Balakian: Remembering Hrant Dink
lakian-remembering-hrant-dink/?ec3_listing=posts
B y Contributor – on August 8, 2009
The article below is based on a speech delivered by Prof. Peter
Balakian during a panel discussion on the legacy of Hrant Dink held at
MIT on Feb. 1, 2009.
George Santayana, the philosopher who taught at Harvard for decades,
wrote, `Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat
it.’ It seems like an axiomatic enough assertion, yet what happens to
those who don’t know history, who have been locked out of history, for
whom the past is a manipulated narrative constructed by the state? The
idea of repeating a past you don’t know is fraught with another kind
of tragedy.
It’s a kind of blind legacy that one might see in various cultures,
but one that we see in Turkish society that hasn’t been allowed to
know its history, in particular its dark histories of which the
Armenian Genocide of 1915 is one. Blind history will beget a blind and
violent present.
Hrant Dink’s assassination in broad daylight, carried out by Turkish
nationalists, is one manifestation of blind history. Dink was a man of
unusual courage, and dedication to the complex process of creating a
ground upon which Turks could come together with Armenians in order to
know the true history of 1915. Hrant forged complicated roads and
narrow alleyways to make this journey; he spoke openly in a country
where to speak openly is done at great risk and to speak openly as any
minority, an Armenian, a Kurd, is done at even greater risk.
Hrant was an Armenian citizen of Istanbul who was writing and speaking
about the Armenian Genocide openly in Turkey. He was inhabiting a
delicate civic space in Turkey’s complex society. In one of his final
essays, he told us he felt like a pigeon – at once vulnerable, yet
free, he so hoped. But he was gunned down, apparently by the Deep
State, by forces of repression and violence against free expression
and thought, having been demonized and made a pariah by Article 301 of
Turkey’s penal code.
***
Stephan Deadalus, in Joyce’s `Ulysseus,’ says: `History is a nightmare
from which I am trying to awake.’ It’s a phrase that hits any Armenian
in vulnerable places. It’s a notion that is embedded in the traumatic
life of the legacy of genocide. For Armenians, whether of the diaspora
or the Republic, that legacy remains poisoned by ongoing Turkish state
denial. The assassination of Hrant Dink is in some way emblematic of
that nightmare.
Hrant’s murder resonated with Armenians for many reasons, but not
least because it evoked the murder of thousands of intellectuals and
cultural leaders in 1915. There was a genocidal taint to his
assassination in broad daylight in downtown Istanbul. It reenacted our
history.
The killing of Armenian intellectuals and cultural leaders goes back
well into the 19th century and before, but it was this killing of
intellectuals on April 24 that marked the beginning of the genocidal
process in 1915.
In the end, thousands of Armenian cultural leaders and intellectuals
were killed by Turkey’s Ittihad government. In the end, more than
5,000 churches, monasteries, and schools were destroyed. In the end, a
civilization, not only its people but its many layers of history and
culture, which had evolved for 3,000 years, was gone. In the wake of
this, it is not surprising that Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish
legal scholar who invented the concept of genocide as a crime in
international law, relied quite heavily on the Armenian case in
developing the concept of genocide. It was Lemkin who first used the
term `genocide’ in relation to the Armenians on U.S. national TV, on
Feb. 13, 1949.
So affected by the Armenian Genocide was Lemkin, that he noted as the
UN Genocide Convention was being ratified: `…A bold plan was
formulated in my mind. This consisted [of] obtaining the ratification
by Turkey [of the proposed UN Convention on Genocide] among the first
twenty founding nations. This would be an atonement for genocide of
the Armenians.’
***
Hrant Dink’s death opened up positive forces in the democracy movement
in Turkey; in this sense he was a martyr for democracy. His death
forced an inquiry into intellectual freedom in Turkey and into the
Armenian past.
For me, Hrant’s legacy is emblematic of a new climate of
Armenian-Turkish intellectual dialogue and colleagueship and
friendship. Where once there was a black hole of abstraction about
Turkey for many of us, now there is a more visible and complex
world. In the past decade, Turkish intellectuals and others have made
great inroads that are now visible to us and have given us a deeper
understanding of Turkey as a place of many layers and nuances, a place
not simply defined by ultra-nationalism and Deep State forces.
Armenians need to embrace the new sense of complexity they have given
us – of our shared history, of our shared humanity, of the
understanding that there is no future in denying the past. Our Turkish
friends are vital to our sense of a future.
I feel it is also important for Turks and Armenians to de-ethnicize
the Armenian past. The idea that this is a debate between two cultures
is wrong and ahistorical. It is not `Armenians say’ and then `Turks
say.’ The genocide is a fact of modern history, and here, there is an
important place for the international scholarly community. Rather than
defending or rejecting a particular national narrative, scholars are
able to see the anatomy of such events in a comparative context across
a global expanse. They are able to show us that the Armenian Genocide
is part of a human history that involves many perpetrators and many
victims. Turkey is not alone in its crimes against humanity; most
countries have built themselves from violence done to other ethnic
groups and peoples.
It seems as if there has never been a more open moment for bonds to be
forged between Turks and Armenians on the issue that haunts both their
cultures. Hrant Dink was concerned that pressure on Turkey from the
outside world would backfire or endanger the lives of people inside
Turkey, and his perspective I respect deeply; he paid the highest
price for it. And yet, I think he was wrong here. While his fears were
a genuine response to the mechanisms of terror and repression inside
Turkey, the fact remains that the process of education about the
history of the Armenian Genocide is an inexorable force, and a litmus
test of intellectual freedom and democracy for Turkey. The process of
education can’t be stopped, or controlled, by any entity. It is part
of world knowledge. We cannot allow the accepted history of the
Armenian Genocide to be falsified by the blackmail and threats of the
Turkish state. And the Turkish state will have to come to accept that
the moral reality of the Armenian Genocide is not controversia
l anywhere else in the world but in Turkey. And, even there, the taboo
is crumbling.
In this new era, Armenians I hope will find ways of joining hands with
their new Turkish colleagues and friends to work for change – in
whatever ways – in creative ways and pragmatic ways. Not rigid,
ideological, or romantic. There are new openings in this landscape and
there are new pitfalls and fears. There is anger, frustration, and
paranoia among Armenians after decades of Turkish state violence,
denial, and continued racism. There are threats of violence against
progressive Turks from the new wave of Turkish ultra-nationalists; and
there are many people inside Turkey asking for broad, democratic
change, so that religious and ethnic minorities can achieve equality,
and intellectual freedom and free speech can be realized. Two years
ago, more than a hundred students at Bogazici University in Istanbul
staged a protest with the slogan `against the darkness,’ and they
chanted Hrant Dink’s name and their solidarity with Armenians. These
are the forces that Armenians want to join with and work with in
pursuit of an open and free society in Turkey.
Peter Balakian is Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the
Humanities at Colgate University and the author of many books
including The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s
Response, winner of the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize.