Dead – for daring to defy the deniers

The murder of Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian writer and journalist, on 19 January continues to reverberate in Turkey, as many people loudly and anguishedly question the state of their society and their wider responsibility in his death. As Hrant’s wife, Rakel Dink, put it in her funeral address: "Nothing can be done without questioning what makes a baby into a murderer."

It is early days to see what wider impact Dink’s untimely death may have. But some hope the outcry it has caused and the extraordinary sight of 100,000 people silently following his funeral cortege in Istanbul, many holding placards proclaiming ‘we are all Armenians’, could trigger a positive and lasting response in Turkey.

For Hakan Altinay, head of the Soros Open Society Institute in Istanbul, the mass funeral was dramatic: "I have seen nothing comparable in my lifetime, with people from all walks of life, the great majority just individuals who are outraged and disgusted. I don’t think anyone could have anticipated, not Hrant himself, that so many would turn out and say ‘we are all Armenians’."

He said he hoped the tragic event would lead to introspection: "We know in our hearts it is something more than one psychopathic act…we do not have a great tradition recently of sustaining this kind of introspection but very strange things have happened in the last seven days."

Cengiz Aktar, of Besiktas University in Istanbul, is deeply gloomy about the future and whether anything good would come out of the dramatic reaction to Dink’s murder. "The silent [funeral] march was full of hope and many commentators have taken for granted that something good will happen but we should be realistic," he said.

"We are not that many. I would qualify this [reaction] as an expression of anger rather than hope. It is not at all a real hope. What is the Turkish civil society? It’s a nascent baby, it’s nothing, it can’t move the mountain and there is no political translation of the emotions."

Aktar said he doubted that politicians would rise to the challenge: "All the political parties are riding the nationalistic horse. I don’t see how, in this electoral period, the government and other political parties will steer this goodwill in a positive direction."

Many commentators have pointed the finger not simply at the teenage suspect charged along with five other conspirators by police but at the intensifying nationalism in Turkey of the last couple of years and the aggressive attitude towards ethnic minorities. And, more specifically, blame has been attached to the notorious article 301 of the Turkish penal code, under which Dink received a six-month suspended sentence on the charge of ‘insulting Turkishness’ for referring to the massacres of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in 1915-17 as genocide.

In his last article before his murder, Dink himself wrote at length about the damaging process of being charged and found guilty under 301: "Those who tried to single me out, render me weak and defenceless, succeeded by their own measures. They managed, with the wrongful and polluted knowledge they injected into society, to form a significant segment of the population who came to view Hrant Dink as someone ‘denigrating Turkishness’. The diary and memory of my computer are filled with angry, threatening lines sent by citizens…whose numbers cannot easily be dismissed."

Turkish commentator, Mehmet Ali Birand angrily wrote in one newspaper column on the day of Dink’s funeral: "We are the real murderers of Hrant. We have nourished our murderers in a mindset and against a backdrop shaped by article 301 of the Turkish penal code. We have handed them the guns. All those responsible are still among us. What is worse some of them appear on television broadcasts and go on and on about how sorry they feel."

For Istanbul-based writer Nicole Pope, Dink’s murder turned the focus on article 301 once again: "The government had made half-hearted noises to review the article, but it has yet to repeal or amend it. With Dink’s tragic death, calls for the article to be abolished are getting louder."

Whether the government will now move to abolish article 301 in this pre-electoral period - something the EU too has pressed for strongly - still remains open to doubt. Aktar believes it will not: "Of course not, it is just politicking and window-dressing." With presidential elections due in May and parliamentary ones in November, most politicians are not rushing to seize the moment, even though in one positive gesture Armenian leaders and officials were invited to attend the funeral.

But neither Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan nor President Ahmet Necdet Sezer nor Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, nor the 301-supporting leader of the opposition social democrats, Baykal, attended the funeral - something bitterly criticised by some. Birand wrote: "These people are the ones who failed the test. Our leaders just failed."

For Altinay, "if it were a year after the elections, Erdogan would have gone to the funeral and led the procession. I think he made a cold-hearted calculation on what would be gained and lost".

Aktar is deeply pessimistic about EU accession talks being helpful in this troubled moment in Turkey: "Relations with the EU being as they are that won’t be of any help…and more genocide bills will come from all over the world which will create a tremendous inward-looking reaction in the country."

Dink himself, in defending freedom of speech, was against countries passing laws making it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide.

Altinay predicted more good would come out of the reaction to Dink’s murder: "It may fizzle away but maybe the questions we didn’t ask persistently enough...are now impossible not to ask."

• Kirsty Hughes is a freelance journalist based in London.

The murder of Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian writer and journalist, on 19 January continues to reverberate in Turkey, as many people loudly and anguishedly question the state of their society and their wider responsibility in his death. As Hrant’s wife, Rakel Dink, put it in her funeral address: "Nothing can be done without questioning what makes a baby into a murderer."

Carnegie Europe: Strategic Europe, 26.04.16: Honoring Turkey’s Voice of the Voiceless http://carnegieeurope.eu/strategiceurope/?fa=63439

---