Hrant Dink: Requiem to a Lesser Turkey
He was one of those rare Armenians (now numbering around 60.000) whose family survived the Ottoman mass deportation of 1915. Although he was born in Malatya in 1954, he grew up in an Armenian orphanage in Istanbul, graduated from the Zoology Department of the Faculty of Sciences, Istanbul University.
However, he found his way into public recognition after he has founded the Turkish-Armenian daily, AGOS in 1996. As the chief editor and prime columnist he aimed at three things:
* to open up the introverted Armenian community to the wider public for he believed that direct contact and open channels of knowledge would help eradicate prejudices;
* to promote the idea that there are other ethnic-cultural groups in Turkey other than the Turks and Muslims and they can very well blend into the nation cleansed of stereotypes and biases;
* to defend Armenians against majority fanaticism in Turkey and to defend Turks/Turkey against fanaticism and hypocrisy of foreigners and Diaspora
Armenians.
He has succeeded in all three accounts. He was a Turk against Armenian extremism and he was an Armenian against Turkish extremism. He was Turkey in its complexity. But fanatics do not live on reason. They live and nourish on hatred. They need to hate in order to survive. It is this hatred of life and humanity that took the life of this honorable democrat and patriot.
Hrant, did not leave his country despite all pressures and injustices. He preferred to talk from within, among people who he identified with. Yet he was given a prison sentence of 6 months due to the notorious Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code that punishes "insulting Turkishness". All the other writers and intellectuals indicted in lieu of this article was acquitted. However his case was carried to the High Court of Appeals where his sentence was endorsed in spite of the pleas of the Chief Prosecutor who insisted that there was no crime committed.
There was yet another court case lingering on dating back to 2002 when he gave a lecture in Urfa and had said, " I am not a Turk but an Armenian of Turkey". He was accused f insulting and denigrating Turkishness!
His answer to such accusations was as follows: "In my opinion to denigrate the people one lives together on ethnic or religious grounds is pure racism, and there is no excuse for that.If I am not cleared of these indictments I will leave my country because anyone condemned for such a crime does not deserve the right to live with the people he derides". How noble isn't it? But believe or not this statement led to another court case on the grounds of "trying to influence an ongoing trial".
Despite his moderate stance, officials and ultra-nationalist were barely tolerating him although they tried to intimidate him frequently. However, he was so sincere in his humanitarian quest and his self-acquired mission of digging out the truth that had been buried deep in the public sub-conscience concerning the social history of his country, he carried on. While he wanted to create awareness among Turks about the feelings and suffering of Armenians following WW1, he tried to convince Diaspora Armenians to reframe the same events with concepts other than 'genocide'.
He wanted to this to humanize the issue and snatch it away from the ideological extremism and hateful political opportunism of the extremists on both sides. He was like a two-way lightening rod, over-charged by both sides.
The straw that broke the back of the camel was an editorial published in AGOS on the 6th of February 2004. According to the editorial, the famed adopted (or God) daughter of M.K. Ataturk, the founder and hero of Turkey, Ms. Sabiha Gokcen was originally an Armenian. Indeed Hrant had found and interviewed the relatives of late Ms. Gokcen now living in Armenia.
According to the information obtained she was taken from an Armenian orphanage and raised by Ataturk to be an accomplished military bomber pilot. She was a national icon and symbol of modern Turkish women besides being the daughter of Ataturk.
The news shook Turkey. The most potent protest among others came from the military. The press release that originated from the office of the Chief of General Staff was as follows: "What ever the reason of opening up such a symbol to public debate is a crime against national unity and social peace."
Awkward, but Hrant thought that the revelation would serve the opposite end: it would bring the Turks and the Armenians together a little closer. After all one of Turkey's national icons was originally an Armenian and has been honored to be the Goddaughter of the nation's revered hero. So these historical, cultural differences really do not matter if we can find the commonalities that unite us. Well, he was wrong. Icons and heroes could only be Turkish in Turkey.
I will conclude this humble requiem in words by the statement of the History Foundation after Hrant's assassination: "It is not the lifeless body of Hrant Dink that lies before AGOS, it is Turkey's hopes.Turkey will find it harder to solve its problems without Hrant Dink; it will be a lesser Turkey.(DE/EÜ)