Letter from Istanbul

Our foreign correspondent, Phillip Grayson (a Magdalenian, I say with pride) is finally settled in Istanbul and sends a letter on the Hrant Dink matter.

Dink was an ethnic Armenian and a liberal in the best and true sense. He insisted on his Turkish as well as his Armenian identity and was no mere spokesman for the Armenian diaspora. A liberal in the true sense, he denounced the French law not allowing one to deny the Armenian genocide as well as the Turkish one denying it.

Here is Phillip:

Istanbul is mourning the death of Hrant Dink. The reporter was shot dead in front of his paper’s offices by a seventeen-year-old man. Conspiracy theories abound. It was Armenians trying to pull the country apart, French agents trying to ruin Turkey’s EU bid, so on, so forth. A massive swarm of mourners followed his corpse through the city to its grave. Many of the same people who protested outside Dink’s trial, calling him Anti-Turkish, an enemy of state, as he was convicted of violating law 301, the increasingly famous anti-free speech law that prohibits, “insulting Turkishness,” the same law that ensured Orhan Pamuk the Nobel Prize when he was tried under it, worded vaguely enough to convict almost anyone and interpreted even more loosely throughout the country. Essentially the law is used by the government to turn the Turkish people against liberal intellectuals. It worked very well with Dink, an ethnic Armenian Turk, succeeding in silencing him.
Conspiracy theories abound. The killer was arrested the day after the murder, wearing the same clothes, bright, distinctive hat and all, that he had been seen in through security cameras and numerous eye-witnesses, the same clothes he was wearing in images shown around the clock on every television channel in the country, carrying the gun he had used in the murder.
Conspiracy theories abound. The government denies that Dink had asked for protection before the murder. Two days before he was shot, Dink wrote that he felt like a pigeon, constantly looking over his shoulder, always on the lookout. It was clear to him, it was clear to everyone, that he was going to be killed.
Conspiracy theories abound here because the truth is obvious and illegal to state. Hrant Dink was murdered by Turkey, through article 301, because he wrote articles opposing the current administration.
It’s difficult for me to say what this means for Turkey. The shows of sympathy are encouraging, but plainly hypocritical. Pamuk remains largely despised throughout the country because of propaganda issued against him and the anti-Turkish stigma so easily applied with 301, so damaging in the eyes of a surprisingly touchy brand of nationalism. Dink was even more hated. The most encouraging message to be found from the entire situation seems to be that the Turkish people do not want to see opponents of the government murdered in the middle of busy city streets, they simply want them jailed or driven into exile.
I wanted to say that Istanbul straddles two continents, stretches from the Middle East to Europe, the Muslim world to the modern world, et c et c. I wanted to write about a girl in headscarf on the subway, whose long dress lifted slightly as she sat to reveal strappy spiked heels. This is a city of contradictions, that’s still true, but now, they seem more like conflicts.
It’s such a bizarre feeling, walking through this modern, civilized, often exhilarating city, and realizing that the government is still killing people over freedom of speech issues. It’s as though there is some dark tension straining to hold these vastly different worlds together, or perhaps struggling to push them apart, to take a more hopeful view.
So Istanbul is mourning Hrant Dink, and I mourn a little for Istanbul, and hate it a little, because the time for being heroic by speaking freely is long gone. There should be no need for courage in these matters. But apparently there is.