THE UNIVERSITY OF HRANT DINK
Today’s Zaman
Jan 20 2012
Turkey
One of the best ways to show our respect to the memory of Hrant Dink,
his personality and work is to give his name to a university in Turkey.
This is better than naming a few streets and a park after him. I am
not even sure if this much has been done. Names of other prominent
personalities such as Ugur Mumcu who were brutally assassinated have
been given to several streets, parks and neighborhoods, but it is
impossible to find Dink’s name on any Turkish map.
As far as I could learn from Google, the Å~^iÅ~_li Municipal Council
agreed to name a street after Hrant Dink, but Google Maps and the
Ä°stanbul Greater Municipality’s official map do not know of any
street by this name. When an ethnic Turk or Muslim is murdered, you
can easily name places, streets and so on after them, but when the
murdered person is a citizen of Armenian origin, nobody cares. Is this
not strange? My question is of course rhetorical and this attitude
towards Dink’s memory is of course not strange. Let me repeat what I
keep writing in this column: We are all children of Kemalistan. One
of the vital ramifications of this inherent, genetically transferred
cultural disease is either our transparent or latent nationalism.
Even an overwhelming majority of practicing Muslims or leftists in
Kemalistan suffer from nationalism, which only in extremely rare and
exceptional cases is close to benign patriotism or positive inclusive
nationalism, and even this is dangerous, as the boundary between this
and crude nationalism is always blurred.
There are maybe millions in Turkey who sincerely respect Dink’s memory
and are very sorry for his loss. Nevertheless, either keeping his
memory alive by naming streets and places after him has either not
entered these people’s minds or they are afraid to push for putting
it into practice. In this country, we love to keep changing street
and place names either because of a sickness of cultural-historical
amnesia imposed by the Kemalists in a top-down fashion or because
in a polarized society every new municipal government changes street
and place names from whom they dislike and replaces them with their
ideological relatives.
In some sad cases, the word ideological simply, but of course
deliberately, drops from the expression and “ideological relatives”
neatly becomes “relatives.” In even sadder cases, administrators
prefer to name streets and places after themselves. I remember reading
in the newspapers that there were not only one or two but several
street names named after the mayor in Ä°stanbul’s Eyup district a
few years ago. If I was not afraid of being attacked by our blind
Justice and Development Party (AKP)-lover friends and colleagues,
I would also mention how brazen-faced the AKP is being by changing
the name of Rize University to Recep Tayyip Erdogan University. Yet,
let us play safe and say “nevermind.”
If we really would like to respect Dink’s memory and teach our
younger future generations our modern political history, we must
name a university, I would prefer it to be a new one, the Hrant Dink
University. In this university, only arts, humanities, journalism
and social sciences would be taught and they would be taught in a
“Dinkian” spirit, focusing on shared experiences, tackling amnesia and
employing memory, intercultural dialogue, multiculturalism, the Ottoman
pluralistic experience that was brutally assassinated by nationalists
(Turks and others), anti-nationalism and human rights.
We must do it to seek forgiveness from Allah for our sin of not doing
much to protect a member of a minority group who was entrusted to
us by Allah. Readers of this column who are practicing Muslims will
recognize what I mean. It should be added for the pragmatic minded
that this will also positively contribute to both Turkey’s soft power
and its aspiration to be a role model.