HRANT DINK: THE 1,500,001ST VICTIM OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
The Globe – by Galip Ozben

Kurdish Aspect, CO
Feb 8 2007

Hrant was portrayed by the Turkish State as an enemy of the Turkish
nation thanks to the infamous clause 301, writes Globe analyst on
Turkish affairs, Galip Ozben.

Ozben says that unlike the Kurdish case in the country- where it
has been backed by its political and military struggle; the Armenian
cause could only rely on international pressure on Turkey.

Hrant Dink’s assassination outraged Turkey’s democratic opposition
and his funeral on 22 January turned into a mass protest with the
participation of more than a hundred thousand people putting Istanbul’s
major roads to a total halt.

The murder investigation, on the other hand, has been shaking the
foundations of the Turkish establishment, as a conspiracy relating
elements of the Turkish state to the murder unfolds day by day with
more shocking information. Under the circumstances, Premier Erdogan
overtly admitted the existence of a ‘deep state’ and his statement
heralded an intra-state struggle involving the purge of a number of
top security personnel from the ranks of bureaucracy. The murderous
semi-official gang however would not go without a bang: with the
ultra-nationalist MHP raising its voice in support of the murderers,
the whole affair seems to be turning into a counter-offensive by
Turkish nationalism against pro-democracy forces in the country.

The nationalist reaction mainly grows in its condemnation of the
slogans "We are all Hrant Dinks" and "We are all Armenians" expressed
in Kurdish and Armenian languages in addition to Turkish at Hrant’s
funeral march. This was the first in Turkey’s modern history, where
despite international guarantees, the Armenian minority have been
systematically degraded, silenced and persecuted. A consequence of
these policies has been the constant decrease of Turkey’s Armenian
population since the 1920s from 300,000 to around 60,000 in the year
2006. In fact, Hrant Dink’s assassination has been perceived by many as
a major link in this chain of constant state persecution. In Hrant’s
radical democrat personality, the Armenian community of Turkey had
found for the first time an internationally recognized representative,
who courageously broke a ninety-year-long silence about the Armenian
genocide and the constant denial, degradation and persecution that have
been in effect ever since. Hrant also led the Armenian community to
break their shell by correctly presenting the cause of his people as
a majorn concern of the broader democratic movement in Turkey. Such
dialogue had also served to break the nationalist prejudices of
the many within Turkey’s democratic opposition. For many Turks,
the Armenian cause, which had been presented in school textbooks,
‘scientific’ works, official statements and consequently popular
discourse as an exclusively foreign conspiracy, was gradually gaining
legitimacy.

Hrant’s March

In these circumstances, Hrant had become a natural target of hardline
nationalists. And if one wing of hardline nationalism is political,
the other is certainly judicial. The world is aware that authors
Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak have been tried for the breach of the
infamous clause 301 and acquitted. However, very few are aware that
Hrant Dink and a number of Kurdish lawyers have been the only ones who
were convicted by this clause to imprisonment. Obviously, belonging to
an ethnicity other than Turkish was in itself "degrading Turkishness."

Hrant was thus portrayed by the Turkish State as an enemy of the
Turkish nation thanks to the infamouse clause 301. He began to receive
death threats and on one occasion he was threatened by Istanbul’s
vice governor. The threats, official and unofficial alike, had the
same demand: "Stop talking or else you’ll be silenced". Like many
of us, Hrant already knew the scenario of what had happened in the
1990s to Vedat Aydin, Musa Anter and tens of Kurdish journalists
and intellectuals. After courageously stating the cause of their
people, their death penalties had to be executed for the sake
of the survival of the Turkish order based on the denial of the
Kurdish identity through political, economic and military coercion
in addition to systematic policies of demographic engineering and
cultural assimilation.

There certainly are limits to this resemblance: Firstly, the eliminated
Kurdish intelligentsia was speaking on behalf of more than one third of
Turkey’s population, in comparison to no more than 60,000 Armenians,
mainly concentrated in certain neighbourhoods of Istanbul. Secondly,
the Kurdish intelligentsia’s stance corresponded to the emergence
of a strong Kurdish political and military challenge around the
country in addition to the emergence of a de facto Kurdish entity
in northern Iraq. The Armenian diaspora in Europe and the US, and
the former Soviet republic of Armenia have no comparable effect over
Turkish politics. In these circumstances, the only force to favour
the Armenian cause has been the international pressure over Turkey,
which has tangibly intensified in parallel to the Turkish prospect
of membership to the European Union.

‘Obscuring the Facts’

Such pressure, however, vindicates further the nationalist fantasies
about fighting against foreign threats led by imaginary Armenian
‘masterplan’ of Turkey’s disintegration. They spark further official
and popular versions of nationalism, which have been united in a
persistant chorus of denial of the historical events ever since their
occurrence in the 19th and early 20th centuries that resulted in the
violent elimination of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire.

Following the French Parliament’s October 2006 bill that criminalizes
the denial of the Armenian genocide, the Turkish government issued a
call for historians to form an international commission to study the
event and offered to open its archives. This invitation, however,
was made by the head of the official Turkish History Institute,
Professor Yusuf Halacoglu, who had already stated that ‘there was
no genocide but some deaths from diseases and from the attacks on
the Armenian deportation convoys by Kurdish bandits.’ This statement
shows no progress in the Turkish official discourse, which had been
stated boldly in 1990 by Nuzhet Kandemir, the then Turkish Ambassador
to the US, that the Armenian deaths were ‘a result of a tragic civil
war initiated by Armenian nationalists’.

In addition to the categoric denial, and the intensive domestic
propaganda that it was in fact the Armenians who massacred the Turks,
Turkish ‘scientific’ officials backed by a fistful of internationally
degraded advisors, such as Professor Justin McCharty and Professor
Norman Stone, have been working hard on contingency plans, in case they
lost the battle of denial. In the Turkish media there has been growing
mention that the deportation had nothing to do with the republic of
Turkey, but it was an Ottoman Empire affair. There are others, relating
the whole event to the orders of the CUP (Committee of Union and
Progress) dictatorship, who were practically ruling the Empire at the
time. There has also been growing mention of the Kurdish involvement
in the Armenian genocide, which hopes to imply that it was not the
Turks or the Turkish state but the Kurds who were responsible for the
genocide. Some writers even hint at the German responsibility from the
genocide because the Turkish military was under German command at the
time. ‘Many of the Turkish efforts’, comments historian Taner Akcam,
‘aimed to obscure the facts, rather than dispute a false charge.’

Internationally, Turkish government, diplomats and academics have
been fighting hard to maintain their ‘thesis’ based on genocide
denial. Turkey is known to have offered funding for academic programmes
in universities such as Princeton and Georgetown. In 1998, UCLA’s
history department voted to reject a $1m offer to endow a programme
in Turkish and Ottoman studies because it was conditional on denying
the Armenian genocide. In August 2000, Turkey threatened Microsoft
with serious reprisals unless all mention of the Armenian genocide
was removed from an online encyclopaedia. According to Professor
Colin Tatz, an Australian academic, "Turkey has used a mix of academic
sophistication and diplomatic thuggery to put both memory and history
in reverse gear".

Most of the thuggery against Turkish citizens is performed
domestically, where any mention of the Armenian genocide is liable
to punishment by the Turkish state, to lynch attempts by nationalist
mobs, as has been observed in the recent trials of a number of writers
including Orhan Pamuk, and to political assassination as in Hrant
Dink’s case. School textbooks and the media present the Armenian
Genocide as a lie made up to degrade the Turkish nation.

According to these ‘sources’, Turks were subjected to big massacres
at the turn of the century until Ataturk emerged to save them from
their enemies. However, as the psychiatric research on the mechanism
of denial demonstrates, the actors engaged in denial are always
deeply aware of the fact of the matter, and this knowledge surfaces
from time to time as slips of tongue. This can be observed in the
threat issued by the founder of modern Turkish racism, Nihal Atsiz,
to Turkey’s Kurds in the 1930s: "I advise the Kurds to find a place to
go, for instance demand a country in Africa from the United Nations,
and ask the Armenians about the consequences if they don’t comply
with this advice."

Similar outbursts can be observed in the contemporary rightwing
discourse: "Let us be clear to the world’s public: in the past we
punished all the infamous half-casts, who, not content with profiting
from our lands, attacked our possessions, the lives and honour of the
Turks. We know that our forefathers were right, and if we were to face
such threats again, we would not hesitate to do what is necessary"
(Akit, 12 February 2001).

l

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress