Palm Beach Post Editorial
Belief in an ideal cost an editor his life
Sunday, January 28, 2007
BY DOUGLAS KALAJIAN
nion/epaper/2007/01/28/a1e_kalajian_commentary_012 8.html
Hrant Dink died last week because he would not let go of a crazy idea.
He believed in the essential decency of his fellow human beings.
As editor of the last Armenian-language newspaper in Istanbul,
Mr. Dink pleaded with his country to face its ugliest history by
taking responsibility for the mass slaughter of Turkey’s Armenian
minority in the years before, during and after the First World
War. This took remarkable courage.
Turkey not only disavows any such responsibility, it forbids the mere
suggestion that Armenians were subjected to genocide. Respected
Turkish author Orhan Pamuk experienced the consequences two years ago
after he acknowledged the Armenian Genocide: He was charged with the
crime of "insulting Turkishness."
Mr. Pamuk’s case led to an international outcry. The charges were
dropped, but the government continued to press similar charges against
a number of lesser-known academics and writers, including Hrant Dink.
To Armenians in diaspora, the prosecution of Mr. Dink echoed the
persecution of their parents and grandparents. My father survived The
Genocide as a child, but at a terrible price. He grew up without a
family, a home or a country.
Despite that, he remained remarkably free of bitterness or anger
toward Turkey and its people.
He found it almost impossible to speak about what he experienced, but
he insisted that I learn enough history to appreciate its lessons. He
believed, as Mr. Dink apparently did, that truth does more good than
harm.
The truth about the Armenian Genocide always has been
clear. Massacres, forced marches and mass starvation of deportees were
reported in numbing detail in The New York Times and other major
publications. A typical headline from Aug. 18, 1915:
"ARMENIANS ARE SENT
TO PERISH IN DESERT"
The story reported "a plan to exterminate the whole Armenian people."
It hardly was the world’s first or the last scheme of mass
extermination. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-born Holocaust survivor,
surveyed not just the wreckage of postwar Europe but the wreckage of
history when he drew a common thread through the destruction of
Carthage and the mass murders of Armenians and Jews. He gave the world
its first word for barbarity on such horrific scale: genocide.
Turkey insists that the virtual disappearance of its once-vast
Armenian population was a consequence of war and not an act of ethnic
cleansing, but the artifice has become increasingly difficult to
sustain. Armenians have lobbied to make acknowledgment of the Genocide
a condition of Turkey’s entry into the European Union, a demand that
has infuriated the Turkish government.
Until last week, however, there was at least one powerful voice of
dissent in the Armenian community: Hrant Dink’s.
Mr. Dink was that rare creature – a man of principle. He did not think
Turkey should be wrestled into submission. He seemed to believe that
truth would triumph by its own virtue. He also believed in the country
of his birth, Turkey. Friends encouraged him to flee rather than face
charges, but Mr. Dink refused, even as taunts and death threats
mounted.
"I persevered through all this with patience awaiting the decision
that would acquit me," he wrote in his last column for his newspaper,
Agos. "Then the truth would prevail and all those people would be
ashamed of what they had done."
The column was published on Jan. 19. Mr. Dink was shot three times in
the head soon after leaving his office that day. Authorities have
charged a 17-year-old with pulling the trigger on orders of an
ultra-nationalist group. The government that bullied Mr. Dink and
sullied his reputation condemned the murder and hailed him as a
champion of free expression.
Hrant Dink was tragically wrong in believing that he would find
justice, but he also was right. The night he died, thousands of Turks
streamed into the streets of Istanbul to demonstrate that good people
never are insulted by the truth of history.
"We are all Armenians," the crowd chanted. "We are all Hrant Dink."