Abstract
The murder of Hrant Dink remains a trauma for Turkish society. Five years on,
During a dramatically snowy week in Istanbul last January, the trial of Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian journalist who was assassinated in 2007, came to an awkward and unsatisfying conclusion. Two men directly involved with the murder were convicted, but no acknowledgement was made of the political forces that organised and made possible such a masterfully executed killing. A few days after the verdict, more than 40,000 people marched from Istanbul’s Taksim Square to the offices of Dink’s newspaper Agos, to commemorate the fifth anniversary of his death. The march quickly turned into a political meeting as thousands of people protested the verdict, chanting the slogan: ‘This is not over until we say so.’ For the protesters who marched on that cold January day, those convicted were no more than the tip of the iceberg. The crowd demanded the government investigate the case further, with the firm belief that a more sinister and complex story was still to be uncovered.
When I decided to talk to Turkish dissidents to gain a deeper understanding of the tragic fate of many intellectuals in the country, two images haunted me: the ceaseless snow and the shadow of Dink’s murder. A week before the protests, I met Murat Belge, a professor of comparative literature, who is considered to be among Turkey’s leading dissidents. Five years ago he had stood on the pavement where his friend Dink had just been murdered. The sight of the tens of thousands of people who quickly gathered that night to protest the killing shocked but also partly reassured him. He told me how he had never expected such a reaction, but that it at least gave him something to be proud of on that ominous day.
Demonstrators hold banners reading ‘We all are Hrant, we are all Armenian’ after an Istanbul court rejects allegations that Dink’s murder was the result of an organised conspiracy. It is also the anniversary of Dink’s murder, 19 January 2012
Credit: EPA/Alamy
Belge has been studying Turkish society for a long time. Four decades ago, he founded the monthly political magazine Birikim, which introduced the ideas of the French theorist Louis Althusser to Turkish socialists and played a decisive role in influencing many Turkish communists to become dissidents of the regime. Belge is also the publisher of Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s Nobel Laureate, who shares a similarly scrutinising view of the authoritative tendencies in Turkish culture.
Belge played a formative role during my own university years. As a lecturer on Romantic poetry, he taught me iambic pentameter, along with the Lake Poets and the political responsibilities that come with being a dissenting writer. An influential political commentator, he also happens to be the Turkish translator of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. With his long beard and wisely smiling eyes, Belge physically resembles Joyce’s similarly witty and passionate compatriot George Bernard Shaw.
During the 1970s, Belge worked as an assistant in the English department of Istanbul University while also participating in the political activities of a radical leftist group. The department of English played a decisive role in his life and was founded in 1939 by Halide Edip Adıvar, a major novelist, English scholar and dissident of the Republican era, later denounced as a traitor by the regime for her criticisms of its authoritarian practices. Located in Turkey’s oldest university, the literature department also prides itself for having provided a safe haven to Eric Auerbach, the founder of the discipline of comparative literature, during the Nazi era.
After the military coup of 1971, Belge was arrested for his political activities. He was tortured and jailed for two years. Long afterwards, in an interview, he identified among his torturers a Turkish general, who is currently serving a prison sentence for his role in the political group Ergenekon which allegedly planned the assassinations of high-profile dissidents, including Hrant Dink. Belge was held in the notorious Ziverbey Kiosk in Kadıköy where high-ranking generals interrogated and tortured those they considered enemies of the Turkish state.
A decade later, when Belge was an assistant professor of English literature in Istanbul University, he was forced to resign from his tenure following the 1980 coup. Those were the Kenan Evren years, named after the general who pledged to put an end to what he saw as the chaos caused by Turkish dissidents. All political activities were outlawed by the generals and Turkish socialists were forced once again to go underground. In a seminal essay published in the New Left Review, ‘The Tragedy of the Turkish Left’, Belge gave an account of how Turkish socialists dealt with the issue of political violence – of which they were victims during the coups. He came to the conclusion that, for various sections of the left, ‘the question of power became an obsession’ and ‘the fetishisation of “immediate” power and “total” struggle drew the left further and further away from reality’. The left, in other words, was forced to be forceful, pushed towards authoritarianism by the regime.
When I met him to discuss the situation of Turkish dissidents today, Belge seemed to have retained this perspective. I could instantly see that his outlook as an intellectual was deeply suspicious of militant forms of socialism. My impression was confirmed when Belge made a practical distinction between a political opponent and a dissident. The former merely seeks to have a grip on power, he argued, while the latter struggles to undermine and deconstruct it. For most of his life, Belge’s sympathies have lain with the latter; he believes that the regime perceived dissidents as the greater threat and that was among the reasons they were singled out.
As we walked towards a restaurant in the university campus where we planned to conduct the interview, a young student wearing a headscarf approached Belge and asked a question about her exam results. Moments later, a gay activist invited him to a meeting. As a long-time supporter of freedom of expression and human rights, Belge seems to be a favourite with political student groups. The usual custom in Turkey is to show solidarity with one’s own political allies, but Belge plays a different game. In his adamant support for the rights of conservatives, progressives and ethnic minorities alike, he has made friends across Turkish society with those who feel wronged and oppressed by the regime. And ironically, once added together, the marginalised may even prove to be a majority rather than a minority in the country.
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Belge emphasises the importance of being a dissident rather than a mere opponent to the regime and illustrated his point. ‘Think of an oil well,’ he says. ‘Two groups of men approach it. We have those who follow the ruler and those who follow his opponent. Both discuss but fail to come to an agreement on the best method to drill the largest possible amount of oil from the well. And then another character appears and asks them: “Hey guys, why do we need this oil in the first place? Why don’t we give up on drilling entirely and look for alternative sources of energy instead?”‘
The usual custom is to show solidarity with one’s own allies
Belge has asked similarly fundamental questions during his career as a lecturer and publisher. Now in his 60s, his findings can scarcely be said to be optimistic. ‘The sad fact is that there has never been dissidence in Turkey,’ he says. ‘When I look at the so-called opponents of the government, they fail to convince me that there will indeed be a significant difference when they exercise power themselves.’ To illustrate his argument, he pointed to how almost nobody struggled against the industrialisation process which accompanied the foundation of the Turkish Republic. Industrialisation meant power and authority and everyone wanted to be a part of this new phenomenon, which made any form of dissent intolerable. ‘Never did we have intellectuals like Gandhi in this country,’ Belge says, ‘whereas a profound analysis of the industrialisation process would actually prove crucial for the left to redefine itself.’ The first wave of Turkish dissidents included figures such as Adıvar and Mustafa Suphi, the latter being the leader of Turkish communists. He later drowned in the Black Sea alongside his comrades in what many believed to be a massacre organised by the regime. Belge acknowledges Suphi’s assassination as one of the earliest cases of its kind in Turkey. He also points to how, after the massacre of communists whose sympathies lay with the Soviets, the founders of the Republic quickly pulled significant names from the left inside the tent to avoid the emergence of an independent popular movement: the founder of the Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, had asked the communists to work within the frame of the state rather than allying with the Soviets. As a result, many leftists quickly came to an agreement with the regime and gathered around the influential Kadro magazine, channelling their dissent into a statist movement instead. Belge’s own father, Burhan Belge, was one of those young men whose early socialist ideals were sacrificed for an administrative position in the government. He, and others who made the same compromise, then had to accept the hegemony of the one-party regime. Many intellectuals who had been in opposition during the first three decades of the Turkish Republic now found themselves in the similarly uncomfortable position of being allies of the state or at best toothless opponents. Belge believes that both groups were obsessed with grasping the political power of the Turkish state.
Murat Belge arrives at an Istanbul court house, protected by police officers, 7 February 2006
Credit: Ahmet Ada/Reuters
During the 1980s, Belge became one of the leading figures on the Turkish left. When Polish general Wojciech Jaruzelski imposed martial law in Poland in 1981, Belge compared the militarist character of his regime to the Turkish coup of 1980. Both coups aimed to defend a regime the generals feared was undermined by its people. ‘I was working for a leftist newspaper at the time,’ Belge says. ‘The editors, like many leftists in the country, secretly supported Jaruzelski’s rule; in fact they secretly supported the Turkish coup as well, believing the generals had saved their regimes from destruction. In the beginning, the US administration supported the Turkish military, but when it later criticised its human rights abuses, the general staff took an anti-US stance and started talking about sovereignty and national values. Many leftists who secretly supported the military now openly embraced its anti-US stance for that was precisely the thing they understood from the word “socialism”: an armed opposition to the US.’ This resembled what Belge in his New Left Review piece called the ‘tragedy’ of the Turkish left: a vicious circle that not only destroys its political enemies but also manages to recreate them in its own image.
Belge first met Hrant Dink in 1993 during a conference of the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly, a non-governmental organisation working for human rights and pluralism, whose Turkish branch Belge had founded in the early 1990s. When I asked about his initial impressions of Dink, Belge characterised him as an affectionate, passionate intellectual who was uncomfortable with mainstream politics. Belge believes that Dink’s pacifist, anti-mainstream stance was among the reasons that led to his assassination. ‘Let me give you an example,’ he said. ‘Before his assassination, we visited Yerevan together. I remember coming across a statue of an ancient Armenian military commander. I asked him who he was. “He has a sword, don’t you see, don’t you understand?” Dink replied. “When you are ready to kill someone, when you have a sword in your hand, it is enough for them to erect a statue of you.”
‘This was the perspective for which he was murdered. The state apparatus has in fact no problem with Armenian hardliners. If you have a nationalist agenda, be it Turkish or Armenian, that position is acceptable in the sense that it is politically clear. But if you are a dissenter, like Dink was, then they can’t place you anywhere. I believe that when they killed him, they killed “love”’, he says with a grieving voice. ‘Love is not an easy thing to get rid of so they killed Dink instead for he represented exactly that: a form of love and affection.’
In 2008, Belge was among those who organised an academic conference about Armenians in the Ottoman period, where Dink gave a moving speech about how deeply-rooted Turkish Armenians had always been in Turkey. ‘People were so afraid about the whole conference,’ Belge says. ‘They thought if we discussed the Armenian issue in Turkey there would be a catastrophe. But nothing of the sort happened. Swallows continued to fly, flowers were still blossoming and rivers floated peacefully by.’
I was reminded of these words when, as I left Belge that evening, a large flock of swallows flew above me and disappeared into the black night. The next day they were nowhere to be seen. It was a brighter day but still freezing. I hopped onto a ferry to reach Kadıköy, a neighbourhood located on İstanbul’s Anatolian side. During a windy trip I stayed indoors, looking at a children’s book, The Nocturnal Sun, and a young adult novel, When The Moon Meets the Sea, both written by Karin Karakaşlı, a young Turkish-Armenian author and translator whose life changed dramatically when she met Hrant Dink more than a decade ago. After editing the culture section of Dink’s newspaper Agos for many years, she is now a lecturer in the university as well as a prolific writer.
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Karakaşlı is fluent in Armenian, German, English and Turkish. One of the most interesting figures to emerge in a new wave of Turkish writers who define themselves as political dissidents, I first met her at a Winternachten meeting three years ago, where we both participated in a discussion about the politics of fiction. I remember how she gave a touching speech about the moment she heard of the death of her dear friend; knowing the sensitivity of the issue, I decided not to mention the name of Dink during our interview. But as I met her in a Kadıköy cafe overlooking the Bosphorus, Dink’s figure clearly cast a shadow over us and, without mentioning his name, we gradually became aware that we were, in a sense, talking about his legacy.
Hrant is not a court case. He is an unclosed wound
During the 1980s, Karakaşlı was a great fan of children’s books, including Hans Christian Andersen’s tales. When she wrote a children’s book herself almost three decades later, she understood that it was all about creating a sense of justice, a concept that had long been a central issue for her after witnessing many injustices committed against those perceived to be on the margins: ‘Children’s books are never innocent,’ Karakaşlı told me. ‘In fact they are dangerous in the sense that they raise fundamental questions about the origins of things. If they stop asking questions and become didactic, then the careful look of the child immediately perceives the bossy tone and loses interest. Therefore writing a book for a younger audience proved to be an extremely edifying process for me.’
Karakaşlı has a rare position as a writer who inhabits four languages and four cultures. ‘German has a privileged place for me,’ she said. ‘It is a culture that I find very distant, but that distance proved to have a liberating effect on me. I love Berlin for the same reasons. There is a bit of everything there and nobody judges you for who you are. To be able to have such a hybrid culture in the land of the so-called “Aryan race” is without a doubt an immense historical irony.’
The multiculturalism she described sounded fine, but what about Turkey? From her answer I could understand how she found it very difficult to agree with the politics of the mainstream parties. Karakaşlı has little sympathy for the main opposition party CHP, the Republican People’s Party, which regularly denies any historical wrongdoing during the early years of the Republic. But she is also worried by the political manoeuvres of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his ruling party, even though they publicly apologised for the massacres of Turkey’s Kurdish population in the 1930s. Karakaşlı told me how she was irritated by the use of history for political ends. The latest furore in the media, following the French Senate’s passing of a law that made the denial of the Armenian genocide a crime for French citizens, created a very uncomfortable atmosphere in Turkey, as was expected. The nationalist sentiment was once again on the rise and the discourse of the main political parties became extremely defensive towards historical issues. For all those reasons Karakaşlı considers her politics to be outside the mainstream. ‘During last year’s elections, for example, every choice seemed equally false to me,’ she says.
Karakaşlı works for an Armenian high school where she teaches Armenian to a class of 17 year olds. I asked her to describe her students’ responses to the public discussion of Turkish-Armenian issues. ‘These students possess a special ethnic background and they dislike prejudices,’ she said. ‘Some way or other, they are wounded by what they read in history books which are infamous for their presentation of Turkish Armenians as no better than a bunch of enemies and traitors.’
During the time Karakaşlı worked for Agos newspaper, Hrant Dink was accused of insulting Turkishness in one of his articles, a crime under the infamous Article 301 of the Turkish penal code. Even though she was associated with the case primarily through her responsibility as an editor, the event had a lasting impact: the trial was used to present Dink as a traitor to the country. When I asked her about whether the authorities still intimidate Agos with threats of prosecution, she pointed to how the very survival of Article 301 was a sign of the ongoing limitations. ‘Sarkis Saropyan, an editor of Agos, was condemned to one year in prison alongside Hrant’s son, Arat Dink,’ she says. ‘And that verdict came after Dink was murdered.’ She also described Turkish dissidents’ concerns at a speech given last December by the current Interior Minister Idris Sahin in which he accused Turkey’s musicians, artists and authors of collaborating with terrorists.
‘Politicians still do such things, but when you look at society in general, lots has changed and many things are accomplished. People can talk freely about their sense of injustice and about unjust things that were done to them. But those who organised military coups and massacres in Turkey’s history also accomplished their own triumphs. All the aggrieved groups seem to be reduced to their own sufferings after all. We are forced to ignore the pains of others. Everyone therefore feels alone with their own grief. And this, I believe, has to change.’
Hours later the snow finally left Istanbul. I remembered Karakaşlı’s words as I walked through the crowds gathering in Taksim Square on the anniversary of Hrant Dink’s assassination. ‘The rhetoric of democratisation is not at all convincing unless the Dink murder is conclusively solved,’ she had said. ‘I am not saying this as a close friend of Dink, and even less so as an Armenian. An injustice was done to a man who demanded justice, and until we pass the threshold that is the solving of his case, Turkey can hardly be called a democratic state.’ The recent verdict in the murder trial outraged almost everyone in the country. The president, the prime minister, the leaders of the opposition, even the lawyers of the accused and the judge himself criticised the verdict for failing to acknowledge the political motives behind the murder. From the tragedy of Turkey’s left to the tragedy of Turkey’s dissidents, a sinister atmosphere hung over Taksim Square. As tourists looked in awe at the gradually growing crowd walking in the direction of Agos, I remembered Murat Belge’s response when he saw how tens of thousands of people reacted to the murder committed five years ago.
At 3 o’clock sharp, the exact hour of Dink’s assassination, Karakaşlı herself appeared on the balcony of the newspaper, saluting more than 40,000 people. Never have I seen so many marching together, even at the rallies of mainstream parties. This is the solidarity of those who have felt wronged by history, the solidarity of outsiders. ‘Hrant is not a case to be closed,’ Karakaşlı says in the same intimate voice she used with me a day earlier. ‘No, he is not a court case. Hrant is an unclosed wound.’ As the crowds took in the significance of these words, a sense of unity spread across their faces. For the first time that week I suddenly felt a little bit warmer. ❒