American Jewish Committee: Abolish 301

(Image: AmnestyInternational)

One of America's most respected Jewish organizations is calling on Turkey to abolish article 301, in the wake of Hrant Dink's assassination. The American Jewish Committee declared on January 24 that

Law 301 is widely believed to have created the atmosphere that encouraged those responsible for the murder of Hrant Dink, the Turkish Armenian editor of Agos, who was shot at his Istanbul office last Friday.

The AJC urged Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan to "take steps to guarantee the full rights of expression in the media and other forums."

The Manipulations of Alexandre Adler

Alexandre Adler

Hrant Dink must be turning in his grave about all the articles that have invoked him to argue for causes quite foreign to his own. While we might applaud the fact that Dink's murder has forced many Turks to speak out publicly against the nationalist ideology that caused his death, some unsavory characters have perversely seized the occasion to attack diaspora Armenians and the Republic of Armenia. Alexandre Adler's recent column in Le Figaro to me represents the height of this kind of cynicism.

Adler's essay crafts "connections" between ideas and events that are hallucinatory at best. After eulogizing Dink for one paragraph, Adler proceeds to launch into a vicious tirade against Armenia only to end with a melodramatic paean to the founder of post-Soviet Azerbaijan and the father of the state's current ruler:

Héros de l'Union soviétique, fils de mollah, excellent connaisseur de la poésie persane et patriote turc à la Mustafa Kemal, Haidar Aliev synthétisait ces courants culturels apparemment incompatibles, en tout cas aujourd'hui, en un espoir uto­pique pour demain : la grande alliance des trois cultures russe, turque et persane dans un nouvel ensemble producteur de laïcité et de démocratie.

[A USSR hero, son of a mullah, remarkable connoisseur of Persian poetry, and a patriotic Turk, Haidar Aliev combined those cultural currents which, at least today, seem incompatible, with a utopian hope for tomorrow: the great alliance of three cultures - Russian, Turkic, and Persian in a new fusion producing secularism and democracy.]

Adler then has the audacity to declare that

Si un jour nous parvenons à réaliser cette ambition, on se souviendra de Dink comme de l'un des héros stoïques de cette indispensable longue marche

[If one day we manage to achieve this ambition, we will remember Dink as one of the stoic heroes of this long, vital march.]

Adler's enlistment of Dink in his ode to Haidar Aliev is distasteful enough, as is his characterization of Armenia as a "violent, aggressive, and inept" country. But even more insidious is Adler's effort to link Armenia to Russian and Arab terrorism, and, along the way, to establish some kind of moral equivalence between the genocide of 1915 and Armenians' alleged crimes in recent times:

Certes, la Turquie devrait avancer avec retenue et dignité vers une prise en compte de plus en plus lucide de la tragédie de 1915, mais l'Arménie d'aujourd'hui a aussi son chemin à accomplir pour conjurer une bonne fois pour toutes son alliance faustienne avec les éléments les plus terroristes de l'ex-Union soviétique et du monde arabe, le moment Asala, si on cherche à lui donner un nom.

[Surely, Turkey must advance with self-restraint and dignity toward a more and more lucid accounting of the tragedy of 1915. But today's Armenia also has a ways to travel to conjure {i.e., "do away with"} once and for all its Faustian deal with the most terrorist elements of the former Soviet Union and the Arab world, the Asala moment, if one is looking for a name to give it.]

Few would deny that Armenia, like a host of other former Soviet republics, is experiencing some serious problems. The most serious challenge facing the country is the ongoing blockade against it by Turkey, and by Azerbaijan, with which it continues to be embroiled in a conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh. Other troubles include corruption and authoritarian tendencies among some of its leaders - tendencies that are abundant elsewhere in the region (indeed, Azerbaijan probably takes the prize). But to link Armenia to Islamist or ex-Soviet terrorism is an insidious lie.

Asala (the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia) was a terrorist group active in the late 1970s and until the early 1980s, which assassinated Turkish diplomats in the West. It was founded and based in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war. But it had no connection at all to Armenia, which in any case was a Soviet republic then. Nor was it ever embraced by the vast majority of Armenians in the diaspora.

Finally, as horrible as the actions of the now defunct group may seem today, anyone who seeks to compare them with the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians is nothing but a vicious demagogue.

On top of all this, after linking Armenia to the attempted assassination of John Paul II (a connection that seems as solid as the visions produced by the mushrooms he must have ingested), Adler also manages to drag the Jews into the whole mess, of course on his side. As if the innuendo about Armenian connections to Arab terror weren't enough, he praises Haidar Aliev as someone "qui aurait banni ... racisme et antisémitisme" [who would have exiled racism and antisemitism].

Both advocates for the recognition of the Armenian Genocide as well as their opponents have appealed specifically to Jews and their historical experience to aid their respective causes. One canard circulating among various denialist groups is the claim that Armenians were or are antisemitic, which is part of a transparent effort to impugn Armenian credibility and to provoke antipathy toward the cause of genocide recognition among Jews. Adler seems to be employing a similar strategy by linking Armenians to Arab terrorism, while presenting Aliev as a heroic vanquisher of antisemitism. I think I speak for many Jews when I say that I want no part in Adler's dangerous game.

Reactions after a Tragedy

Today was Hrant Dink’s funeral in Istanbul's Armenian cathedral. The event brought 100,000 people to the street, Turks and Armenians united in their mourning for the journalist and in anger toward the Turkish state. With their presence around Dink today and their demand for an explanation other than the crazy face of a lone teenage nationalist, this crowd gives some credit to the following lines I wrote a couple of hours after the killing.

First, Hrant Dink was no vociferous nationalist. He saw his struggle in Turkey as one for democratization and freedom of speech. The fact that he talked openly about the Armenian Genocide was meant to open up a space for expression on the subject which is a very strong taboo in the country. He had managed to change things a little bit. Something like the beginning of a change could be felt from the Turkish civil society on which Dink and others, such as Zarakolu, Orhan Pamuk, Halil Berktay, and Taner Akçam had placed all their hopes for democratization, and, linked to it, recognition of the genocide. Concerning such subjects as joining the EU, Dink was in favour of it, because he reckoned that this was a way for his country to advance on democratization.

Secondly, we can already see that the Turkish government is trying to present this crime as an attack against Turkey, saying that the killers are trying to destabilize the country, and to divide citizens from different religions. They also pretend, as always, that Armenians there live with no trouble, when the reality is that the 57,000 Armenians remaining in Turkey, who live mainly in Istanbul, can hardly identify in public as Armenians and are subject to all kinds of discrimination. Worse, the government wants to make the death of Dink a common outrage to all democrats, including themselves obviously. Erdogan has declared that this murder was "a bullet fired at democratization and freedom of speech" in Turkey. This is a total shame, given that the very same Dink was on trial last year for having touched the limits of democracy and freedom of speech in his country - limits which we know to be very low- that is for having used the G-word. He was condemned to a 6-months suspended sentence for this reason, convicted of having insulted Turkish identity, under article 301 of the penal code.

Turkish here share a part of the responsibility in distorting the meaning of what happened. Their ignorance, added to the political line of each of them, making them write nonsense. Since Friday, I’ve read that Dink was unwelcome in the Diaspora and in Armenia because his opinions were not those of the majority; allegedly because the Diaspora is made of extremists who don’t want any reconciliation with Turkey; allegedly because Armenia has something else on its plate than genocide recognition, and that hard economic realities made this issue disappear. Today, 2,000 people gathered in Yerevan at the same time that the funeral was taking place. Certainly, we Armenians are not of one mind on how to further genocide recognition; but we are united about the necessity of achieving it and we are of one heart about what Dink was doing, saying and writing in Turkey. If those same media had taken a look at the reactions all around the Armenian world, at the commemorations in all Armenian churches since Friday, they would not have written such silly things.

I’ve also read articles toeing the line of Turkey’s Prime Minister, saying that this crime was in fact directed against the Turkish state. And now, four days after the tragedy, four days after having spread absurdities, I don’t hear anything anymore. Silence, disinterest, oblivion. And I can’t help but noticing the huge difference between similar cases. Anna Politovskaya, well-known Russian journalist and human rights activist in her country, was killed last October. For days and days, even weeks, that was a big topic in the media; Putin was the target of accusations, and the opportunity was seized to recall what was going on in Chechnya. In Istanbul, a lot of people whether Armenian or Turkish, want explanations.

I believe that unless Turkish civil society and its intellectual leaders sincerely committed to democratization claim justice for Hrant Dink’s murder, and satisfaction on the issues he was struggling for, nothing will come out of it. All I can do is hope that their reaction will be strong enough to sustain a wave of change such as the crowd of this morning was promising.

Hrant Dink

Just now I heard on the news that Hrant Dink, a brave man, whom I had the privilege of hearing at Berkeley last year, was killed on the street today. Dink, the editor of the Armenian-Turkish weekly Agos, frequently in the news in Turkey for "insulting Turkishness," was 53 years old.