“IN MEMORIAM: HRANT DINK, 1954-2007″
By Fatma Muge Gocek
As I sit in front of my computer and type in this first eulogy of my life with tears streaming down my face, I realize that what I will miss the most about my dear friend the journalist Hrant Dink’s unexpected departure from this life are the big hugs he used to give me, to us, to all his friends, to humanity as a whole, those warm, comforting, loving hugs… I mourn that I will no longer feel that happiness surge within me as I saw his face light up on our next encounter, he will not say “Dear Muge!” and rush to me with his arms open to give me one of his wonderful hugs. The last image in my minds’ eye will unfortunately be his tall, lifeless body lying covered on a pavement, mercilessly assassinated by a gunman in broad daylight in front of his newspaper in Istanbul on January 19th 2007.
I got to know Hrant closely in 2002 when he came to Ann Arbor, Michigan to attend the annual meeting of the Turkish Armenian Workshop of Scholars that my colleagues Ronald Grigor Suny, Gerard Libaridian and I held at the University of Michigan that year. After the initial meeting at the University of Chicago in 2000, we had decided to invite journalists as observers and he, as the columnist and editor-in-chief of the Turkish-Armenian Agos newspaper, was among the invitees. Hrant was just as surprised as we were when he was issued a passport by the Turkish state to attend the workshop as he had been refused one for the last twenty years. At the workshop, he stunned all the participants by making several original contributions, specifically by his articulate standpoint as an Armenian living in Turkey, by his criticism of nationalist Diaspora politics, and by his peaceful vision of the future of Turkish-Armenian relations.
During our first meeting, I was personally struck by one thing in particular about Hrant Dink. At the time, I had been working intensely on the ethnic cleansing of the Armenians in1915 and even just the mere act of reading about the historical events had made me so angry and hurt as a human being and as an ethnic Turk. I had also been born and raised in Turkey for twenty-four years prior to my arrival in the United States and therefore knew and was likewise very upset as a Turkish citizen about the prejudice and discrimination the minorities still faced in Turkey due to rabid Turkish nationalism. When I could not overcome my anger, when the Diaspora Armenians I met in the United States likewise struggled so much — sometimes successfully and at other times unsuccessfully — with their anger and hurt, how had Hrant Dink achieved, how had he managed to overcome that ever-consuming, destructive, dangerous anger to fill himself instead with so much love and hope for humanity, for Turkish society, for Turkish-Armenian reconciliation?
