The 2007 Assassination of Hrant Dink Through the Lenses of History, Memory and Emotions

Fatma Müge Göçek The 2007 Assassination of Hrant Dink through the Lenses of History, Memory and Emotions

On 19 January 2007, Hrant Dink, the 52-year-old journalist and editor-in-chief of the bilingual Armenian Turkish Agos newspaper, was assassinated in broad daylight. This article reinterprets the Dink assassination through the lenses of history, memory and emotions which manage, I argue, to go beyond the current ambiguous interpretations of this horrifĳic event. The article commences with existing scholarly analyses of the Hrant Dink assassination, to then continue with the narratives of the Hrant Dink assassination told through the lenses of history, memory and emotions. It ends by concluding that the Dink assassination is yet another episode in systemic Turkish state violence.

On 19 January 2007, Hrant Dink, the 52-year-old journalist and editor-in- chief of the bilingual Armenian Turkish Agos newspaper, was assassinated in broad daylight. A 17-year-old ultra-nationalist assassin shot him from behind with three bullets to his head. Dink was a humanist who advocated human and minority rights in Turkey alongside Turkish-Armenian reconciliation. In relation to the collective violence committed against the Armenians, he criti- cized both the offfĳicial Turkish denial of the Armenian Genocide (1915-1917) as well as the Armenian Diaspora’s campaign for its international recognition. Due to his stand, Dink was prosecuted by the Turkish legal system three times for “denigrating Turkishness” in his newspaper editorials, receiving many death threats from the ultra-nationalists in the process. He had also been threatened by the İstanbul governor and two agents of the National Intelligence Agency (MIT) for writing in his newspaper about the Armenian origins of Sabiha Gökçen, who was not only the fĳirst female pilot of Turkey, butalso the adopted daughter of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the symbolic founder of the republic. Dink had asked for but did not receive police protection. He was about to take his legal case to the European Court of Human Rights when he was assassinated. During his funeral, about 200,000 protestors took to the streets, afffĳirming their solidarity with the victim against the perpetrators by chanting “We are all Hrant, we are all Armenians.” Even though a decade has passed since Dink’s death, those offfĳicers and offfĳicials within the state and governmentat th planned the assassination have still not been arrested and tried. In addition, the Turkish state and society are nowhere near acknowledging rampant state violence in the present, let alone in the past.

This article reinterprets the Dink assassination through the lenses of history, memory and emotions which manage, I argue, to go beyond the current ambiguous interpretations of this horrifĳic event. The article ommencesc with existing scholarly analyses of the Hrant Dink assassination, to then continue with the narratives of the Hrant Dink assassination told through the lenses of history, memory and emotions. It ends by concluding that the Dink assassination is yet another episode in systemic Turkish state violence.

Current Analyses of the Hrant Dink Assassination

To date, there are fĳive scholarly analyses in English analyzing the Hrant Dink assassination1. Interestingly, all female authors approach the assassination in a manner that articulates the complexity of public meanings and interpretations that the assassination generated in Turkey. Meltem Ahıska’s astute commentary was the fĳirst analysis to appear on the Hrant Dink assassination in the English-speaking medium. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s conceptualization of the divide between “what is no longer” and “what is not yet,”2 Ahıska argues that the inherent violence represents a crisis in Turkish nationalism, one that will probably not disappear, but instead survive through its connection with an “ethno-populism […] sustained by intimate relations and shared emotions. Three important concepts can be specifĳied through this connection: a pragmatism that is directly related to immediate interests; a nationalist fantasy staged to pretend that there is a genuine bonding among the people; and a violence that is always ready to intervene whenever a problem occurs.”3 After discussing the relation between Turkish nationalism and racism, Ahıska concludes on a hopeful yet skeptical note, wishing that “the moment of truth” the assassination has sparked among the populace [regarding the dangers of nationalism] would not disappear “in the political turmoil of the coming elections.”4 Yet, that moment has unfortunately vanished.

1 Meltem Ahıska, A Deep Fissure is Revealed after Hrant Dink’s Assassination, in: New Per- spectives on Turkey 26 (2007), pp. 155-164; Seyhan Bayraktar, Nothing but Ambiguous. The Killing of Hrant Dink in Turkish Discourse, in: Armenian Weekly, 26th April 2008, pp. 6-10; Gülay Türkmen-Dervişoğlu, Coming to Terms with a Difffĳicult Past. The Trauma of the Assassination of Hrant Dink and Its Repercussions on Turkish National Identity, in: Nations and Nationalism 19 (2013) 4, pp. 674-692; Daniella Kuzmanovic, Dead Bodies, Afffective States and Volatile Icons. An Iconology of Hrant Dink, in: Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 8 (2015), pp. 85-101; Alice von Biberstein, Surviving Hrant Dink. Carnal Mourning under the Specter of Senselessness, in: Social Analysis 61 (2017) 1, pp. 55-68. 2 See Ahıska, A Deep Fissure is Revealed after Hrant Dink’s Assassination (as cited in fn. 1), p. 155. 3 Ibid., p. 159 [italics in the original text]. 4 Ibid., p. 164.