Hrant Dink murdered

[gmd]

Re: Hrant Dink murdered

I hope through Hrant Dink's death a path to peace and dialouge is opened.
Yet i still wish he had not been assasinated...

What do you mean???? An Armenian is martyred and now you are ready for peace? The first Republic of Armenia was brutaly attacked by Kemalist forces right after the Genocide. Is one more victim all Turkish society needed to want peace?

[Aurathen]

Re: Hrant Dink murdered

My dear friend GMD,
I am not really sure whether you knew Hrant Dink or what his intentions were. He was proud to be a Turk just as we. He denied with all his effort the so called "genocide" He was proud to be Armenian and he was proud to be a Turk. He was the first who resisted France's resolution about the so called "genocide". I dont think you know about the whole situation going on in Turkey. I have many Armenian friends here and we all happily live. THe acts of a few criminals can't be correlated to a whole nation. After reading what you write in these forum, I find it hard to understand the differences between you and the people from your race.

[ARK]

Re: Hrant Dink murdered

I hope through Hrant Dink's death a path to peace and dialouge is opened.
(

[ARK]

Re: Turkish-Armenian Journalist Hrant Dink Shot Dead In Istanbul

This is a joke, right?

Kinda.

[gmd]

Re: Hrant Dink murdered

My dear friend GMD,
I am not really sure whether you knew Hrant Dink or what his intentions were. He was proud to be a Turk just as we. He denied with all his effort the so called "genocide" He was proud to be Armenian and he was proud to be a Turk. He was the first who resisted France's resolution about the so called "genocide". I dont think you know about the whole situation going on in Turkey. I have many Armenian friends here and we all happily live. THe acts of a few criminals can't be correlated to a whole nation. After reading what you write in these forum, I find it hard to understand the differences between you and the people from your race.

i did not know him personally but from what i have read from him i did not get the impression that he was a genocide denier. he was a Turkish citizen that is different then being a turk. and the last sentence makes no sense to me.

p.s. i don't know you and you sure as heck are no friend of mine!

[RSNATION]

Re: Hrant Dink murdered

My dear friend GMD,
I am not really sure whether you knew Hrant Dink or what his intentions were. He was proud to be a Turk just as we. He denied with all his effort the so called "genocide" He was proud to be Armenian and he was proud to be a Turk. He was the first who resisted France's resolution about the so called "genocide". I dont think you know about the whole situation going on in Turkey. I have many Armenian friends here and we all happily live. THe acts of a few criminals can't be correlated to a whole nation. After reading what you write in these forum, I find it hard to understand the differences between you and the people from your race.

Hrant Dink did not deny the Armenian Genocide. he was a proponent of educating the Turkish people regarding the Genocide. He was wary of having resolutions passed in France, the US, etc.

[karoaper]

Re: Hrant Dink murdered

http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/article2175034.ece

Hrant Dink
Armenian champion in Turkey
Published: 22 January 2007

Hrant Dink, journalist: born Malatya, Turkey 15 September 1954; Editor, Agos 1996-2007; married 1972 Rakel Yagbasan (two sons, one daughter), died Istanbul 19 January 2007.

'For me, 2007 is likely to be a hard year," the Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink wrote earlier this month. "The trials will continue, new ones will be started. Who knows what other injustices I will be up against?" But with his computer filling up with e-mailed death threats he knew it was only a matter of time, even if he thought he would survive the year. He likened himself to a pigeon, constantly looking around for signs of danger.

Dink was gunned down on Friday outside the offices of Agos ("Ploughed Furrow"), the weekly Turkish Armenian paper he edited in central Istanbul. "I have killed the infidel," his murderer was heard to shout.

Hrant Dink was the most prominent and controversial ethnic Armenian figure in Turkey. With some 60,000 people, the Armenians are the largest surviving Christian minority in the country, despite a systematic and brutal attempt to exterminate or expel the entire population in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire in what Dink and all other Armenians rightly insist was genocide.

That successive Turkish governments have devoted massive resources to denying the genocide has poisoned relations between Turks and Armenians to this day. Yet Dink sought to overcome this legacy, arguing that the Turks of today are different from their Ottoman ancestors who conducted the killings. He also argued that Armenians around the world should no longer see relations with the Turks through the prism of the genocide. "Turkish-Armenian relations should be taken out of a 1915-metres-deep well," he argued.

But the Turkish authorities repeatedly tried to intimidate Dink into silence, closing the paper in 2001 and prosecuting him, but he was acquitted. Over the years he faced repeated trials, often under the notorious Article 301 of the Criminal Code which punishes "insulting Turkishness", on one occasion using deliberately twisted evidence.

Dink had a troubled childhood. One of a small number of surviving Armenian families in south-east Turkey in what had before the genocide been the heartland of Turkish Armenia, the Dink family disintegrated soon after Hrant's birth through his father's gambling. The young Dink was then cared for by his grandfather, the inspiration throughout his life. Even in primary school the boy objected to the mandatory daily recitation of the patriotic verse "I am a Turk, I am honest, I am hardworking", insisting that he was a Turkish citizen of Armenian origin.

When only seven, Dink and his brothers were sent to an Armenian orphanage in Istanbul, where he would meet his future wife. In his final year at an Armenian secondary school in the city he was expelled for his left-wing sympathies and finished his schooling at a Turkish school. In 1972 he legally changed his first name to Firak, which did not give away his ethnic Armenian origin in a highly nationalist country that refuses to embrace its many minorities.

Dink took a degree in zoology at Istanbul University, but failed to complete further studies in philosophy. He was occasionally jailed for his leftist activities. He and his wife then ran an Armenian youth camp, but after this he was subjugated to Education Ministry control he moved into journalism. For a decade he ran a bookshop with his brothers, steering clear of political activity.

In 1996 he founded Agos, which was published in Turkish and Armenian and came to have an influence beyond its circulation of 6,000. Run collegially, it had its offices in a converted flat that were always crowded and humming with debate. Dink paid particular attention to training young ethnic Armenian journalists, many of whom joined the mainstream Turkish media.

Not all in the Armenian community admired Dink's role as its unelected spokesperson. He was not devout and the Armenian patriarch often disagreed with his approach, preferring a quieter line.

But Dink was above all a figure in Turkish society as a whole, speaking up for democracy, human rights, free speech and the rights of oppressed groups, including women, Kurds and other ethnic minorities. A fluent Turkish-speaker (some say he was more eloquent in Turkish than Armenian), Dink was a popular interviewee, able to present difficult views directly and imaginatively without alienating his audience.

This made his conviction in October 2005 of "insulting Turkishness" and suspended six-month sentence particularly hard to bear. "When I first heard the verdict I found myself under the bitter pressure of my hope that I kept during all the months of the trial. I was stupefied," Dink recalled. "In my view, to humiliate people we live together with on the basis of ethnic or religious difference is called racism and this is something unforgivable."

Branding the verdict "a bad joke", he vowed to fight to clear his name. He cried as he spoke of it. "My only weapon is my sincerity."

Felix Corley

[Aurathen]

Re: Hrant Dink murdered

Let me explain what I meant by my last sentence:
What i was trying to express was that my relations with the armenian people living here are very good, in most cases better than my relations with most of the Turks I know. We call eachother brothers. Yet I sense that most of the Armenians here hate us and don't want to talk about our common problems. I never deny something that is true. So after the historians complete their researches about this matter and conclude that there has been a genocie to Armenians starting from 24 April 1915, then I will accept it with great grief and regret and be ashamed of my acestors. But to destroy the freedom of expression and thought as French example is something that is beyond the line. I hope you understand me thanx.

[RSNATION]

Re: Hrant Dink murdered

HRANT IS KILLED, LET ALL LIARS SHUT-UP

by Ay?e Günaysu

Everyone who says that this was an attack on Turkey, everyone who talks about the sinister games played on Turkey, everyone who talks about the timing of this attack coinciding with foreign parliaments' making decisions on the "alleged" genocide, and thus trying to disguise the fact that Hrant Dink was being tried because he said "genocide" and was receiving threats because of this, and everyone who is protecting the real murderer, that is the ones who are allowing Union and Progress' covert operator, lyncher, rabid spirit to still live on, has a share of responsibility.

The Justice Minister Hikmet Sami Turk, who yelled from the podiums of the congress that the ones who were organizing the Armenian conference were stabbing the Turkish people in the back, President Ahmet Necdet Sezer who vetoed the law proposal dealing with minority foundations on the grounds that it would strengthen minorities, the district attorneys who turn a blind eye on thousands of cases of torture, convictions without trial, unknown culprits taken into custody and lost, but processed and tried the alleged "notices of guilt" that are devoid of the most elementary notions of universal law, the newspaper Hurriyet that in the days Hrant Dink declared he was going to look for justice in the European Human Rights Courts, made front page news with the head of the Greek foundations who said he wouldn't go to European Human Rights Courts as he trusted the Turkish Justice system, called him a true citizen, and therefore whomever tried to look for justice in the European H.R. Courts was shown as a target, branded as "so-called/pseudo" citizen, and, before Hrant's blood was even dry, the Turkish Television stations that for hours debated a litany of provocation by relating it to the law proposal pending in the United States Congress, are all a part of this murder, they have a responsibility.

Everybody who says that this was an attack on Turkey is lying. Because this attack was made possible by Turkey herself therefore, Turkey is responsible. This attack was made possible by the government that has implemented article 301, as protection against only the denigration of Turkishness, not of all identities, thus providing a legal basis for aggression, and it was made possible by an entire population of Turkey who didn't reject this article.

Everybody who, instead of feeling shame faced with the murder of Hrant Dink, instead of saying "we are all guilty", worried about Turkey's dignity, from the officials to the opinion leaders, they are all lying, they are trying to disguise their guilt. Let all the liars shut up.

And you shut up too please, democratic journalists like Altan Oymen. If you are not refusing to answer questions that link the murder of Hrant to the genocide recognition proposal in the US Congress, and do not see a problem replying to them, if you are not refusing to be disrespectful to the pain of the Armenian people by making such connections, if you are not rejecting to thus support the ones who are trying to fool people with conspiracy theories by foreign influences aimed at the Turkish people, just to exonerate our own murderers, shut up, all of you shut up.

LET ALL LIARS SHUT UP. HRANT'S WOUNDS ARE STILL BLEEDING

[Aurathen]

Re: Hrant Dink murdered

RSNation, you are right. Our government lead the path to Hrant Dink's murder. They showed him as a traitor to his country. And some brainless Turkish nationalists were fed with this nonsense. The result was the death of this nice good man. BUt you know I am a Turk and I wish you understand how much Pain Hrant's death gave me and how sorry I am. We never understood Hrant. And let this be our punishment.