Two years after the murder…
It was two years ago today that Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was murdered in front of Agos, the newspaper he worked for as a columnist and editor in chief.
What has been done in these two years to find the real culprits behind the murder? And who has been charged with ignoring intelligence that indicated the murder was being planned well before it happened? In short: nothing, and nobody. Anyone in any way connected to the murder either has a loss of memory, is not responsible, or has gone up in smoke. Why? In my opinion everything can be simply explained by this photo: the killer, O.S., has just been brought in for questioning at an Istanbul police station, where he is applauded by policemen, who take a picture of him holding a Turkish flag and posing in front of one with a quote from Atatürk on it: “The soil of the fatherland is sacred, it can not be left to its faith”. Don’t think it’s just a coincidence; there are recordings of the scene which clearly show it was set up this way. The scene explains how deeply rooted this poisonous nationalism is and how deeply rooted the suspicion against Armenians is. There is no urge whatsoever to find out what really happened in the months before the murder, no urge to really hold responsible the ones who knew about the murder plans but didn’t do anything with the intelligence that they had received. For the Armenian community, it is yet another manifestation of the difficult position they occupy in Turkey, and of how this never ever seems to change.
May Hrant Dink rest in peace.
I just had an intense discussion with my Turkish friends, intellectuals and archaeologists working now in the US, when they posted Hrant Dink’s foto as their foto on their facebook profile. I wanted to talk about what it really means when someone says “I am Hrant Dink” which simply sounded odd and disrespectful almost, the first time I heard it while living and working in Turkey when this incident happened, and again when I saw it while back here in the US. We would never say here, for example, I am MLK, or I am Black. It is our differences and through celebrating it that we come to a peaceful dialogue. It seems even my intelligent, intellectual, academic Turkish friends didn’t understand me. BTW. When this happened, I was teaching at a university in Turkey and believe me it was impossible to reconcile what I had seen as a genuine and generous outpouring of emotions on the streets of Istanbul, and complete silence about the whole thing at the campus. I mean, nothing, zero. An incident that would, in many US campuses provoke vigorous discussions.