"He was aware, like many of us in the United States, Europe, Turkey and all over the world who belong to our Turkish-Armenian network, that the solution to this problem lies in cooperation, in dialogue, and in reconciliation. He was aware that we need to tackle this issue as a community of scholars who, like him, believe in the ultimate goodness of humanity, and who, like him, fervently hope and strive on a daily basis to move that dialogue, the possibility of that reconciliation forward."-Fatma Muge Gocek-
On January 19, 2007, upon leaving his office in Istanbul, Turkey, journalist
Hrant Dink was shot and killed, an assassination. Dink wrote as a columnist and editor-in-chief of the weekly AGOS, widely regarded at the voice of the Armenian community (since 1996). Dink had struggled against the Turkish state from the start. On October 7, 2005, he was convicted for "insulting Turkishness" (under that country's penal code) on the grounds of stating that he "was not a Turk ... but from Turkey and an Armenian." However,
Prime Minister Erdogan castigated the murder saying, "the kind of people who did this might be anything, but they can definitely not call themselves nationalists."
Read Dink's last column written for AGOS, entitled "
A Pigeon-Like Unease of Spirit," as well as a
eulogy by Fatma Muge Gocek, both published at OpenDemocracy.
posted by Alexandra at 1/24/2007 06:01:00 PM 
