The Pigeon on the Bridge Is Shot
Ayse Kadioglu
February 16, 2007
(Ayse Kadioglu is an associate professor of
political science at Sabanci University in Istanbul.)
“Sometimes they ask me what it is like to be an
Armenian. I tell them that it is a wonderful
thing and I recommend it to everyone.” These were
Hrant Dink’s opening remarks at a conference
entitled “Ottoman Armenians During the Collapse
of the Ottoman Empire,” held in Istanbul on
September 24 and 25, 2005. Those of us lucky
enough to hear the mischievous introductory lines
received them with joyous laughter, but we also
knew we were witnesses to a lecture of historic
significance, a momentous step forward in the
efforts of Armenians and Turks to come to terms with the horrors of the past.
Little more than a year later, on January 19,
2007, Dink, the editor-in-chief of the
Armenian-Turkish newspaper Agos, was assassinated
in front of his office on a busy street in
Istanbul. On the day of his funeral, when more
than 100,000 people (mostly Muslim Turks) marched
with banners proclaiming “We are all Armenians”
and “We are all Hrant Dink,” I could not help but
think that we had indeed taken him up on his
advice. Yet this time, most of us were crying.
Hrant Dink was a meticulous writer and speaker.
He chose his words carefully, including the ones
for which he was prosecuted by the Turkish state.
I think he was referring to two things when he
recommended becoming Armenian to his audience at
the conference. First, he was pointing to the
need for empathy in modern societies — an
essential theme that he underlined on other
occasions. He urged Turks to listen to the
grievances of Armenians and empathize with these
people, whose ancestors were deported and
massacred by the crumbling Ottoman Empire in
1915. He also exhorted diaspora Armenians to
empathize with the Turks, who do not want to
think of their ancestors and themselves as
perpetrators of genocide. Second, he wanted to
make clear that one could belong to a national or
religious community by voluntary declaration.
Dink was against ascriptive criteria for
community membership; these inevitably led, in
his opinion, to racism. Citizenship, in his eyes,
was really an allegiance to a multi-national,
constitutional state, rather than loyalty to a
single nationality or religion. As a country,
Turkey belonged to all the groups that inhabited
its territory, not just the Turks. He saw that
Anatolian soil had been a mosaic prior to the
Turkification policies instigated by the Turkish
state in the twentieth century. In that soil Dink found his salvation.
HRANT DINK AND AGOS
Hrant Dink was born in the inner Anatolian town
of Malatya on September 15, 1954. He moved to
Istanbul with his family when he was seven years
old. When the family faced financial problems and
his parents divorced, he was placed, with his two
brothers, in the orphanage of an Armenian church
in Istanbul. Dink spent ten years at the
orphanage. After attending Armenian primary and
secondary schools, he studied zoology and later
philosophy at Istanbul University. He met Rakel
in the orphanage. She was 17 and he was 22 when
they got married. They had three beautiful
children and a granddaughter. His wife called him
“Çutak,” meaning “violin” in Armenian, because he
was tall and slim. He used this nickname in his
column in the Marmara newspaper. His
granddaughter, who is just learning to speak,
changed this word to “Tutak” in the language of a
toddler. For three summers in a row, Dink and his
wife Rakel worked together with the children of
the orphanage on the construction of a summer
camp in Tuzla, Istanbul. They planted trees and
created a dreamland for the orphans. The camp was
taken away by the state in 1983 as part of a
confiscation policy directed at non-Muslim religious foundations.
In 1996, Dink and a few friends founded a weekly
newspaper called Agos, with the encouragement of
the Armenian patriarch. From this point onward,
Agos became the most visible platform for
descriptions of the injustices faced by Armenians
in Turkey today and in the past. Of the paper’s
12 pages, nine are in Turkish and three are in
Armenian. This distribution, by the
interpretation of Bask n Oran, an Ankara
University political scientist and Agos
contributor, is symbolic of the wish on the part
of the Armenian community in Turkey to
“integrate” into Turkish society “without being
assimilated.” A month before Dink’s
assassination, the staff celebrated the
newspaper’s tenth anniversary with a party
featuring Armenian and Turkish songs.
Despite the fact that Dink’s name became
increasingly associated with the Armenian
community, he always found continuities with the
injustices suffered by other groups in Turkey —
the Kurds, for instance, and women who wear the
headscarf. He was a democrat in that he was
interested in a common venue for exposing all
such injustices. At one roundtable discussion on
civil society organizations held in Istanbul, he
talked about the daily discrimination faced by
Armenians. When I murmured during his talk, “Just
like the issues of women,” he turned to me in
excitement and said, “Yes, that is exactly what
we need to talk about: manifestations of
discrimination that are shared by various underprivileged groups.”
MINORITIES AND THE STATE
At the turn of the twentieth century, the Ottoman
Empire was in decline. As the Ottomans lost
territory to the Russians, Austrians and Greeks,
Muslims from these lands began to migrate to the
center of the empire in the Anatolian peninsula,
leading to unease among non-Muslims residing
there. At the end of the Balkan wars in 1914,
Ottoman elites embraced the idea of formal
population exchanges, geared toward creating a
modern and more homogeneous Turkish state. The
Ottoman embassy in Athens raised official
objections to pressures upon Muslims in western
Thrace. The Ottoman and Greek states reached a
verbal agreement upon a non-coerced exchange of
Anatolian Greeks and Muslims in Greece, but
implementation came to a halt with the outbreak
of World War I. During the war, reactionary
pressure increased to address the “problem” of
the non-Muslims within the empire and, in 1915,
the rump imperial state oversaw the deportation
and massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians.
The official population exchange of Anatolian
Greeks and the Muslims in Greece took place
pursuant to the Treaty of Lausanne, signed in
1923 between the Western powers and the Republic
of Turkey that emerged on the Anatolian peninsula
following the Ottoman Empire’s dissolution. While
the number of non-Muslims in the lands that
constitute today’s Turkey was “one in every five
persons” in 1913, this ratio had fallen to “one
in forty” by the time of the proclamation of the
republic. The Treaty of Lausanne assured equal
treatment under the law to Turkey’s “non-Muslim
minorities” — Armenian Christians, Greek
Christians and Jews. In practice, however, all of
these official minorities, as well as unofficial
Muslim “minorities,” have faced discrimination
from state and society. Such Muslim groups as the
Kurds, Arabs, Circassians, Georgians and Lazes
are perceived as “different,” mainly because
their native tongue is not Turkish. Alevis,
whether they are Kurdish, Arab or Turkman, are
ill-treated because they adhere to a non-Sunni
sect of Islam. The state viewed all these groups
as obstacles to the formation of a Turkish
national identity built upon a single religion and language.
By 1928, the state was engaged in efforts to
create a single language at the expense of the
other languages that existed in Turkey. The
“Citizen, Speak Turkish” campaigns led to
policies that outlawed the use of languages other
than Turkish in public places such as movie
theaters, restaurants and hotels. Such policies,
and riots and vandalism targeted at Jews and
Christians, prompted further migrations of
non-Muslims out of Turkey over the ensuing decades.
The daily lives of the remaining Armenians in
Turkey became increasingly more difficult, and
anti-Armenian sentiment rose, in the 1970s, when
the Armenian nationalist organization ASALA began
assasinating Turkish diplomats all over the
world. In the 1980s, bogus allegations of ties
between ASALA and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party
(PKK), which had launched an insurgency in
southeastern Turkey, surfaced in major Turkish
newspapers. Amidst these developments, Armenians
in Turkey increasingly felt they had to mask the
Armenian aspects of their identity, and began to
assimilate more and more into Turkish society at
the expense of their language and religion. The
1990s brought still greater pressures on the
Armenian community in Turkey since Armenia, which
declared its independence after the
disintegration of the Soviet Union, invaded the
Armenian-populated part of Azerbaijan (a
Turkic-language country considered by Turkey as
within its sphere of influence). Relations
between Turkey and Armenia were curtailed.
A prevalent theme in Turkish politics has been
preservation of the state and its autonomy in the
face of popular or political pressures. Appointed
state officials, whether military officers,
civilian bureaucrats or the president of the
republic, have always regarded elected
politicians as well as the people as immature and
in need of guidance. These officials encouraged
the growth of religious and nationalist
organizations to debilitate those political
currents that opted for mobilization and
empowerment of the people. Turkey’s recurrent
military coups were legitimized in terms of
preservation of the state. Fear of losing a
unified state has always been the key motivator
for various nationalist organizations, including
those inclined to a kind of fascism.
All these developments accelerated the coupling
of demos and ethnos in Turkey: the view that full
citizenship was (or should be) tantamount to
Turkish national identity. Despite the fact that
Armenians in Turkey were legal citizens, more and
more they found they had to hide their
non-Turkish and non-Muslim identities.
Citizenship had become an instrument of
assimilation with a Turkish national identity
rather than a guaranteee of a set of rights,
including the right to a “different” identity in Turkey.
NEW POLITICAL CLEAVAGES
Following the 1999 Helsinki summit, when Turkey
became an official candidate for membership in
the European Union, the Turkish parliament began
to pass major legislative reforms with respect to
minority rights, including the lifting of
barriers to the use of minority languages and the
practice of minority religions. These reforms
became the backdrop for a nationalist backlash.
Contemporary Turkish politics are, in many ways,
defined by a tension between two fundamental
currents. The first current consists of those
pushing for democratization by, among other
things, furthering the rights of the non-Turkish
and non-Muslim citizens of Turkey. The second is
made up of those who fear that the ground beneath
“the Turks” is slipping — so much so that “the
Turks” are losing their privileged status.
Despite all the legislative reforms, there are
still laws that uphold this privilege. On October
7, 2005, Hrant Dink was convicted of violating
one such law, Article 301 of the Turkish penal
code, which makes it a crime to “denigrate Turkishness.”
Dink had published a series of articles
concerning Armenian identity in Agos in February
2004. In one article, he criticized the
inflexible views of some diaspora Armenians,
saying that “the clean blood that the Armenians
need in order to establish a noble current of
relations with Armenia [will be found] if/when
they can cleanse their blood of the poison of
Turks.” By “the poison of Turks,” he meant hatred
of Turks. He was calling upon diaspora hardliners
to let go of this hatred (using the expression
“clean blood” as a metaphor for a clean break
with old habits) and focus on building relations
with Armenia instead. But nationalists in Turkey
blinded themselves to context and chose to read
Dink as saying that Turkish blood is poisonous.
Thus did this sentence inspire charges against
Dink for “denigrating Turkishness.” Nationalist
bullies vandalized the courtroom hearing his case
and dared him to “come and see the clean Turkish
blood.” A report of experts presented to the
local criminal court underlined the importance of
reading Dink’s lines “in context” in order to
comprehend his intentions, and opposed the charge
against him. Nevertheless, the court handed down
a verdict of guilty. The conviction was approved
by the Court of Appeals on June 6, 2006, and Dink
was given a suspended sentence. He was taking his
case to the European Court of Human Rights when he was killed.
Legal codes like Article 301 make it possible to
read every criticism directed at past and present
policies of the Turkish state, regardless of
their moral content, as a basis for the
accusation of “denigrating Turkishness.” Indeed,
when taken to its logical conclusion, the law
makes it impossible to be critical of activities
carried out by Turks. Certainly, the law has
become the weapon of nationalist groups who
oppose multiculturalism in Turkey as much as they
oppose Turkey’s membership in the European Union.
They maintain that Turkey belongs only to Turks.
They expect Turkish citizens who are not Turks to
adopt a Turkish mask, sublimating their
religious, linguistic and cultural identities in
order to enjoy the fruits of citizenship.
Though several writers and journalists, including
Turkey’s Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, have faced
charges under Article 301, Dink is the only one
to date whose “guilty” verdict was upheld by the
Court of Appeals. He was visibly very sad on this
occasion, saying that he would never denigrate
Turkishness, because all his life he had opposed
racism. Indeed, it is possible to argue that it
is the very existence of such legal codes that
denigrates Turkishness. After his conviction,
Dink considered leaving Turkey. But whenever he
traveled abroad, he missed his country. He had
tried so hard to construct a life for himself and
his family in Istanbul. In the end, he decided to stay.
Hrant Dink labored to open channels of
communication between Armenians in Turkey, Turks,
diaspora Armenians (who are mostly in the United
States) and the government and people of Armenia.
He invited all parties to be self-critical to
facilitate dialogue. Use of the word “genocide”
to refer to the mass deportations and massacres
of Armenians in 1915 is, of course, the biggest
bone of contention between Turks and Armenians.
Dink had a distinctive approach to the
controversy. In his speech at the conference on
Ottoman Armenians, he uttered the phrase
“Armenian genocide,” and immediately added, “All
right, perhaps it is better not to use that
expression.” Dink did not want that one word to
close the ears of some in the audience to the
rest of his words. He wanted to move the debate
over the past away from the term “genocide” to
the possibility of dialogue. While he advised
Turks to grow out of their denial of the enormity
of the massacres, at the same time he admonished
Armenians to be careful not to bring indignity to
Turks by constantly dwelling on the atrocities of
their ancestors. (Ironically, in fact, the words
that led to his conviction for “denigrating
Turkishness” were directed at negative Armenian
attitudes about Turks.) In sum, Dink suggested
that Armenians and Turks both “get out of this
1,915-meter deep well” and start listening to one
another. Since the Anatolian people carried pain
with dignity, he thought, Armenians and Turks
could carry their pain without dishonoring each other.
His funeral, with its mixed procession of
Armenians and Turks, was an occasion for such
dignity. An Agos contributor at the funeral said
he heard Turkish kids shouting, “Long live the
Armenians,” quite a change from earlier
experiences when expressions such as “Armenian
dogs” or “deceitful Armenians” were more common.
THE WATER FOUND ITS CRACK
Hrant Dink was buried in a cemetery in Istanbul.
As his wife told the thousands who had gathered,
while he had left her embrace and his children,
granddaughter and loved ones, he would never leave his country.
Dink’s friends could not help but be reminded of
a story he told: He once received a phone call
from an elderly man in a village in Sivas who
told him that an old Armenian woman had passed
away. The villagers wanted Dink to help them find
her family. He located the woman’s daughter in
France and told her about her mother’s death. The
daughter said the old woman’s family had been
deported from that village in Sivas; every year
she had been traveling from France in order to
spend a few months in her birthplace. When the
daughter came to get her mother’s body, she
called Dink from the village and started crying
on the phone — because of what that the old man
in the village had told her. “Uncle, what have
you told her?” Dink asked, prepared to be angry.
But the man responded, “I did not say anything
bad. I just told her that this village was her
mother’s home.” He quoted the Turkish proverb:
“The water found its crack.’ She should bury her
mother here rather than taking her body to
France.” After telling this story, Dink would
conclude, with tears in his eyes: “Yes, Armenians
have an eye on Turkish soil — not to come and
take it, but to come and be buried under it.”
In his last column in Agos, Hrant Dink wrote
about the threats he had received. Nationalist
organizations had vandalized the courtroom
hearing his case and demonstrated in front of
Agos. He admitted to being intimidated. “It is
unfortunate that I am now better known than I
once was,” he wrote. “I feel much more the people
who throw me that glance that says, Oh look,
isn’t he that Armenian guy?’ And I reflexively
start torturing myself. One aspect of this
torture is curiosity, the other unease…. I am
just like a pigeon, obsessed equally by what goes
on to my left, to my right, in front of me and in
back.” His only consolation in such anxiety was
his faith that the pigeons could live freely in
crowded urban centers, even if fearfully. He
thought the pigeons would not be harmed.
Yet Dink also maintained the people after him
were not as ordinary and visible as they seemed.
He was, in other words, pointing his finger at
what reformers in Turkey call the “deep state” —
the relations between the military and security
establishment and clandestine, paramilitary
organizations. The 17-year old man who gunned
Dink down was arrested shortly after the
assassination. He is from Trabzon, a city on the
Black Sea known as a center of right-wing
nationalist activity. Soon, the police chief of
Trabzon was removed from his post. A brief look
into the chief’s past, provided on January 27 by
the journalist Can Dündar in his column in the
daily Milliyet, revealed his web of affiliations
with police chiefs, retired military officers,
lawyers and paramilitary youth working to “save”
Turkey from disintegration in the hands of the
pro-European Union civil society groups and policymakers.
Soon after Dink’s murder, some of the nationalist
groups donned the same white beret worn by the
gunman when he fired the fatal shot. These “white
berets” aim to frighten Turkish democrats who,
like Dink, are interested in constructing bridges
of dialogue. Undoubtedly, they have allies inside
the organs of the state. On February 2, police in
Trabzon posed Dink’s killer in front of a Turkish
flag. Video footage of the scene, which made the
assassin out to be a national hero, shocked many
Turks but undoubtedly pleased many others. The
crude nationalists in soccer stadiums shouting
slogans exalting Dink’s killer, as well as the
white berets in the streets of Istanbul, are
indicators that a dangerous number of citizens
are willing to endorse crimes committed in the name of preserving the state.
Nowadays, one can observe competition between
various “nationalisms” on Turkey’s primetime
television programs. People feel compelled to say
they are nationalists in order to render the rest
of their claims legitimate. Some of the
nationalists are loaded down with fears that the
privileged status of ethnic Turks in Turkey will
soon be lost. In their zeal to sever Turkey’s
ties with everyone except ethnic Turks, they are
like trench diggers on a battlefield.
Hrant Dink lived his life like a pigeon on a
bridge connecting the feelings and thoughts of
Armenians in Turkey with those outside, as well
as with Turks. He was a pigeon on a mission to
make such bridges more than symbolic. He was shot
by trench diggers, who remain powerful opponents
of his mission. On the day of his funeral,
however, Hrant Dink’s bridge was flooded by
thousands who wanted to guard it in his name. He would have loved the sight.
