Poor Hrant Dink, made as he said, into a pigeon, “equally obsessed by what goes-on on my left and right, front and back. My head is just as mobile and fast.” Worse than being killed is waiting to be killed. Here are a few excerpts from his final column before his death.
Those who tried to single me out and weaken me have succeeded. With the false information they oozed into society, they created a significant segment of the population who view Hrant Dink as someone who “insults Turkishness”.
The memory of my computer is filled with angry, threatening lines sent by citizens from this sector…
How real are these threats? To be honest, it is impossible for me to know for sure.
What makes his death so troubling is more than the state imposition of what the truth is to be regarding the death of 1,000,000 Turkish/Armenians in the early 1900s for being prematurely “anti-Turkish,” it is that all nations hold similar views — even those who condemn Drink’s death. What is the outrage in the US over flag burning, the almost yearly attempts to make it illegal but anger at “insulting Americanness”? You could make a list in an hour or two of those furious at their compatriots for “insulting Japaneseness, Chineseness, Germanness, Spanishness…” Perhaps the bar is lower for denigrating Turkishness than for denigrating Americanness. Perhaps not. Try suggesting at the Annual White House Press Association dinner that the US is directly responsible for tens of thousands of deaths in Central America in the last decades of the 20th century. See if the disdain meter doesn’t spike.