IN PRAISE OF … ARAT DINK
The Guardian
Wednesday April 23 2008
Since it was introduced three years ago, article 301 of Turkey’s
penal code, which makes insulting Turkishness a criminal offence, has
been used to bring charges against illustrious names in literature,
academia and journalism: Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel prize-winning author;
Noam Chomsky; the novelist Elif Safak; Hrant Dink, the Armenian-Turkish
journalist who was assassinated by radical nationalists; and last
year Hrant’s son Arat. On Monday night Arat received the Guardian
Journalism Award from the campaigning group Index on Censorship. It
was not just to commemorate his father’s work, but for his own brave
refusal to buckle under the censorship laws that led to his father’s
death. Arat, executive director of Agos, an Armenian newspaper in
Istanbul, was brought to trial as a co-defendant, along with Serkis
Seropyan, holder of the weekly’s publishing licence. Their crime
was to have republished an interview that Hrant gave to Reuters
in which he referred to the 1915 massacre of the Armenians in the
Ottoman empire as genocide. Arat was convicted as charged and given a
one-year suspended sentence. The Agos staff continue to be threatened
by extreme nationalists but remain determined in the face of bigotry
and physical threat. Arat Dink believes both Turks and Armenians are
postponing a common historical reckoning and looks forward to the day
when both peoples can commemorate the events in 1915 as a common part
of their history, without threatening each other’s identity. Like
father, like son.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
