and progressive
forces in Turkey need to be allowed to evolve in an atmosphere of
tolerance. It seems clear from Hrant Dink’s murder, and the numerous
trials brought forth by extremists, that ultra-nationalists in Turkey
are working hard to undermine the government and Turkey’s hope for
the EU. But the tens of thousands of citizens protesting Dink’s
murder embody an affirmation of Dink’s life’s work, and it is up to
prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government to embrace this
legacy. That means bringing the perpetrators and their aides to
justice properly, and showing the extremists that terrorism will not
be allowed to undermine Turkey’s movement toward democracy.

The truth of the past

As for the issue of the Armenian genocide, Ankara would be wise if it
came to understand the work of Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish
legal scholar and holocaust exile who invented the concept of
genocide, on how genocide is defined; then the government could find
a way to come to accept the historical record that has accrued over
the past fifty years.

In an open letter from the International Association of Genocide
Scholars to Erdogan in June 2006, the world’s major organisation of
genocide scholars reminded the Turkish premier that the scholarly
record on the Armenian genocide is unambiguous, and that Turkey’s
calls for an international body to examine the events that befell the
Armenians is a political ploy aimed at trying to undermine the
definitive historical record.

Raphael Lemkin was the first person to use the word genocide in
conjunction with what happened to the Armenians in 1915. The many
books on genocide in the English language – every one of which has a
segment on the Armenian genocide – might also be the place for Ankara
to begin educating itself. Blaming the victims with a variety of
stock clichés supported by a few denialist scholars will have no more
success than denial of the Nazi holocaust has beyond a small cadre of
fanatics.

The German Bundestag in June 2005, with its own country’s history
deeply in mind, urged Turkey to come to terms with the Armenian
genocide: "facing one’s own history fairly and squarely is necessary
and constitutes an important basis for reconciliation." Turkey can
only go forward to its longed-for future in the European Union by
allowing mechanisms for critical self-evaluation to become part of
its cultural life. That way, the Armenian genocide will no longer be
taboo, and Turkey’s best and brightest – like Hrant Dink – will not
become victims of repression and race-hatred.

Moreover, as much as anything, it is crucial for Agos, that small,
bilingual Armenian newspaper in Istanbul, to be kept alive by the
good forces in Turkish society; for Agos embodies Turkey’s hope for a
new age, and it is a living symbol of the need for openness and
dialogue between Armenians and Turks at this historic juncture.

—–
Peter Balakian is the Donald M and Constance H Rebar Professor of the
Humanities at Colgate University. His book The Burning Tigris: the
Armenian Genocide and America’s Response (Harper Collins, 2003) was
awarded the Raphael Lemkin Prize in 2005

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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress