The Assassination of Hrant Dink

[hrad]

And thank you for your lesson in dhimmitude.

A. No, I do not.

B. As I explained before, not if Turkey is accepted with it's current foreign policy intact, etc.

As for my opinion regarding relations with Turks, I look forward to a day with magnamity amongst our peoples but not necessarily friendship. Armenians believed in frienship once, in 1908 to be exact, and paid the heaviest price for their trust.

Good luck on your journey.

Thanks.
Your last paragraph says it all for me ! YOU do not desire friendship with any Turk who has doubts about the Genocde. To you it seems it is a BLACK and WHITE issue.Let us forget about getting together and sorting this out. To you it seems dialogue with Turkey is only possible if she comes round the table having accepted the Genocide. I can't believe you would refuse to shake the hand of a Turk. To me that, in itself says everything.

That is NOT what Hrant Dink was advocating.

[Joseph]

Thanks.
Your last paragraph says it all for me ! YOU do not desire friendship with any Turk who has doubts about the Genocde. To you it seems it is a BLACK and WHITE issue.Let us forget about getting together and sorting this out. To you it seems dialogue with Turkey is only possible if she comes round the table having accepted the Genocide. I can't believe you would refuse to shake the hand of a Turk. To me that, in itself says everything.

That is NOT what Hrant Dink was advocating.

You're welcome.

[Helen]

Turkish Columnists about Dink's Murder

http://www.lraper.org/main.aspx?Action=ChangeLanguage&Language=ENG

[Hovik]

Europeans exterminated at least more than a hundred million people all across this planet (over last several centuries), and there is yet no other culture that could match such level of brutality.

Scythian, I think we see eye-to-eye on this too. I will admit I am not informed enough to make a judgement on a hundred million figure, but there is no doubt (in my mind) that Europe has yet to recognize it's own crimes against humanity. That said, I still don't think what happened under the bloody sultan, 1915 and beyond was a spontaenious thing, taught by the Europeans. Anyone whose taken an unbiased Ottoman History course knows that Ottomans were warring people. Wether with Persians, Arabs or Europeans everywhere they went they beat, bound, gagged, kidnapped, raped and murdered everything in sight. This was part of Ottoman military culture, it is well documented, and nothing you should take personal shame in - it's just a fact of history. There was a culture of this barbarism way before the Armenian "problem" really reached a boiling point, in fact all the way back through their invasions from Central Asia to the Caucusus. So the idea that it came from Western Europe doesn't seem like it really holds water.

reversed version of gavur is a notion that also existed in christian Europe in extreme levels (For example, the name Tartar stems from a zombie-like creature coming from hell), and whilst the christians and jews had rights in the Ottoman Empire, there was no such thing in Europe for the jews or muslims.

Again, the name association could be from the barbaric history of the military. Go to the middle east today and ask the elders what they know about the period of Turkish occupation... I dare you

Furthermore, isn't 'Tartar' a self-given name?

And lastly, we agree completely that Jews and Muslims in Europe didn't have it too good. However, I haven't heard of European laws that barred Jews and Muslims from:

Stopping a European from raping/maiming/killing the Muslim/Jews wife or daughter or son while he is living with him free of charge in the winter months. (kishlak - winter quartering obligation)

Riding a horse past a European who was walking. (Armenians were made to dismount, walk the horse past the muslim, then re-mount)

Testifying in court against a European.

Trying to stop multiple regional bandits from taxing them multiple times.

I could go on and on. Bottom line, Turkish racism and hatred toward Armenians was legalized - how might that influence the drive to Genocide?

Economic disasters were initiated by the exploitations of the new world (known as the conquest of paradise) which casued ongoing inflation and corruption (illegal smuggling of raw materials from the Ottoman Empire to Europe). Respectfully, the collapse of the Ottoman coin system was very related to the increased supply levels of precious metals like silver and gold (extracted from European colonies). That is why, the Ottoman budgets (income) couldnt cope with inflation of prices, particularly in 17th and 18th Centuries, and in the 19th Century, the industrial revolution did really blow the empire, and that is why, Turkey even paid Ottoman debts until 1950s.

True True True, and all of this contributed to the bad situation in the country and the scapegoating of the minorities, especially Armenians.

I think, as a Karachay-Balkar whose forefathers were killed in masses and whose people were forced to emigrate to Turkey in masses (back in 1860s), I agree with you. However, the problem is, none of those western/european countries, (which were in my opinion, responsible for the most brutal crimes against humanity) did not recognize these crimes or did not demonstrate any of the humanitarian notions that you stipulated so far (in relation to our ordeal, or in relation to the ordeal of others), and this is really disappointing.

I agree that if this is the case, you should fight for recognition of it. However, let me tell you from personal experience.

Even if you have mounds of evidence, foreign and domestic eyewitness testimony (unbiased), the eyewitness testimony of the victims themselves, tons of physical evidence including photo and video, butchered bodies and mass graves, the admittance of all your perpetrator's allies that they committed genocide against you, and most of the worlds credible historians on your side - you can still pull your hair out for a century trying to get the reality of what happened to you, recognized by the inheriting nation of the perpetrators. I don't wish the madness we Armenians experience with attempts at Turkish recognition on anyone else.

[hrad]

You're welcome.

“I have never called anyone a “traitor” in my whole life. I have not even called Ali Kemal a “traitor.” I am using this word for the first time for [Dink's] murderer. Yes, who ever did this, is a true traitor [to Turkey]. He is an enemy of Turkey, the Turkish Republic and all her citizens... Trust me, this murder will make two groups of people very happy – the racist Turks and the racist Armenians. All others should go into a deep mourning starting today.”
-- Ertugrul Ozkok, Hurriyet

Hand on heart I can say I do not belong to either group.

[Joseph]

Sorry but armenians never were friends to Turks. The reason Ottomans deported the armenians on 1915 (at war abviously) was very clear. Armenians just decided to not to be FRIENDS suddenly and decided to be allies with our enemies and shoot us from our back. A lot of people were killed that days during the war and during the deportion. And they who killed werent armenians only. Turks and many other were killed.

Cause we are as sorry as you that your ancesstors were killed in those days but we also sorry for our ancesstors too who had killed just like yours.
So with love or with hate or with whatever, none of YOUR ways can make Turkish admit this genocide claims.

Just LET the historians do their job. This is the only WAY.

I guess your right in a way. We are not your friends. Friends are equals and respect one another. Armenians where under a system of dhimmitude and treated as foreigners in their own lands and subsequently murdered and cast out by their tormenters because a handfull had the audacity to actually defend themselves from attacks. How dare those insolent infidels not be willingly murdered! Shameless Armenians, protecting their families and homes (well, you can rest assured that only very few did, most believed they would not die and willingly submitted).

So yes, murdering almost defenseless minority doesn't seem very friendly. The Armenians who believed in the Constitutional changes in 1908 were very naïve. Their compatriots were soon slaughtered in Adana in 1909.

It is obvious why the Turks murdered the Christian population. WWI merely gave the Turks the cover to finally solve the "Armenian Question" under the guise of war and try to realize the syphilitic dream of Pan-Turanism. The problem is (for you at least) some of us survived!

They were killed because they were relatively properous compared to the Muslim population (even in the most backward parts of Anatolia), were of the Christian faith, were undergoing a cultural renaissance at the time, and controled a disproportionate of trade and commerce in the Ottoman Empire. Also being Christian, Armenians and their other co-religionists in the O.E. were the perfect scapegoats for the Turks, Circasssians, etc who were expelled from the Balkans and the Caucasus respectively. Sure, why not take out your anger on the Armenians?

And yes, lots of other people were killed: the Assyrians, Yezidis, Chaldeans, Nestorians, Arabs, Dersim Kurds and Maronites...by the Turks, their "benevolent masters".

So, please don't say you are sorry. In the very least don't lie about that. It makes you look stupid and insults our intelligence; the crocodile tears of the ulusalci.

And I guess it really doesn't what you or anyone else believes in Turkey. Everyday more and more people are learning the truth and they are on our side.

[Joseph]

Financial Time article

Financial Times
*
Death in Istanbul
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Published: January 25 2007 02:00 | Last updated: January 25 2007 02:00
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The assassination last Friday of Hrant Dink, the editor of a bilingual Armenian-Turkish newspaper, called forth a howl of outrage on the streets of Istanbul, as 100,000 mourners at his funeral cried "we are all Armenians" or "we are all Hrant Dink". A teenager who admits to the crime and has ties to Turkey's violent ultranationalist fringe has been caught. What Turkey now needs, especially if it is to remain a credible candidate for membership of the European Union, is a ruthless examination of the poisonous backdrop to this killing. Mr Dink's murderer did not emerge from nowhere.
The impasse in Turkey's EU accession talks has whipped up xenophobia. Brussels says that despite major reforms to entrench human, democratic and minority rights, Ankara has not done enough to protect freedom of expression or subordinate the army to civilian control. Turkey's neo-Islamist government says the Europeans are acting in bad faith, raising the bar to entry ever higher to pander to anti-Muslim prejudice, particularly in France, Germany and Austria.
Both are right. But there are, nevertheless, rightly unalterable membership criteria. No country with a penal code that makes it a crime to "denigrate Turkishness" (Article 301) will meet them. European membership is also inconceivable while Turkey refuses to face up to the mass murders of Armenians as the Ottoman empire crumbled during the first world war.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, has called for reputable historians to establish the truth, confident this would place the killings within a conflict in which millions of Turks also perished as western powers dismembered Ottoman territory.
Yet for generations there has been nothing but silence or denial. Rare conferences to discuss these terrible events have been cancelled after pressure from the army-dominated nationalist establishment. Turkey closed its borders with Armenia in 1993.
Critically, nationalist cabals have used Article 301 to silence writers and intellectuals who have dared to raise the Armenian tragedy and ask whether it was centrally directed genocide. Mr Dink himself was given a suspended jail sentence and Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel prize-winning novelist was also dragged to court (where yesterday he was publicly threatened by a well-known extremist who prosecutors say provided the gun that killed Mr Dink).
Mr Erdogan has reacted forcibly to the murder and made gestures of reconciliation towards the Armenians. It is unrealistic to expect more ahead of fiercely contested elections this year.
But Turkey must demonstrate its commitment to free speech by repealing Article 301, not only a mechanism for exacerbating ultranationalism but evidently an incitement to murder too. Once the elections are over, Turks and Armenians need to move towards a public reckoning with history.

[Joseph]

Murder most foul

The recent rise of racism in Turkey claimed its most prominent victim last week, with the murder of a well-known Turkish-Armenian journalist.

Gareth Evans reports from Istanbul


Last Friday Hrant Dink, the 52 year-old editor of the bilingual newspaper Agos, was shot and killed on the street outside the building where he worked.

In recent years Dink had become a figure of hate for Turkey's ultranationalist right. His attempts to build bridges, both inside Turkey and between Turks and the citizens of the Republic of Armenia, had frequently brought him into conflict with the Turkish state and Turkish nationalists, particularly over the ethnic cleansing of the Armenians who were under Ottoman rule during the First World War.

At least 600,000 -- and probably many more -- Armenians died; some in organised massacres, and others from hunger and disease after being driven into the Syrian desert without food or water. Most of the international community already recognises what happened as the first genocide of the 20th century. But, despite a wealth of documentary, photographic and eyewitness- evidence, the Turkish state not only denies that a genocide occurred, but frequently prosecutes anyone who suggests that it happened under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, which makes it a crime to "insult Turkishness".

Armenians, both in the Republic of Armenia and amongst the diaspora in Europe and the US, have long argued that Turkey must recognise the genocide, before they can establish any form of dialogue. In the 1970s and 1980s, a groups calling itself the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA) killed dozens of Turkish diplomats in an attempt to force Turkey to acknowledge what happened.

In February 2004, Dink wrote a series of articles in Agos calling for dialogue without any preconditions. He insisted that Armenians should "cleanse their blood of the poison of the genocide' and sit down and talk with Turks. His comments triggered a furious reaction from many in the Armenian diaspora, almost all of whom are descended from survivors of the massacres and deportations.

But in Turkey, the mere mention of the word genocide led to Dink being prosecuted under Article 301. In October 2005, an Istanbul court sentenced Dink to a six months suspended jail sentence. In July last year, the conviction was upheld by an appeals court. At the time of his death, Dink was also facing charges of trying to influence the judiciary, because of the public comments he made about his trial.

"If a defendant cannot influence the judiciary, then who can?" he asked in an article he wrote in Agos.

Although many Turks have also been prosecuted under Article 301, few have been convicted; and none have been murdered.

Over the last two years, there has been a rapid rise in racist nationalism in Turkey, which has frequently boiled over into violence both against Kurds and against members of Turkey's dwindling non-Muslim minorities. The violence has been fuelled by racist websites, inflammatory articles in the nationalist press, and popular television series such as Valley of the Wolves. The latter not only preaches chauvinistic nationalism, but advocates lynching and extrajudicial violence, in order to defend what is termed "national honour". When a cinema version of Valley of the Wolves was released early last year, it swiftly broke all box office records. The film was bankrolled by Hurriyet newspaper, Turkey's biggest selling daily which, under its masthead, carries the message "Turkey for the Turks."

No one in Turkey ever refers to members of the country's non-Muslim minorities as "Turks". While they are in theory equal before they law, in practice suffer considerable discrimination. Such minorities are actually regarded as resident aliens, rather than fully- fledged citizens. Over the past two years there has also been a marked increase in the attacks and threats launched against non-Muslim minorities. In September 2005, a photographic exhibition marking the 50th anniversary of a government-instigated pogrom against the Greeks of Istanbul in 1955 was stormed and trashed by Turkish ultranationalists. Nor has the violence been confined to Turkish citizens. In February 2006, an ultranationalist youth stabbed to death an Italian Catholic priest in the eastern Black Sea port of Trabzon.

In his article in Agos, which was published on the day of his death, Dink recorded how the threats against his life had recently intensified and become more specific. He said that that he had reported them to the Public Prosecutor in Istanbul, but nothing had been done. "I'm making a note of that here," he wrote, "just in case."

Dink was shot three times in the back of the head at 3 pm on Friday afternoon, as he returned to his newspaper after a visit to the bank. His body lay on the sidewalk for two hours while police forensic teams collected evidence. Standing on a first floor balcony above the corpse of her father, his daughter Sera screamed at the crowd below: "They have killed my father. Is his blood any cleaner now?"

On Friday evening, around 8,000 Turks and Armenians staged a candlelit procession in Istanbul to protest Dink's killing. But the ultranationalists were already trying to shift the blame, inventing improbable conspiracies theories and claiming that Dink had probably been killed by Armenians. Even Prime Minster Tayyip Erdogan spoke of "dark hands" being behind the murder, in an attempt to destabilise the country.

The truth became clear on Saturday when police released footage from a nearby security camera, showing a youth running away from the scene of the killing. He was soon identified as Ogun Samast, an unemployed, poorly-educated 17 year-old from Trabzon. Later, on Saturday, he was arrested on an overnight bus from Istanbul to Trabzon. He still had the murder weapon in a bag by his side. It later emerged that he had been a member of an ultranationalist gang in Trabzon. The suspicion is that he had been chosen to carry out the killing because as a minor, under Turkish law, he can only receive a light jail sentence.

When he was taken into custody, Samast showed no remorse, and proudly confessed to the murder. "I couldn't stomach what he was saying and writing about Turks," he told the police. "I don't regret it. I would do the same again."

Dink's murder sent a shock wave across the country. No one doubts that the killing has dealt another blow to Turkey's already battered international reputation, and that it will make it even more difficult for the country to realise its ambitions of joining the EU.

But most Turks are still in denial about the environment of racist hatred and intolerance which, if it has not actually pulled the trigger, has fed the prejudices of those responsible for Dink's death. In the daily Radikal, one of the few Turkish newspapers to acknowledge the seriousness of the problem, editor Ismet Berkan wrote: "Don't let anybody imagine that it was just a 17 year-old-boy who killed him. Who was it who created this atmosphere?"

He angrily dismissed the conspiracy theories and attempts to shift the blame and place responsibility for Dink's murder on anything else but a murderous racism.

"Dink was killed because he was an Armenian," Berkan asserted.

[Joseph]

The most telling article yet

In Turkey, hopes for reconciliation fade

SELCAN HACAOGLU

Associated Press
ANKARA, Turkey - As mourners streamed through the streets this week to honor slain ethnic Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, many liberal Turks were swept up in a sense that an unprecedented chance for ethnic and political reconciliation was at hand.

But a darker reality already has set in: Many Turks are rejecting the appeals for solidarity and democratic reform.

They say the tens of thousands who joined Dink's funeral procession in Istanbul on Tuesday were mainly urban intellectuals, hardly representative of a nation of more than 70 million people where conservative Islamic values are deep-seated and nationalist pride in "Turkishness" is strong.

Many support the views of nationalists who are becoming increasingly strident in their condemnation of Western values that they feel are being imposed on them by the European Union, which is considering Turkey's membership bid.

Dink had been forced to stand trial by nationalists angered by his calls to recognize the killings of Armenians in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire as genocide. He was shot down Friday, allegedly by a teenager who incited to the crime by four ultrarightists also charged in the case.

During his funeral procession, mourners chanted "We are all Armenians," urged liberal reform and called for the repeal of the law used to convict Dink on charges of "insulting Turkishness."

The pleas fell on deaf ears, with most Turks interviewed by The Associated Press on Thursday voicing opposition to making concessions to Armenians on the sensitive issue of the killings.

"They should speak for themselves, they cannot speak on behalf of Turks," Filiz Un, 32, said of the marchers honoring Dink. "I am sorry for him as a human, but they cannot pretend that all the Turkish public is behind them."

A headline in the right-wing newspaper Tercuman said anyone who isn't proud to be Turkish "should clear off and leave."

Turkey's largest nationalist party responded to the mourners' chants by posting its own slogan - "We are all Turks" - on a digital display outside a local party branch in the Mediterranean resort of Antalya.

And in a chilling sign that the suspects in Dink's killing have their supporters, a fake bomb was left outside the Turkish parliament building Thursday saying they should be set free, private CNN-Turk television reported.

That came a day after one of the men charged in the slaying issued a threat against Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, a Nobel literature prize-winner who also has been charged with insulting Turkey.

The defiant tone from nationalists alarmed mainstream politicians.

"You don't recognize any laws, you go and kill defenseless people? That's not nationalism," Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said. "If you do that, you are murderers and monsters. No one but God can take a life."

Turkey's expulsion of ethnic Armenians during World War I - which Armenians say claimed 1.5 million lives - is a dark chapter rarely discussed publicly in Turkey or taught in its schools.

Turkey vehemently denies that many died or that it was genocide, saying the bloodshed came during the chaos of a disintegrating empire. It is battling Armenian diaspora groups that are pushing European governments and the United States to declare the killings genocide.

"There is a fault line passing right through the middle of society," wrote Turker Alkan, a columnist for the center-left newspaper Radikal.

"Those who cannot reconcile Hrant Dink's murder with humanity, consciousness and moral values are on the one side; those who don't really oppose the murder because of their nationalist sentiments and their religious beliefs are on the other," he added.

Selami Ince, news editor of the Istanbul-based Su TV, run by the Alawite Muslim sect, answered by saying few of the funeral marchers were Turks with roots in the Anatolian heartland.

"Unfortunately, they do not represent the Turkish public," Ince said. "The Turkish public has not filled the streets with demands of democracy and freedom. They were leftists, Armenians, Kurds and those intellectuals who favor multiculturalism."

---

Associated Press writer Suzan Fraser in Ankara contributed to this report.

[Joseph]

“I have never called anyone a “traitor” in my whole life. I have not even called Ali Kemal a “traitor.” I am using this word for the first time for [Dink's] murderer. Yes, who ever did this, is a true traitor [to Turkey]. He is an enemy of Turkey, the Turkish Republic and all her citizens... Trust me, this murder will make two groups of people very happy – the racist Turks and the racist Armenians. All others should go into a deep mourning starting today.”
-- Ertugrul Ozkok, Hurriyet

Hand on heart I can say I do not belong to either group.

Shat lav.