ARAT DINK RECEIVES GUARDIAN JOURNALISM AWARD
PanARMENIAN.Net
02.05.2008 14:17 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Arat Dink, the son of slain Hrant Dink, 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.
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.
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 license. 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 continues 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,
GIBRAHAYER e-magazine reports.