01.23.07
Hrant Dink’s funeral
It was a historic day in Turkey today, as well over 100,000 people (the AP and Reuters guess) marched the 5+ mile stretch from Osmanbey (the site where Hrant Dink was assasinated last Friday) to Yenikapi on the Marmara Sea, where he was buried in the Armenian graveyard of the Holy Mother of God Armenian Patriarchal Church. Members of the Armenian diaspora as well as prominent Armenian religious leaders were invited to attend this funeral.
Amongst the marchers were a broad spectrum of contemporary Istanbul society, including many of the local ethnic Armenians, as well as Kurds, Turks, and a few of us foreigners-in-residence. Signs in the crowd contained expressions such as “Hepimiz Hrant Dink’iz. Hepimiz Ermeniyiz” (We all are Hrant Dink. We all are Armenian), also written in Armenian: “Menk Polorys Hay Enk” and in Kurmanci (the primary Kurdish language spoken in Turkey): “Em Henû Hrantin.”
There were also signs about the contraversial article 301, which was used earlier to try Hrant Dink and many other prominent and lesser known scholars, journalists, and politicians, including Elif Shafkat and Orhan Pamuk. Some of the signs (and chants) indicated that article 301 specifically killed Hrant (meaning: the sentiment that generates things such as article 301 creates a warped sense of patriotism inspiring regular people to “take the law into their own hands”); others simply advocated repealing this piece of legislation.
The mood was sorrowful, and a bit tense due to the thousands of police gathered on every side street in full riot gear. However, the march, and funeral procession, passed without major incident.
People I talked to indicated that this was much larger than any funeral procession in post-1980 Turkey. When Ugur Mumcu’s car was bombed, perhaps 10,000 people attended a funeral, but this kind of multi-day funeral/demonstration is basically unprecedented in contemporary Turkish history. I have never seen a more focused march of any sort in my life - there was one cause and one cause only; sorrow for the death of a good and generous man at the hands of fascism. The march today was a demonstration that fascism will not be tolerated here in Istanbul. How long that message will prevail or last, though, noone knows.
[closed for comments: 8/14/2007]
Stephen said,
January 23, 2007 at 22:40
I was shocked when I read about the assassination of Hrant Dink in my newspaper here in the UK. If I was living in Turkey I would have joined the 100,000 people marching the 5 miles for his funeral. It is very sad that the Police force were in full riot gear but a huge relief that there were no negative incidents. This tragedy should never have happened and I hope that Article 301 is soon abolished. My thoughts are with Hrant’s family and his colleagues at Agos.
Oneworld Multimedia :: Notes from the Armenian Turkish Blogosphere — on Hrant Dink’s Murder :: January :: 2007 said,
January 24, 2007 at 13:48
[…] Actually, there are many excellent posts on this site, and specifically news that another local dissident, Orhan Pamuk, has now been given automatic protection by the Turkish police following Dink’s murder. There are also some amazing photographs of yesterday’s funeral procession in Istanbul. A foreigner working in Turkey also posts some images, but adds some interesting commentary. It was a historic day in Turkey today, as well over 100,000 people (the AP and Reuters guess) marched the 5+ mile stretch from Osmanbey (the site where Hrant Dink was assasinated last Friday) to Yenikapi on the Marmara Sea, where he was buried in the Armenian graveyard of the Holy Mother of God Armenian Patriarchal Church. Members of the Armenian diaspora as well as prominent Armenian religious leaders were invited to attend this funeral. […]
eliot said,
January 28, 2007 at 02:49
It has been to see the aftermath to this funeral procession/ march in the last several days. Many Turkish columnists chose to attempt to bracket this march off as only the activity of a few “marginal” “leftist” “intellectuals” and as such it’s not representative of a broader Turkey. There’s also the continuous chatter about the “foreign” influence - meaning, I imagine, members of the Armenian diaspora - creating such a stir about these events.
Never mind that there hasn’t been a larger funeral march in anyone’s memory… certainly not for any deceased politicians (since Ataturk) or for any other journalists. Or that the Turkish government organized the funeral. Or that if there truly were 100,000 intellectuals (Turkish, Kurdish, Armenian or otherwise) who could be gathered together on one street in Turkey that would be such a momentous day no one would have bothered with the 8km march and would have stayed in one place debating Foucault, Chomsky, and the relevance of geographic imaginaries to the construction of post-Fordian conceptualizations of space, place, and intertextuality.
The other thing is that Kurds have been consistently left out of descriptions of the march, an interesting but problematic omission in light of increased talk about military action in the east. For perhaps the scariest aspect of January 23 2007, from a Turkish nationalist standpoint, is that members of all ethnicities (Turks included), came together to demand an end to fascism and latent fascist institutions in contemporary Turkey. The particular kind of Turkish nationalism present in areas such as Trabzon (where 5 of the 6 apprehended suspects practiced their target practice and planned the assassination) was directly implicated, as well. It’s not an “Armenian” problem that was made blatant on January 23, but a much deeper ideological issue about the tension between Turkey’s strongly multicultural and multilingual past and it’s current (but comparatively recent) enforced monolingual monoculture.