AGOS – THE PAPER IN THE NEWS
The Independent/UK
Published: 30 April 2007
‘Agos’, an Armenian-Turkish newspaper based in Istanbul, was rocked
in January when its editor, Hrant Dink, was shot on its offices’
doorstep. Ian Herbert looks at the impact his death has had in the
Muslim country
The security guard at the door of Agos newspaper in central Istanbul
has become well accustomed to pointing out the spot where the
editor-in-chief was murdered in broad daylight, by two shots to
his head and two to his body, four months ago. "There," he says,
identifying a place on the pavement, two steps from the door, where
Hrant Dink was shot from behind.
But there is another more subtle clue to the threats facing those,
like Dink, who want to talk about Armenian identity in Turkey and the
way that hundreds of thousands of Christian Armenians were killed
by the Turks in 1915. It is the utter absence on the nondescript
premises of this Turkish-Armenian weekly newspaper of a sign marking
its presence. "Doing without a sign was a kind of a protection for
Hrant," says Etyen Mahcupyan, the 57-year-old Armenian columnist who
has succeeded his friend as editor.
"I never asked Hrant why he didn’t have one, come to think of it. It
was a form of hiding, which you do without thinking. It may have
been related to him being a person from a minority; a non-Muslim,
not wanting to show off in a Muslim country."
There are currently more reasons than ever for those, like Dink,
who criticise Turkey’s continuing denial that the events of 1915
amounted to genocide, to keep their whereabouts unknown. The EU’s
frostiness about Turkey’s accession to the EU, despite the efforts of
the Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to present a modernising
face to Europe, is fuelling a new wave of nationalism in a country
where images of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey,
stare out from most available public places and where any "insult to
Turkishness" is a criminal offence. Dink’s murder at the age of 52,
three months after Anna Politkovskaya’s in Russia, demonstrates the
enduring danger facing those who, in pursuit of their profession,
persistently challenge the state.
Dink, who described e-mail death threats against him in his last column
for Agos ("I am just like a pigeon… I look to my left and right,
in front and behind me as much as I can") retains his presence in the
office which Mahcupyan never wanted to occupy. Testaments to Dink’s
journalism line the walls: the Bjornson Prize, awarded by the Norwegian
academy established to protect freedom of expression; the Henri Nannen
Prize; the Oxfam Novib PEN Award for journalistic excellence.
Yet this office was no Armenian enclave. The 24-page newspaper,
which Dink established 11 years ago in the belief that only dialogue
could resolve the bitter memories left by the mass murder of Ottoman
Armenians during the First World War, has three pages in Armenian
with the rest, including the front, in Turkish. Around 25% of the
10,000 readership is Armenian-Turkish.
The rest is Turkish.
"Hrant’s death has given rise to a different level of intensity
about the issues he raised," says Mahcupyan, whose first issue as
editor, devoted to Dink’s life and work, increased the paper’s sale to
25,000. "His death has created a sympathy for the issues he raised. But
there’s also a backlash which [is] nationalistic." He details many
threatening e-mails and letters received after the assassination,
the thrust of which was: "You could be next."
Dink had become as much an ambassador for the Armenian cause as
a journalist. His ability to remember, years later, the names of
individuals he had met was legendary. But his belief in a secular
Armenian identity did not win him too many friends within the Armenian
church.
"You should remember he was brought up in an orphanage," says
Patriarch Mesrob Mutafyan, the most senior Armenian cleric in Turkey,
in reference to Dink’s 10 years growing up in an evangelical orphange
after his parents had separated. "It turned him against the state,
against the patriarch, against anyone."
The patriarch was speaking from the Church of St Mary in Istanbul,
where it is easy to see why Dink felt his people were besieged. Such
is the threat from Muslim extremists that visitors must enter through
X-ray machines.
Across the road is Dink’s old Armenian primary school, where the
current head teacher, Margrit Yesiltepe, unknowingly reveals much
about the way that Armenian culture has been erased in Turkey. "We
are a Turkish school and must teach what are in the history books,"
she insists from her seat behind a small Turkish flag in a room where
Ataturk adorns the carpet and the walls. But the "history books", it
transpires, deliver a curriculum set by the government which makes
no mention of Armenian issues, or of the events of 1915. "This is
how it was for me as a pupil and it was no problem," says the head.
Before Dink’s death, there were signs that Mr Erdogan wanted
to put some things right. He has tried to establish a "joint
history commission" of academics for a definitive examination of
the genocide issue (though the Armenians have refused to join it)
and the language of his influential special adviser, Egemen Bagis,
reflects the government’s willingness to engage. "I don’t know if
it was genocide or not," he says. "We asked the Armenians to join
our commission two years ago and I say to them: I am ready to face
my own history if you are yours." But in an election year, with the
far-right MHP party doing well in opinion polls, Mr Erdogan dare not
alienate the powerful, reactionary military and judiciary figures
who don’t tend to go in for ethnic tolerance.
For now, the political ferment makes life as unsettling as ever
for those who are carrying Dink’s torch, including Orhan Pamuk,
Turkey’s Nobel Prize-winning novelist, who went into exile in New
York after criminal charges against him over genocide references were
dropped. "What power do the ultra-nationalists really have?" asks
Mahcupyan. "Not much, except the ability to scare people and to kill
– and you only need a gun and a youngster to do that." As he spoke,
Mahcupyan had no idea of the next story which was about to preoccupy
him: the murder, last week, of two Turkish Christian converts and
a German in a publishing house that prints bibles, in the eastern
Turkish city of Malatya.
From: Baghdasarian