The last Armenian

__Sungur Savran

"We're all Hrant, we're all Armenians!" So chanted the hundreds of thousands of marchers, mostly Turkish and Kurdish, in Istanbul on Tuesday 23 January 2006 during the funeral procession of Hrant Dink, the foremost representative of the Armenian community in Turkey and a leftist.

Hrant was assassinated a few days earlier in broad daylight in one of the busiest business districts of Istanbul on a Friday afternoon, the most hectic of times for business in Istanbul. In an incredible show of audacity, a seventeen-year old gunman approached him as he was leaving the office building of the weekly paper of which he was editor-in-chief, shot him in cold blood three times in the head and swiftly ran away under the frightful gaze of the shopkeepers and others in the area. Hrant died immediately. His body was kept waiting in the street barely covered with what seemed to be a large sheet of paper for nearly two hours-as if the police wanted everyone, onlookers and those who watched the scene on television, to measure the scary fate that awaits all who oppose the oppressive regime in Turkey. The assassin was caught swiftly only 32 hours after the assassination-a very uncommon situation in a country where files on most political assassinations are finally shelved under the heading "unknown perpetrator".

Armenian genocide

For a whole decade after the initiation of his journal Agos, Hrant had challenged the overwhelmingly dominant attitude of denial in Turkey concerning the genocide of 1915. As most of the world is aware by now, in 1915, the Ottoman Empire, the predecessor of the Republic of Turkey, resorted to mass deportation of the majority of the Armenians of Asia Minor and an estimated one and a half million men, women and children, overwhelmingly non-combatants, were massacred in the process. Apart from those living in Istanbul, capital to the empire, Armenians were virtually wiped off the whole territory that is now Turkey. The atrocities of 1915 have officially been denied by the republican state. However, the official view has come under increasing criticism in recent years on the part of a host of left-wing intellectuals and the socialist and Kurdish movements. Nonetheless, the majority of the people keep on believing that it was the Armenians who were to blame for what is considered to have been "mutual carnage" between the two sides. In nationalist parlance, even the word "Armenian" is something of an insult. Official mouths have regularly characterised Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the Kurdish guerrilla organisation PKK, as "Armenian seed", with the purpose of denigrating him in the eyes of the public. The fact that the Armenian is deemed to be more lowly than the Kurd goes to say a lot on the status of the Armenians in Turkey.

Recent years have also witnessed an immense rise in Turkish chauvinistic nationalism in general, orchestrated by the General Staff of the armed forces and down to the most "respectable" and pro-EU ideologues of the bourgeoisie. The real target is the Kurdish people, but the Armenians receive their fair share, too. Hrant himself was constantly a victim of racist slander and questioning on the part of some of the chauvinist ideologues. He was invited to speak very often on TV, sometimes for genuine debates with the holders of the "Turkish thesis" on the genocide (i.e. pure denial), but almost as often with the intention of taking him to task for his supposed hostility to the Turkish nation. This overall chauvinistic atmosphere contributed, without a shred of doubt, to his cowardly assassination.

More important still is the fact that the Turkish judiciary system paved the way to this tragic event, by convicting him on the basis of the notorious article 301 of the Turkish Criminal Code, which punishes the "crime" of "denigrating Turkness". (The latest Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk was also tried on the basis of this article, but acquitted as opposed to Hrant, who was the only one to be convicted on the basis of this article.) It is the peak of irony that the single sentence for which Hrant was convicted was, in fact, written to criticise Armenian nationalism for its fixation on "the Turk". Although very outspoken on the issue of the Armenian genocide, Hrant was no Armenian nationalist. A true internationalist, his real aim was to lay the basis for a fraternisation between the Armenian and Turkish peoples and in working towards this he frequently came into clash with the more nationalistic elements of the Armenian diaspora in Europe and the US. In his convicted article he was once again criticising Armenian nationalism for its failure to overcome its obsession with the past and "the Turk". In a key sentence, he wrote that once the poison that came from "the Turk" was evicted, the blood of the Armenian would be purified etc. The whole context made it clear that the concept "the Turk" here referred not to the Turkish people itself, but the ghost of the Turkish enemy in the imagination of the Armenians. In a further irony, the stylistic mastery of an author whose mother tongue was not Turkish but Armenian proved to be beyond the comprehension of a host of respectable Turkish judges and he was convicted to six months in prison for denigrating "Turkness"!

This assassination will certainly take its toll on the Armenian community in Turkey. Hrant was the real secular leader of the community, even challenging the up to now unquestioned power of the Istanbul patriarch of the Armenian Gregorian Church, the spiritual leader of the community. His violent death has no doubt sent shivers throughout the community. It will be no surprise if a majority of Turkish Armenians should decide to emigrate in coming years. Hence, the assassination may serve as the last drop that accomplishes the "final solution" of the Armenian question that the genocide of 1915 had aspired to.

An official conspiracy?

This assassination is the last in a series of hundreds of political assassinations in Turkey since the late sixties and early seventies. What the socialist left had been saying all along was grudgingly confirmed in 1997, when after a car accident that killed several undercover agents of the Turkish state, an immense amount of evidence about the activities of a semi-official counterinsurgency organisation ("kontrgerilla") came to broad daylight. Since the evidence was too clear to be covered up, even the Prime Minister's office had an official report written on the issue in 1997. Without mincing its words, the report bluntly stated that it was what in Turkish political terminology has come to be called the "deep state" that had planned and executed the assassination of hundreds, even thousands of opponents, including Kurdish, socialist, trade-union or even plain liberal democratic figures.

Hence, nowadays no one believes that this kind of political assassination is the making of "lone wolves" or lunatics. The majority know perfectly well that Hrant's assassination is the work of state agents (a mixture of military, intelligence and police officials) working hand in glove with select fascist militants (the so-called "grey wolves"), elements of the Turkish mafia and repentant ex-PKK guerrillas enlisted by the Turkish state. The fact that Hrant's assassin was caught in almost a matter of hours raises certain questions, but is not unprecedented under the AKP government. The real challenge is to trace the clues to the original planners of these assassinations and in this the present government has had no more success than previous ones. So the apprehension of the seventeen year-old murderer of Hrant hides more than it reveals.

The response of the masses

Given this overall picture, the fact that the funeral procession mobilised between 200 and 300 thousand people for a march that extended over an eight-kilometre route is itself impressive. However, more impressive still is the series of slogans that were popularly chanted during the procession. (We should note in passing that the organisers of the funeral ceremony are predominantly left liberals from ÖDP (the Party of Freedom and Solidarity) and they tried, in vain, to impose on the marchers a "silent march". Such idiocy can rarely be matched since the abominable nature of the murder and the rage it provoked warranted combative slogans. ) Most striking among those slogans was, of course, the previously quoted "We are all Hrant, we are all Armenians!" This slogan is iconoclastic in a country where "Armenian" and "evil and base" are still regarded as synonymous in very large circles. Other very radical slogans laid the blame on the state directly: "Here's the state, here's the genocide!", "The state's the murderer, accounts will be settled!", and "The strings of the murderers are in the hands of the pachas!" ("Pacha" is the word for army generals, used commonly in daily parlance).

The crowd was a mixed bag. The middle and even upper middle classes were over-represented. They usually keep away from the streets, but this time they were severely worried by the harm done to the "image" of Turkey in the eyes of the West. A host of hypocrites from among the so-called social democrats showed up as well, trying to pretend that their contribution to the rise of Turkish chauvinism did not contribute to the assassination of Hrant. The socialist left was very active as well. Tuesday being a week day, workers of large enterprises were not able to show up, but there was a very clear plebeian element in the march as well. Isci Mucadelesi (Workers' Struggle), Turkish section of the CRFI, came out actively, distributing thousands of leaflets that were eagerly collected and read by the marchers.

One should not overestimate the importance of this gigantic march for the future course of struggles in general. But it can be confidently said that the reactionary assault on Hrant's life has backfired on the fascist movement and its allies in the state. It may even be said that discussion on the question of the Armenian genocide has become legitimate for the first time in history. What Hrant was unable to achieve in his lifetime may in time become a reality thanks to his martyrisation.

Huom!

__ Sungur Savran on johttohahmo Isci Mucadelesi -järjestössä (Työväen Taistelu), joka on CRFI:n jaosto Turkissa