HRANT DINK MURDER: 3 YEARS PASSED
PanARMENIAN.Net
19.01.2010 11:34 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Hrant Dink, the editor-in-chief of the
Armenian-Turkish Agos newspaper was assassinated three years ago today.
"Hrant Dink face the trial for using the term Genocide. Then he was
killed," said Professor Taner Akcam, a Turkish scholar, the author of
"Shameful Act" book.
"During a visit to Paris, in an interview with Reuters, Dink said,
"We must shout it was a genocide… And I will say it in the court." It
was on January 5, 2007," Akcam recollected.
"Diaspora seeks justice, Turkey seeks freedom and democracy. These
two aspirations should give a start to dialogue between the civil
societies. We should recognize the Genocide and reconcile," he said.
Hrant Dink (September 15, 1954 – January 19, 2007) was a
Turkish-Armenian journalist and columnist and editor-in-chief
of Agos bilingual newspaper. Dink was best known for advocating
Turkish-Armenian reconciliation and human and minority rights in
Turkey. Charged under the notorious article 301 of the Turkish
Criminal Code, Dink stood a trial for insulting Turkishness. After
numerous death threats, Hrant Dink was assassinated in Istanbul in
January 2007, by Ogun Samast, a 17-year old Turkish nationalist.
Taner Akcam (October 23,1953, Turkey) is a Turkish historian,
sociologist and publicist. He is one of the first Turkish academics
to acknowledge and discuss openly the Armenian Genocide by the Ottoman
Turkish government in 1915. Akcam studied at the Middle East Technical
University in Ankara. He was a faculty member of Administrative
Sciences, Department of Political Economy. He received his Bachelor
of Administrative Sciences in 1976. He stayed at the university as
a Master’s student and assistant in the same department for some time.
In 1976 he was arrested and sentenced to 10 years imprisonment as
the editor-in-chief of a political journal. He escaped prison one
year later. He has been living in the Federal Republic of Germany
since early 1978 as a political refugee. He continued his political
activities and in 1988 started working for the Hamburg Institute for
Social Research on the history of violence and torture in Turkey. He
earned his Doctorate Degree at The University of Hannover in 1995. The
topic was called Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide on
the Background of Military Tribunals in Istanbul between 1919 and 1922.
Currently he belongs to the scientific staff of the Hamburg Foundation
to promote science and culture, working at the Hamburg Institute
for Social Research. Today, Akcam is currently a Visiting Associate
Professor of History at the University of Minnesota.
The Armenian Genocide (1915-23) was the deliberate and systematic
destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during
and just after World War I. It was characterized by massacres, and
deportations involving forced marches under conditions designed to
lead to the death of the deportees, with the total number of deaths
reaching 1.5 million.
The date of the onset of the genocide is conventionally held to be
April 24, 1915, the day that Ottoman authorities arrested some 250
Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople.
Thereafter, the Ottoman military uprooted Armenians from their homes
and forced them to march for hundreds of miles, depriving them of
food and water, to the desert of what is now Syria. Massacres were
indiscriminate of age or gender, with rape and other sexual abuse
commonplace. The Armenian Genocide is the second most-studied case
of genocide after the Holocaust.
The Republic of Turkey, the successor state of the Ottoman Empire,
denies the word genocide is an accurate description of the events. In
recent years, it has faced repeated calls to accept the events as
genocide.
To date, twenty countries and 44 U.S. states have officially recognized
the events of the period as genocide, and most genocide scholars
and historians accept this view. The Armenian Genocide has been also
recognized by influential media including The New York Times, BBC,
The Washington Post and The Associated Press.
The majority of Armenian Diaspora communities were formed by the
Genocide survivors.