The murder of Hrant Dink, the Turkish journalist, has caused widespread anger and revulsion in the country. Once, while many Turks would privately have deplored such a crime, it would have been mainly the “usual suspects,” left-wing lawyers, artists and academics who would have protested publicly. Dink’s assassination, however, has produced genuine regret and concern from a variety of quarters.
The Turkish police are to be congratulated for making rapid progress in their investigation. Thanks to a father dutiful enough to report his own teenage son to the authorities after he thought he recognized him running away from the scene of Dink’s murder, seven suspects have been arrested in northern Turkey. The 17-year old boy has allegedly confessed to killing Dink because, in his view, the journalist insulted Turkey and Turkishness.
Dink’s crime was to write about what happened in eastern Turkey in the closing years of the Ottoman Empire under its young Turk leadership. Unwisely lured into World War I on the side on the German-led Central Powers, the Ottoman leadership was fighting a war on three fronts — in Mesopotamia, Arabia and Thrace. It did not need a new front opening up in the east. Egged on first by czarist and then Bolshevik agents, there was a series of increasingly threatening rebellions among the large Armenian community in the east. Armenians, along with Greeks, Jews and other non-Turks had played an important part in Ottoman society as officials, generals and businesspeople.
Many Turks and Kurds — the other principal inhabitants of the eastern area of Ottoman Turkey — were slaughtered in the initial stages of the rebellion. At one point however, these people, particularly the Kurds, who had long nursed commercial and cultural resentments against Armenians, struck back. That retaliation has been the source of the deepest sensitivity to the modern Turkish Republic which, it might be argued, had nothing to do with any official policy to crush the rebellious Armenians. Over the years, the Turkish authorities have sponsored learned books and collections of source documents from the Ottoman archive, all setting out to deny first that there were large-scale massacres, certainly not bordering on genocide, but rather a military and militia campaign in which many civilians perished. Nearly a century on, the immensely proud Turks still bridle at any suggestion to the contrary.
Journalists such as Dink therefore could not fail to cause pain and anger as they continued to maintain the massacres did indeed happen with official approval, if not by official orders. Finding Dink’s assassins and any extremists who supported them in the murder will sadly not heal this sensitive wound. That will require a far deeper examination of Turkish hearts and minds. Whatever the truth of what happened in eastern Turkey all those years ago, modern Turkey cannot afford to continue reacting so sensitively to allegations of massacre.
