Hrant Dink: This Heart Will Never Go Silent!

greece / turkey / cyprus | anti-fascism | news report Saturday January 20, 2007 14:17 by ender yilmaz - AKi -Turkey

“Those who killed Hrant Dink are” shouted one speaker at Taksim square sit-in yesterday evening “those who don’t want people’s fraternity, …those who killed 1,5 million Armenians, … those who exiled hundreds of thousands of Kurds from their villages, …those who created Sivas, Çorum, Maraş massacres, …those who represent the rotten gang order of this country, …”

Hrant Dink

Hrant Dink: This Heart Will Never Go Silent!

by Ender Yilmaz

Hrandt Dink, an Armenian journalist and a leftist intellectual, was a firm supporter of a society without nationalisms. He was found guilty in October 2005 of insulting Turkish identity after he wrote an article which addressed the Armenian genocide. He said that he would go to Paris and say that there was no Armenian genocide, if the Armenian genocide law passed in the French parliament. He got lots of threats. He represented the line of true intellectuals which every country has.

The Istanbul sit-in to protest his murder began in the afternoon and ended at 8 p.m. with a one-hour-long march to his newspaper, Agos. Estimates of the participants range between 5 and 15 thousand. There were also other protests in Ankara, Izmir and Bursa. Some of the slogans in Istanbul protest were: “We all are Armenians, we all are Kurds”, "Obsinately we all are Armenians", “We all are Hrant’s, we all are Armenians”, “Long live people’s fraternity” (in Turkish, Kurdish and Armenian), “The ropes of the murderer is in the hands of the state”, “Murderer state will pay back”, “Side by side against fascism”, “Time will come, the order will change, fascist murderers will pay back to the people” etc.

Flags of the ex-“social-democratic” new-center Republican People’s Party (CHP) were burned (its building was near to the Agos newspaper and people cut the flags hanging between the street lamps) and people shouted: “CHP is not the people’s, but the fascists’ party”, “Fascist Baykal (leader of the CHP)”, “Baykal! We are Kurds, shoot us too”.

Coincidentally (!) fascist gangs continued their provocations at Istanbul and Mimar Sinan Universities yesterday. In the morning, a gang of 30-40 people (mostly outside the university) managed to enter the university (security guards probably displayed extreme benevolence to them which they don’t have for leftist students) and walked in the campus for leftists. In the evening a group of students at the sit-in should leave to save the students at the Mimar Sinan University campus in Beşiktaş from the fascist gang blocking the exit.

Nobody knows really what is being aimed at with this murder. Fascist sites are rejoicing. Some conservative people even argue that it is the work of the Armenian Diaspora. The mainstream media is very sad (a sadness they didn’t have either for the persecution of Hrant Dink before or for the massacred Armenians).

Hrant Dink represented the moderate Armenian who wanted to let the Turkish people understand our violent past and also present, and knew that interventions from first world states created nothing but xenophobia dressed under the cover of anti-imperialism. We will feel his absence more, when the occasional quick "debates" about ethnic and religious minorities partially enter the mainstream media. We will have more and more fruitless debates - better to call them quarrels - between more and more nationalist sides. We should further his anti-nationalist line. Only this can overcome the lack of this valuable friend and stop inter-ethnic conflicts. Only then Hrant Dink can live as if he were still speaking and writing, as if he had not been murdered. As the protesters were singing yesterday evening: