Cleveland Plain Dealer, OH
Jan 30 2007

We’re whining, others are dying
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Connie Schultz
Plain Dealer Columnist

Now, there are two more photos that haunt.

The first shows Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink on the ground,
his black shoes jutting out from under a white sheet as he lay
face-down outside his newspaper’s Istanbul offices. One bullet to his
head, three to his neck, and the 52-year-old champion of free speech
was dead.

The second photo shows the women Dink left behind: his wife, Rakel,
and his two daughters, Baydar and Sera. They, too, are outside the
newspaper’s offices, dressed in black with white shawls draped across
their shoulders. Baydar and Sera are releasing white doves into the
sky. Their mother, Dink’s widow, still clutches the dove in her
hands, as if unwilling to let go.

Many journalists knew of Dink long before he was murdered on Jan. 19.
As editor of the weekly Armenian-language newspaper, Agos, he was
prosecuted last year under Turkish penal code 301 that criminalizes
insulting "Turkishness." Dink’s crime: demanding that Turkey
acknowledge its role in the Armenian genocide during the first World
War.

Dink was a free-speech purist, and so he also attacked a French bill
that would punish anyone who denied that Armenians were victims of
genocide. As Columbia Journalism Review’s Aia Malek noted last week,
Dink "was a champion of free speech above all. . . . He considered
the French and Turkish laws as two sides of the same coin, saying
that, Those who restrict freedom of expression in Turkey and those
who try to restrict it in France are of the same mentality.’"

The Committee to Protect Journalists reported that Dink is the 19th
Turkish journalist in 15 years to be killed because of his work. The
group offers many such sobering statistics: 93 journalists killed in
Iraq since 2003; 54 journalists killed in Colombia; 58 journalists
killed in Algeria. And on and on.

Neither I, nor any of my counterparts safely ensconced behind
American borders, can claim camaraderie with such heroic journalists.
What we ought to claim from their experience, however, is a
moratorium on our own self-pity oozing like a festering wound among
too many of us, myself included.

A lot of energy is wasted lately in my profession as we grouse about
how nasty readers can be to poor, besieged us. Oh, they can be mean.
They attack our integrity in letters to the editor, post lies about
us on blogs and send heinous messages through e-mail and anonymous
phone calls. Hurts our feelings, makes us angry. We denounce them in
speeches, write columns to defend against them and grant interviews
to whine about them. Public editors and ombudsmen write entire
columns beseeching readers to be more civil.

Yes, that would be nice. But it’s not a prerequisite for us to do our
job, and the worst we suffer when readers and their good manners part
company is the challenge to rise above the ugliness. So, some readers
accuse us of motives we do not possess. They insult our intelligence,
our families and even our taste in neckwear. So what? If this
happened to one of my kids, I’d tell them they just found another
opportunity to build character.

Journalist Prahlad Goala was murdered near his home in India after he
wrote a series linking local forestry officials to timber smuggling.
Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who opposed the Chechen
conflict, was murdered in her apartment building last October. TV
cameraman Abdul Qodus was killed in Afghanistan by a suicide bomber.

I think of them, and so many others like them, and I am embarrassed
by all our whining in the land of the free.

The photos from Dink’s murder will join a third newspaper photo I
clipped in June 2005. In it, hundreds of Lebanese journalists are
gathered at Martyrs’ Square in downtown Beirut to pay tribute to
columnist Samir Kassir of An Nahar newspaper. A relentless critic of
the Syrian government, he was killed when his car exploded.

With a single, defiant gesture, his fellow journalists registered
their protest against those who would dare to silence them.

Without saying a word, they stood tall and raised their pens to the
sky.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress