From the Head Fellow: Kwf Loses a Friend Named Hrant Dink
By Charles R. Eisendrath ’75
Hrant Dink joined Charles and the class of ’05 at lunch to discuss Armenian history.
Hrant Dink, the Armenian conscience of Turkey, died on the sidewalk last January outside the Agos newspaper office where we met with him last year and were scheduled to see him in February. In Turkey, freedom of the press is quite new, circumscribed and as ephemeral as the melody of Hrant’s favorite song. The music shop next door had been playing it nonstop since his murder.
This was a moment to think about what Hrant Dink did with his career, how we were conducting ours, and the multiple insights of a trip organized by Ferhat Boratav of CNN Türk, our exchange partner.
What so affected us isn’t just the calling we shared in this, the bloodiest decade in the history of journalism. In Agos’ cramped little editor’s office, we also sensed Hrant’s life’s work reaching out to us from the jumble of old newspapers, new books and timeless mementoes although it was his best friend and successor who greeted us. A week of conversations with academics, generals, journalists, business and religious figures had shown us that nobody whose life touched Hrant’s wants to let go of him. He had represented hope that one of Turkey’s demons might finally now die, nearly a century after the massacres that gave it life. The murder of one more Armenian Turk, the gentlest, most rational of men, assured renewed potency for the poison that emerges with each aftershock of “The Armenian Events of 1915–18.”
Most Fellows arrive thinking the controversy is about whether the killings actually happened or how many died. They quickly learn otherwise. What counts is what you call the massacres. To many Turkish Armenians, they must be called genocide. To every Turkish government since the events, the most important thing is that they be called something else—anything else. Part of the issue is international opprobrium. More than that, however, or even the sanctions and legal liabilities that attach to “genocide,” Armenians feel they own the term the way Jews feel proprietary about “holocaust.” It signifies their tragedy, to them worse than any other. Surrender the word and theirs is just one more slaughter. Somehow the other side wins. Oddly, other basic questions can be discussed without difficulty. How many died: 500,000? 1,500,000? Who killed them: Soldiers? Turkish neighbors? Kurdish neighbors? Equally strangely, there isn’t much debate about why, perhaps because genocide, if accepted, makes the question an oxymoron.
One purpose of the trip echoes our visit to Argentina arranged by its leading daily, Clarín—looking at a controversy about which many think they understand the facts. The visits begin with the element of why, which is natural. But why can raise unexpected questions. In the six years KWF has visited Buenos Aires and talked to the “Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo,” I can’t recall a single American Fellow new to South America who arrived understanding the why of the Dirty War. Answer: a Marxist guerrilla movement produced popular demand for military intervention, which turned to revulsion at the murder, torture, baby theft and the generals’ humiliation by Britain in the Malvinas/ Falklands war.
In Turkey, the Fellows’ first encounters with the Armenian Events often produced blank stares. Out of context, so many deaths seem Hitlerian (or Rwandan)—ethnic attack not preceded by armed conflict. But the worst slaughter was part of the First World War, one of the bloodiest ever. Th e Ottoman Empire had sided with Germany and was losing on all fronts. Russia, the hereditary enemy, invaded from the East, causing uprisings from Armenians fighting for an independent homeland. Struggling to manage its enormous casualties, impending defeat, loss of a 600-year-old empire and possible occupation, the Ottoman answer was relocation of Armenians from across the empire into central and then southeastern Anatolia and Syria. Hundreds upon hundreds of thousands died of hunger, disease—and deadly assault.
Were there atrocities? Assuredly. Were they genocide? Many experts, including Donald Bloxham in “The Great Game of Genocide,” answer yes, although with the wartime context complicating the definition. But KWF discussions surfaced other issues, such as American massacres of civilians in 1945, also at the end of a world war: the 35,000 non-combatant Germans killed by the British/American firebombing of Dresden? Or the more than 210,000 lives vaporized in the American nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
The point of KWF travels is not to answer questions. It is to wrestle with accepted wisdom. That’s where good journalistic thinking begins.
