Today’s Zaman, Turkey
Jan 19 2008
Hrant Dink, a man who believed that Turkey would change from within
Thousands of people hold his pictures and placards that read: "We are
all Hrant Dink" and "We are all Armenians" as they march behind the
coffin of slain journalist Hrant Dink during a funeral ceremony in
Ýstanbul, on Jan. 23, 2007.
A year ago this afternoon, television-viewers who tuned into 24-hour
news channels saw a man in a brown suit lying facedown on the
pavement of an Istanbul boulevard.
He lay all alone and from underneath the white plastic sheet over his
torso there seeped a small pool of blood.
A small percentage of Turks then knew the identity of the man who had
been shot outside his office’s building. But the next day the whole
country would know the name of Hrant Dink, 52, the editor of Agos
weekly and champion of the Armenian cause. Newspapers splashed his
assassination across their front pages, with banner headlines such as
`The biggest treachery’ (Sabah) and `Hrant Dink is Turkey’
(Milliyet).
Like a low-magnitude earthquake that cracks a house rather than
flattens it, the murder of Dink frightened all thinking Turks,
exposing the fault lines of their society. The aftershocks went
beyond Turkey. As the European Union and US Congress condemned the
assassination, critics of Turkey said it showed the country could not
tolerate free speech. Friends of Turkey hung their heads in shame.
The killing turned out to be the start of two debates that would
endure through 2007. The first was between liberal and conservative
Turks over freedom of expression and, in particular, the Armenian
question. The second was between Turkish Armenians and US Armenians
over how to pursue the tragedy of 1915-22.
Dink’s body lay on the gray paving stones for an unconscionably long
time. Television channels interspersed the live scene on the street
with archive footage of Dink, showing his sensitive eyes and ruggedly
handsome face. Viewers, such as this correspondent who watched from
the Associated Press newsroom in Cairo, were appalled that the police
continued to keep him lying in the cold for hours because of the
slow-moving forensic scientists.
A burly man burst through the police line like a rugby player going
for a try, yelling `Abi!’ (older brother). This was Dink’s brother,
Yervant, who was allowed to see what death had wrought before being
ushered back to the edge of the cordon, where he squatted, crying his
eyes out.
Eventually Dink’s corpse was removed by ambulance. But people did not
go back to their daily lives. Some 5,000 Turks came together in
Taksim Square, the end of the boulevard where he was shot. They did
not know who had killed Dink, but they knew the mentality behind the
many death threats he had received.
Fed up with the bigotry that masquerades as patriotism, they took
felt-tip pens and sheets of white cardboard and scrawled two slogans
that were to become icons of Dink’s death. `We are all Hrants,’ `We
are all Armenians,’ they wrote in Turkish and Armenian.
>From Malatya to Ýstanbul
It was a tribute to a man born in the provincial city of Malatya,
raised in an Armenian orphanage and who saw himself as such a mixture
of Turk and Armenian that he was hurt when the military refused to
give him a commission even though he had scored 100 percent on his
national service examination.
In 1996 Dink had founded Agos, the only Armenian newspaper that
pulled no punches in a society where Armenians have long felt they
are second-class citizens. The paper publishes its articles in
Turkish as well as Armenian because Dink wanted Agos to reach out to
Turks.
Agos scored a scoop in 2004 when it revealed that Sabiha Gökçen,
Atatürk’s adopted daughter, was Armenian. Hrant had found her
relatives in Armenia and published the story hoping it would serve to
bring Turks and Armenians closer together. After all, the late Gökçen
had been a role model for Turkish women, the first female pilot.
But many Turks found the story a nasty surprise. The head of the
armed forces called it `a crime against national unity.’
However Dink persevered in championing equal rights for Armenians and
that what had happened to his community in 1915-22 was not a case of
the unfortunate excesses of war, as the officials would have it. To
call those events an atrocity or genocide had been a Turkish taboo
for decades, but Dink managed to argue that position in such a
sensitive way that he won the respect of those who flatly disagreed
with him.
When the state finally granted him a passport — after many refusals
— he told audiences in Europe and America that today’s Turks should
not be punished for the sins of 90 years ago. And he followed this
through to the point of criticizing laws in countries such as France
and Switzerland that penalize people who deny that Armenians suffered
genocide.
`A bullet has been shot at free thought and our democratic way of
life,’ said Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoðan hours after the
murder. Erdoðan called Armenian Patriarch Mesrob II and assured him
that the killer would be caught.
Turkey has a long record of unsolved murders of prominent journalists
and freethinkers, but this time the police performed.
They found a picture of the killer running with a pistol on a shop’s
security camera. It was broadcast on television and seen by his
father, who called the authorities. Within 32 hours of the murder,
the killer was arrested.
He was 17, an unemployed high school dropout from the Black Sea city
of Trabzon. His uncle told TGRT television he had been living
`aimlessly’ and must have been manipulated by his older associates.
Foremost among his associates, and subsequently arrested, was an
ultra-nationalist who had previously been jailed for bombing a
McDonald’s restaurant.
The matter did not stop there. Everybody knew this was not just one
small group of extremists. As Radikal columnist Ýsmet Berkan put it:
`Those who created nationalist sentiment in Turkey have fed such a
monster that there are many youngsters on the streets who do not find
the … state nationalist enough and are ready to take the law into
their own hands.’
Thousands of people thought likewise and flocked to Dink’s funeral.
Traffic officers closed off the area in front of Agos’s office for
the cortege to start, but more and more mourners came and the
officers scrambled to close the whole boulevard and redirect traffic.
Eventually some 100,000 people were walking behind Dink’s hearse, a
river of humanity flowing across the city.
Many of the mourners had never read Agos and they did not accept that
1915-22 was genocide, but they marched to affirm that Turkey must not
be a country that kills people for their opinions.
To the placards carried by the mourners, reading `We are all Hrant
Dinks’ and `We are all Armenians,’ a new one was added: `The killer
is 301′ — a reference to Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code
(TCK), which outlaws `insulting Turkishness.’ Dink had received a
six-month suspended sentence for violating 301 in an editorial and at
the time of his death he was facing another prosecution under the
same law.
`It is unacceptable to judge and imprison someone because of his
thoughts, let alone to kill him,’ Patriarch Mesrob said during the
funeral mass. In the Holy Mother of God Church sat the deputy prime
minister, the interior minister and two generals. In death Dink had
won the respect of those who harassed him in life.
The mourning of Dink continued after the funeral and evolved into
something else. At media parties it became chic to talk glowingly of
Hrant and say how much one missed him. But some journalists had the
candor to puncture this hypocrisy by asking where all these `friends’
were when Dink was on trial under 301.
Ultra-nationalists
Then the uglier side of Turkey reared its head. The weekend after the
funeral, fans at a football stadium hoisted placards reading: `We are
all Turks.’ Vicious comments about Dink and his death began appearing
on nationalistic Web sites. It emerged that the teenager who shot
Dink had posed with two officers in front of a Turkish flag at the
Samsun police station where he was initially detained. Worse still, a
video appeared on YouTube that showed Dink’s body on the pavement as
a man sang a song which contained the line: `If someone betrays his
country, he will be taken care of immediately.’
Clearly there are two Turkeys: one is cosmopolitan and liberal, the
other is ethnically chauvinist and conservative. Fortunately, the
first Turkey dominates the media. Newspapers denounced the YouTube
song and the police who posed with the killer, forcing prosecutors to
investigate both.
The division between these Turkeys retarded moves to reform Article
301. After Dink’s death, Erdoðan invited NGOs to suggest amendments
to the law but, aware of popular sentiments, he took no action until
after the July elections.
The European Union warned Turkey that it could never join the club
with 301. And then Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül, now president,
responded by repeatedly promising the law would be revised. The
amendment was presented to the Cabinet earlier this month but
contrary to forecasts, it was not quickly approved and sent to
Parliament. The ruling Justice and Development Party is wrangling
over it, with Deputy Prime Minister Cemil Çicek seen as a leading
advocate of the view that the original wording should be preserved as
much as possible.
In America, Dink was deeply mourned among the country’s estimated 1
million Armenians. But during his life many American Armenians
opposed him.
In three articles in Agos in 2004, Dink had argued that the time had
come for Armenians to step back from insisting that Turkey recognize
the `genocide’ of 1915-22, as this had become an unhealthy fixation.
(In one article, he wrote that the craving for empathy from Turks,
which he termed the `Turk,’ had become like a tumor in the Armenian
soul. `It is obvious that the `Turk’ is both the poison and the
antidote of Armenian identity,’ he said. Unfortunately, Internet cafe
browsers misread these lines. The teenage killer reportedly told his
interrogators that he shot Dink because he had said Turkish blood was
poisonous.)
The Armenian world should not `enchain itself to the sense of
fairness of others,’ Dink wrote. `The time has come to leave
everybody alone with their conscience.’ Armenians should re-channel
their energies into improving the state of Armenia.
These ideas were radical for the mainstream of the Armenian diaspora,
for whom the campaign for genocide recognition has become a
`principle of community organization and power legitimation,” said
Gerard Libaridian, professor of modern Armenian history at Michigan
University.
Dink had said other things that were not appreciated by the
mainstream, recalled Razmik Panossian, a writer on Armenian affairs
who lives in Montreal.
`He portrayed an image of Armenians in Turkey which did not fit into
the traditional thinking of the diaspora of how awful things are,’
Panossian recalled. `Hrant Dink was saying, `Yes, things aren’t
perfect, there are lots of problems, but Turkey is democratizing …
and we do have a community life.”
The Armenian lobby in the US also objected to Dink’s advocacy of
Turkey’s bid to join the EU. `A lot of Armenians in the diaspora
don’t agree with this … They just can’t see Turkey being
progressive enough to be part of this club,’ Panossian said.
Libaridian recalled that the criticism of Dink went as far as his
being `branded as someone who was working for the Turkish state.’
`But once he was assassinated by a Turk, he became a hero,’
Libaridian said.
Bill in the Congress
Within hours of the assassination, a principal group in the lobby
called on the White House not to oppose the coming bill in the
Congress on 1915-22. `In light of this terrible tragedy, it is all
the more inappropriate for the administration to oppose congressional
reaffirmation of the Armenian Genocide,’ said Hirair Hovnanian,
chairman of the board of the Armenian Assembly of America.
Eleven days later the bill itself, House Resolution 106, was
introduced in the Congress. It did not require the president to take
any steps against Turkey, but it said 1915-22 did constitute genocide
— and that would have cast a long shadow over relations with Turkey.
President George W. Bush and Turkey mobilized against the bill.
Turkey sent envoys to lobby Washington and the head of its armed
forces warned that relations with the United States would never be
the same. Eight former secretaries of state urged the Congress to
drop the bill as potentially damaging to US military interests in
Iraq and Afghanistan and harmful to reconciliation efforts between
Turkey and Armenia.
Eventually congressional support for the bill collapsed, the decisive
argument being the impact of Turkish retaliation on the military
campaign in Iraq.
Surprisingly little heed was paid to the views of Turkish Armenians,
who also opposed the bill.
Patriarch Mesrob spoke against 106, but members of the lobby
dismissed his remarks as being made under the `intimidation’ of the
Turkish government.
The patriarch did himself no favors in September when he issued a
mealy-mouthed statement about 1915-22. Asked by Today’s Zaman whether
there had been genocide, he replied: `We had big problems in the
past. I find in particular the approach of … collective punishment of
Armenians quite wrong. It wasn’t the whole Armenian community who
took up arms against the government, but I believe the Turkish
Republic should not be accused of what happened then.’
An American Armenian, who knew Turkey and spoke the language,
published an open letter to Mesrob rebuking him for his pusillanimity
in the Today’s Zaman interview. Writing on the eve of Mesrob’s visit
to America, Rachel Goshgarian told the patriarch to speak with a
`strong voice. Let it not be a voice mitigated by fear.’
The same criticism could not be leveled at Agos, which regularly
refers to the `systematic massacres’ of 1915-22. And Agos’s new
editor, Dink’s replacement, also opposed bill 106.
Etyen Mahçupyan said the paper wanted Turks to re-appraise 1915-22 on
`moral grounds alone.’ If the bill had been passed, then the issue
would have become part of Washington-Ankara negotiations. And if
Turkey were later to shift its position on 1915-22, `then Turks will
view it not as a sincere re-evaluation, but as part of the bargaining
between Washington and Ankara.’
Today’s Zaman tried to get the lobby’s response to this argument.
Both the Armenian Assembly of America and the Armenian National
Committee of America did not reply to repeated requests emailed to
their press officers. A prominent US Armenian, Harut Sassounian,
publisher of The California Courier, refused to respond, saying: `I
have no guarantees that anything I say to you will be properly
reported, or allowed to be reported, by your editors who have to be
concerned about Article 301 to avoid being put in jail.’ But
Libaridian and Panossian agreed to give what they perceived to be the
lobby’s response to objections from Istanbul. They both said that the
lobby views Turkish Armenians as speaking under intimidation.
`Their voice does not count because they are seen as a hostage
community that is not free to say what it feels,’ said Libaridian
who, like Panossian, added this was not his view. Libaridian said the
lobby’s argument against Mahçupyan’s objection would be that the
`internationalization of the Armenian question is a valid strategy.’
19.01.2008
JASPER MORTIMER ANKARA
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress