Hrant Dink’s assassination provided a key opportunity for Turkey to mend relations with its neighbor.
By Vartan Oskanian
VARTAN OSKANIAN is minister of foreign affairs of the Republic of Armenia .
February 7, 2007
ANKARA HAS LET a rare moment pass. Three weeks after the assassination of acclaimed Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, it appears the Turkish authorities have grasped neither the message of Hrant’s life nor the significance of his death.
In the days immediately following Dink’s shocking death, allegedly at the hands of a fanatic Turkish nationalist, we in Armenia and others around the world wanted to believe that the outpouring of public grief would create a crack in the Turkish wall of denial and rejection, and that efforts would be made to chip away at the conditions that made the assassination possible. We all hoped that the gravity of this slaying and the breadth of the reaction would have compelled Turkey ‘s leaders to seize the moment and make a radical shift in the policies that sustain today’s dead-end situation.
However, after those initial hints at conciliation, the message out of Ankara has already changed. Last week, according to the Turkish media, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said there can be no rapprochement with Armenians because Armenians still insist on talking about the genocide.
The prime minister is right. Armenians do insist on talking about the genocide. It’s a history-changing event that ought not, indeed cannot, be forgotten. However, we also advocate a rapprochement. And one is not a precondition for the other.
Dink was an advocate of many things. Chief among them, he believed that individuals have the right to think, to talk, to explore, to debate. Dink knew that if the authorities would just allow people to reflect and reason aloud, share questions and search for answers, everything would fall into place. Eventually, through public and private discourse, Turks would arrive at genocide recognition themselves.
Equally, he also believed that there must be dialogue between peoples, between nations — especially between his two peoples, the Armenians and the Turks. He himself was a one-man dialogue, carrying on both sides of the conversation, trying to make one side’s needs and fears audible to the other.
Unfortunately, Turkey ‘s policy of keeping the Armenian-Turkish border closed has resulted in a reinforcement of animosities. Dink was one of many Armenian and Turkish intellectuals who understood that there needs to be free movement of people and ideas in order to achieve reconciliation among neighbors. But Turkey insists on maintaining the last closed border in Europe as a tool to exert pressure on Armenia , to make its foreign policy more pliant, to punish Armenians for defending their rights and not renouncing their past. Armenia , on the other hand, has no preconditions to normalizing relations.
This hermetically closed border combined with a law that pre