“I am honest and hardworking, but I am not a Turk”
On January 19, 2007, Hrant Dink was gunned down and murdered outside the offices of Agos in Istanbul. Two days later, at the Holy Cathedral of Etchmiadzin and in all Armenian churches in Armenia and throughout the world, a special requiem for the repose of souls was celebrated in his memory.
Two days before he was killed, Dink granted an interview to Ellen Rudnitsky and Mirko Schwanitz of the International Organisation of Journalists. It was the last to be granted by the 53-year-old founder and editor of the Agos weekly.
Below is the interview as published by the RIA Novosti news agency on January 25, 2007.
-Mr. Dink, you speak up in your weekly Agos not only for the Armenian minority but also for all minorities there are in Turkey. Are you not afraid?
– Sure I am. To be honest, I feel haunted day in, day out. Ever seen a pigeon? Ever see how it keeps turning its head? It shudders at the slightest noise, ready to fly away at any instant. Can you call that a life? The difference is that I can’t fly away like a pigeon.
– In the past few months you have landed in the dock twice for allegedly insulting the Turkish nation. Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk was also indicted but never convicted as you were. Why is that?
– I had a suspended six months’ sentence. The notorious Paragraph 301 [of the Turkish penal code] stipulates criminal liability for insulting Turkish national identity, and no one knows why some people are convicted and others acquitted. The European Union has every reason to demand that the paragraph be abolished. Its wording gives every judge a free hand. I had no luck with mine. He alleged I said Turks had unclean blood. Absurd!
– Agos, the weekly you are publishing, has a small circulation, but some people in Turkey find it dangerous. Why do you think that’s so?
– That’s right. Our print run is roughly 6,000 copies, but it is read by many more people than that, both in and outside Turkey. That’s what worries certain forces.
– Agos is considered the Armenian community’s press outlet. Why do you publish it in Turkish as well as Armenian?
– That’s just what makes it so dangerous to certain nationalist circles in this country. Agos tells the truth about the Armenian Genocide. At the same time, we present it as part of history and urge our readers to learn the lesson it teaches.
– Is it really so bad to be an Armenian in Turkey?
– You have hardly any problems if you hold your tongue. As for me, I found it hard even in my teens to join the chorus singing how proud we were of being Turks. Certainly, this country has a great deal to be proud of, but I am not a Turk, after all.
– When did you first feel really discriminated against?
– When I finished my active service, I wanted to go on with my military career and become a commissioned officer. I was married then, and had two children. My wife was expecting our third child. I passed the officer examinations with many of my Turkish fellow servicemen. After that, all the applicants were called one by one to get their certificates. I was never summoned; the only one on the list. That was when I realised that, although Turkey was a secular state, a non-Muslim could never qualify as an officer. That day, I first knew what it truly felt like to be an Armenian in Turkey.
– You asked in the latest Agos issue: “What makes me a target?”
– The answer concerns Armenians more than Turks. Too many of us try to hide away at the slightest sign of danger. I am not one of them, I daresay. What does hiding lead to? That’s what makes me a prospective target, and I am not the only one. The same applies to my family. How do you think my wife and children feel when I receive threats every day, some over the phone, others by e-mail? I compared myself to a pigeon earlier because the bird wants to be free, however frightened it might be. That’s what I work for. I want liberty for all of us. I want things to change someday.
– Could you leave this country?
– I want to carry on my cause here. It is not my own personal cause. It concerns everyone who wants to see Turkey as a democratic country. If I surrender and emigrate, the shame will be on us all. This is the land of my ancestors. I have my roots here, and I have the right to die in the country I was born in.
The last article written by Hrant Dink, “Like a nervous pigeon: my unsettled state of mind,” was published by Agos after his murder. It fully depicts the spiritual state this Armenian, a citizen of Turkey, was living in, on the eve of his impending death:
…
This much is clear: those who have tried to isolate me, to make me weak and defenseless, have, in their own fashion, achieved what they wanted. Even now, by the cumulative effect of the filthy and false information that they have disseminated to society, they have created a sector of society that perceives Hrant Dink as one who “demeans Turkdom,” and whose number is by no means small.
The message log and memory of my computer is filled with lines full of rage and threats, sent by fellow citizens from that sector. (Let me note here that I found one of these messages, originating in Bursa, to represent a particularly clear threat, and passed it on to the State Prosecutor’s office in Şişli. To this date, I have received no response.)
How real or unreal are these threats? In truth, that is something I cannot possibly know.
For me the real threat, and the one that is really unbearable, is the psychological torture I have to live through by myself.
“What are these people now thinking about me?” This is the question that gnaws at my mind.
It’s unfortunate that I am more readily recognized nowadays than I used to be, and that I sense more often people casting glances in my direction, saying “O look, isn’t he that Armenian?”
And as a reflex, I wind up tormenting myself.
This torture is in part curiosity, in part worry.
One part is alertness, one part is being frightened.
I feel just like a pigeon…
Just like it, I am in a constant state of keeping my eyes out, looking left and right, in front of me and behind me.
My head is just as mobile… and just as ready to swiftly turn at a moment’s notice.
Here is the price for you.
What did Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül say? What did Justice Minister Cemil Çiçek say?
“Come on, there’s really nothing about Article 301 that deserves to be exaggerated so. Is there anyone who has been convicted under it and sent to prison?”
As if the only price to pay would be to enter prison…
Here’s the price for you… Here’s the price for you…
O ministers, do you know what kind of price it is to imprison a human being in a pigeon’s fright… ? Do you know… ?
Have you never watched a pigeon?
That which they call “Life or Death.”
It’s not an easy process I am living through… and which we are living through as a family.
There have even been moments when I have seriously thought about leaving the country and moving far away.
Especially when the threats have been directed at those closest to me…
At that point I have always felt helpless.
This must be what they call a question of “life and death.” I could have kept on resisting of my own free will, but I had no right to endanger the life of anyone close to me. I could be a champion on my own behalf, but I could not claim the right to play the hero if that meant bringing danger upon anyone else, let alone those close to me.
In hopeless moments like these, I have gathered my wife and children around me and taken refuge in them and had my greatest support from them.
They put their trust in me.
Wherever I would be, they would be there too.
If I said “Let us go,” they would come.If I said “Let’s stay,” they would stay.
To stay and resist.
Well, if we were to go, where would we go?
To Armenia?
Well but how would someone like me, who cannot abide injustices, put up with the injustices there? Would I not wind up in even greater trouble there?
As for going to Europe to live, it’s not for me.
I’m the kind of person who, when I go to the West for three days, on the fourth I am writhing with discomfort, missing my country and saying,“Let it be over already so I can go back.” What would I do with myself there?
Too much comfort would have discomforted me.
Above all, it is not in my nature to leave behind a “boiling hell” behind and flee to some “ready-made paradise.” I’m the kind of person who seeks to turn the hell in which he is living into paradise.
To stay in Turkey and to keep on living here was both our true desire and something that was required by the respect we have for the thousands of our friends, both those we know and those we don’t know, who are fighting for democracy in Turkey and who have come forward to support us.
We would stay and resist.
It may be that one day we would be forced to go, but…
We would set out just like those in 1915 did… Like our forefathers… Without knowing where we were headed…
Walking on the roads they trod…
Feeling the torment, living the pain…
With that kind of blow dealt by fortune we might leave our homeland.
And we would go, not to a place chosen by our hearts, but where our feet would take us…
Wherever that was.
Scared and free.
My wish is that we will never, ever be forced to live through such an abandonment. In any case, we have too much hope, too much need not to.
Now, finally, I am applying to the European Court of Human Rights.
I do not know how long this case will take. All I know is that whatever happens, at least until the case is concluded I will continue to live in Turkey, and from that I derive some degree of comfort.
If the court rules in my favor, no doubt I will rejoice even more because that will mean that I will never again be compelled to leave my country.
Probably 2007 will be an even more difficult year for me.
The court proceedings will go on, new ones will begin. Who knows what sort of additional injustices I will have to confront?
But while all these things happen, there is this truth which I will count on as my guarantee.
Yes, I may find myself trapped in the nervous mental state of a pigeon, but I know that in this country people do not harm pigeons.
Pigeons continue to live their lives, even in the midst of cities, amidst crowds of people.
Yes, a bit frightened but to the same degree also free.
People released doves during Hrant Dink’s funeral procession. Outside the offices of Agos, where Dink was murdered, tens of thousands gathered holding aloft signs reading, “We are all Hrant. We are all Armenian.”
Another segmentof Turkish society believed otherwise and condemned the “We are all Hrant, we are all Armenian” approach. Just ten days after the murder, thousands of football fans gathered in the stadium at Trabzon and raised posters saying, “We are all from Trabzon, we are all Mustafa Kemal Atatürk,” thus expressing their support of Ogün Samast,48 the seventeen-year-old native of Trabzon who murdered Dink. During those days, the Turkish press published photos of Samast in a genial, friendly environment with police in front of cameras. The assassin had unfurled a large Turkish flag with the following words of Atatürk written on it: “The soil of the nation is holy and cannot be left to the whims of fate.”
This chapter is from Tatul Hakobyan’s book – ARMENIANS and TURKS
