The Armenian Weekly April 2014 Magazine
Seven years have passed since Hrant Dink’s assassination and those who planned his murder remain free. While the search for justice continues with a second round of trials, there seems to be insufficient political will to uncover the truth. With these new trials, I am reminded of Karl Marx’s famous adage about history repeating itself—the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Frustrating as this may be, political will is precisely what preve
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Regards from Turkey, friends,
I am sure 99.9% of the population of Turkey knows nothing about Talat Pasha. I think Dr. Akcam assumes that the murderers have the same intellectual skills and historical knowledge that he has. Hrant was killed by ignorant nationalist. Samast had very little knowledge even about Hrant, let alone the Armenian heritage. The similarities between two murders, except Hayal’s scanty knowledge on Talat Pasha’s death, seem mostly arbitrary.
A call to all humanist friends: we should keep fighting peacefully for the victims of the Armenian Genocide and their legacy. But also there is a genocide, apartheid, occupation and state-terror committed everyday by Israel for more than six decades. We should stand firm and united against all violations of human dignity: that is the legacy of Hrant Dink and Edward Said.
Peace,
Dogan,
I appreciate your post for several reasons, but disagree with your dismissal of the thesis. The issue is not what the average Turk or even the average nationalist anti Armenian knows.
Are not Dogu Perincek and his ilk members of a Talaat Pasha Society with chapters in Europe? Is not his Mausoleum of Talaat “sacred ground” to such persons? The trigger-puller and immediate supervisors may have been ignorant, but they did not devise the plan, someone very high up in the deep state did.
“The comparison works despite the fact that Prime Minister Erdogan attempted to resolve the Kurdish problem through peaceful means and has apologized—albeit half-heartedly and with the actual intention of needling the Republican Peoples Party and earning credit with voters—on behalf of the state for the massacres at Dersim in 1937-38.”
I wholeheartedly disagree here. Yes, he took a shot at CHP in his apology, but for once I believe that the “other” factors played only a secondary role to Erdogan’s sincerity here. The government owed us Alevis an apology and we got one. I’ve said this many times, if you want to criticize someone over the Dersim apology issue you need to focus your attention on CHP’s pathetic excuse of a leader, politician, and man Kemal Kilicdaroglu- who, by the way, is a Kurdish Alevi from Dersim. What was this Kurdish Alevi from Dersim’s response to Erdogan’s apology?
“I wouldn’t be surprised if this Prime Minister soon forces the ‘Armenian Genocide’ allegations on us too. The target is Ataturk, you want to get to him, you want to criticize him. We’ve faced our past [as CHP],our past is clean.”
Absolutely pathetic.
So yes, Erdogan “needled” the Republican Peoples Party in his apology. But you’ll have to excuse me for not writing off his apology simply because Erdogan’s apology for Dersim implicated our Lord and Savior Mustafa Kemal Pasha and his political party.
A heartful thank to Mr. Akcam for his soul-stirring analysis. On the question of freedom and justice, however I can’t quite agree with the assumption that they are “separate issues and that the attainment of one does not automatically bring about the righting of past injustices”. True, they are separate issues, but are in the meantime interrelated and the attainment of one can’t but help the realization of the other in the long run.