Dear comrades,

Attached to this e-mail you can find the statement of Hayri
Kozanoglu,
President of ODP, (in English and French) concerning the
assasination of
Hrant Dink, journalist, writer and member of our party.

His funeral will be on the 23rd of January at 10.00 in Istanbul.

Comradely regards,
ODP International Relations Department

———— ——— ——— ——— ——— ——— ——— —
–

We Are All Armenian, We Are All Hrant Dink!

Humanity has lost one of its dear sons who devoted himself to the
cause of
the oppressed and the laborers in their struggle for a honorable
life;
Humanity has lost a distinguished intellectual who, appreciating the
trauma haunting the Turkish people and conscious of the tragedies of
the
Armenian people, fights to foster the courage to face the history in
everyone living in this land. And this country, the different
peoples in
this country witnessed anew a bullet shot to the opportunity to live
together in a free and democratic environment.

Turkey without Hrant Dink is bitter and barren. Today claiming
Hrants’
struggle and the values held dear by him is a must for those who
want to
live as honorable citizens of this country.

The assassins are not the only responsible of this vile murder.
Those so
called opinion leaders who label as treachery every dissenting view
on the
Armenian deportation during the Great War, those insolent groups who
create a caricature of the left by mingling the anti imperialist
rhetoric
with outright nationalism blended by racist hysteria and those fake
intellectuals who try to disseminate intolerance and even support
lynching
orgies against deviants can also claim gracefully a stake in this
monstrous crime.

Presenting “deporting seventy thousand Armenians who came to Turkey
looking for jobs” as a legitimate policy alternative; defending
democratic
values while using the 301st article of the Turkish penal code as a
weapon
against dissenters; incriminating people struggling to unearth the
buried
truths of the dark pages of Turkish recent history; showing active
hostility to everyone who deviates from established modes of thought
and
expressing themselves in an upright and decent manner; refraining
from
taking any precaution to protect someone who receives daily death
threats
while these threats are well known and even made public by the
threatened
in his column, are all coalesced to pave the way for this atrocious
and
infuriating result that we face today.

After Hrant was massacred some, in a desperate attempt to conceal
their
guilt in front of the Turkish public, declared that “the bullet to
Hrant
is a bullet against Turkey”. This is in vain, what they must do is to
reevaluate their past deeds with remorse and conscience if they still
possess a little bit of these values. If they don’t then they must
stay
silent, at least to be considered human beings by the great judge we
call
history.

WE ARE ALL HRANT, WE ARE ALL ARMENIAN


Hayri Kozanoðlu
Chair Person
January 20, 2007