February 05, 2007 edition

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In standing up for truth, Hrant Dink no longer stands alone

The 100,000 mourners of the murdered Armenian-Turkish journalist showed how truth triumphs over censorship.

By Garin K. Hovannisian

LOS ANGELES

"We are all Hrant Dink." That was the appropriate, if not very
accurate, placard held aloft by tens of thousands of mourners last
month when Istanbul buried its famed – and defamed – slain hero.

Mr. Dink was an Armenian-Turkish editor of the weekly newspaper Agos,
but it was not as an editor that he won lasting honors. He will be
remembered by Armenians as the gentle usher on the bridge from
Istanbul’s Armenian community to its Turkish commonwealth – and
ambassador to both from the democratic dream. He should be remembered
by all as an intellectual warrior leading the fight against
censorship.

Even the Turkish government, which convicted Dink in 2005 of
"insulting Turkishness" for writing about the Armenian genocide of
1915, splashed its imperial tears – sourced in self-pity though they
were. From the government’s perspective, the confessed killer, 17-year
old Ogun Samast, had just issued an inconvenient press release on the
eve of Turkey’s accession talks with the European Union. "I shot the
infidel," Samast reportedly yelled after shooting Dink in the
back. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s strange lament on "the
attack on our peace and stability" bemoaned not the dead Armenian, but
the afternoon’s collateral casualty: the illusion of Turkey’s
democratic revival.

Official Turkey may condemn Samast as an ultranationalist vigilante,
but it can’t in good faith call him a traitor. If the mention of
genocide was an act of sedition under Article 301 of the country’s
penal code, then Samast had delivered the just punishment to its
violator. The killer had merely packed Turkey’s state spirit into a
bullet and sent it to its final destination.

Indeed, video footage shows Turkish security officers giving Samast a
hero’s treatment as they posed with him in front of a Turkish flag
shortly after his arrest.

Dink, on the other hand, was found guilty of treason and denied police
protection even as he reported death threats. For his commentaries on
the Armenian genocide, Dink was labeled an enemy to the Turkish
people. He took on that role with understanding but not acquiescence,
defying injustice with truth – and censorship with incorruptible free
speech.

Of a character in Dink’s position, Henrik Ibsen has written, "The
strongest man in the world is he who stands alone." Raised in an
Istanbul orphanage, almost trained for the lonely task of bringing
truth to power in Turkey, Dink often stood alone outside Turkey.

When I first saw Dink in November 2006 at a lecture in Los Angeles – a
great outpost of the Armenian diaspora – he was chatting his way
politely through a crowd of Armenians. The gray-haired and spectacled
journalist, unlike many writers, looked at home in the mass, treating
each nameless face with refreshed interest and respect. But what first
seemed a fitting capture of his timid mannerism, the surname "Dink"
was really a highly misleading onomatopoeia – both to his personality
and to his role in history. Underneath the gentle erudite exterior was
the chiseled soul of a warrior.

By large margin, Armenian communities had celebrated France’s bill
last year to criminalize denial of the Armenian genocide. But Dink, a
luminary of genocide recognition, explained to his compatriots why the
bill (still not law) was wrong, why freedom of speech and truth must
be championed together – the first upheld to guarantee the permanence
of the second.

Damned by Turkey for crying the truth and damned by some Armenians for
tying truth to justice, the man who stood alone was right. The 100,000
attendees at Dink’s funeral were the final proof that censorship could
not cover Turkey’s lie – and it would not protect Armenia’s truth.

But in life, against the myopia of his people abroad and the brute
fascism of his countrymen at home, Dink held out hope. The death of
Hrant Dink is the tragic spectacle of a clash of civilizations at the
confluence of civilizations.

On one end, the Turkish state insists on being angered at Dink’s
assassin, as its laws continue to punish speech and its textbooks
stifle truth. On the other, freethinking Turks joined their Armenian
countrymen at the funeral of their unlikely insurgent who, now passed,
no longer stands alone. A combustion is coming. It is Dink’s legacy
that he yelled fire in Istanbul – and charged the world with
extinguishing it.

* Garin K. Hovannisian is a writer living in Yerevan, Armenia; and Los
Angeles.

Copyright © 2007 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved.