Maxime Gauin JTW Columnist printable version send your friend

Thursday, 22 September 2011

The “friends of Hrant Dink” sent a letter to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The text, as quoted in the Hürriyet Daily News on September 16, 2011, alleges:

“Our search for justice has been left null and void as [our efforts] approach their fifth year. The state in its entirety that we have petitioned saw itself as being close to the murderer.”

The fact that the assassin, Ogün Samast, was quickly arrested and sentenced to more than 20 years in jail seems irrelevant to the authors of this letter. The still unresolved cases of political assassinations in Turkey and in other countries, including old democracies like France, apparently are not very interesting to them, even as contexts leading to prudence in their wording and level of allegations.

Such an excessive statement could be attributed, by an uninformed observer, to the misleading pain of people who have lost a friend because of a terrorist attack. Unfortunately, in looking more closely, quite a different picture emerges.

Preliminary remarks

Hrant Dink was assassinated in İstanbul on January 19, 2007. Despite having been merely the editor-in-chief of a small weekly paper, Agos, representing only a part of Turkey’s Armenian community (the daily Jamanak, for instance, has a different stance), Hrant Dink’s assassination provoked huge reactions and demonstrations in Turkey. The rejection of the murder was unanimous among Turkey’s main political parties and other organizations.

Now, let’s look at what happened in Los Angeles on January 28, 1982. Kemal Arıkan, Consul General of Turkey, was assassinated by Hampig Sassounian and another, unidentified man. The two perpetrators were terrorists of the Justice Commandos Against Armenian Genocide (JCAG), i.e. the terrorist arm of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF-Dashnak), the main political party of the Armenian Diaspora which controls numerous cultural and charitable associations all over the world, especially in North America, France, Australia, and the Middle East.

Instead of condemning the assassination, the Armenian community of California expressed unanimous and unconditional support for HampigSassounian. It does not mean, of course, that all the Armenians of California agreed with the murder; but any Armenian who would have publicly reproved this act would had been purely and simply expelled from Armenian American cultural and religious life. As the Assembly of Turkish American Associations (ATAA) documented for the parole hearing of Mr. Sassounian in 2010, and as I summarized in my previous column for the JTW, the ARF provides constant and full help to its terrorist, presenting him as a “martyr,” “hero,” and “example.”

The comparison between the Dink and Arıkan cases can be continued. Kemal Arıkan’s assassination never provoked the same reactions as the murder of Hrant Dink in the Western opinion. Despite Kemal Arıkan having been a diplomat representing an important country, a member of NATO, there is simply no street, plaque, or any memorial in any Western country, including the U.S., commemorating his death. There are several streets named after Hrant-Dink in the West, for instance in Lyon, France. In this city, the Turkish Consulate was attacked by the Armenian Secret Army for Liberation of Armenia (ASALA), which killed two people, on August 5, 1980. No policeman protected the Consulate at that time. Nothing was inaugurated in Lyon to commemorate the attack.

Prof. Michael M. Gunter, specialist, among other subjects, of Armenian terrorism, explains even, speaking about himself “this author often finds sheer of disbelief on the part of the general non-Armenian public that the phenomenon [Armenian terrorism] even existed” (Armenian History and the Question of Genocide, New York-London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011, p. 72).Despite the JCAG having been directly subordinate to the ARF’s World Bureau, despite all the legal branches of the ARF having given unconditional support to the JCAG, the ARF was never banned by any democratic country. Even the other perpetrator of Kemal Arıkan’s assassination was not found. The lack of protection provided by American police to Kemal Arıkan, or later to the honorary Consul General in Boston Orhan Gündüz who received death threats before his death, did not incite the police forces to any investigation for incompetence, still less for complicity. Similarly, the inability of the police of France, Austria, Belgium, Italy, or Greece to protect Turkish diplomats and other citizens against Armenian terrorists was never the target of any internal investigations. There are such investigations for the Dink case.

The Hrant Dink family, the Hrant Dink Foundation, and other “friends” were never interested by these cases of Armenian terrorism. Armenia’s aggression toward Azerbaijan and the Armenian terrorism against this country are not among the concerns of Hrant Dink’s “heirs.” They are not even interested by the hundreds of Armenians killed or threatened to death by Armenian terrorists, since the end of 19th Century.

The active cooperation of Hrant Dink’s “heirs” with Armenian nationalists

This selective indignation is unfortunately the less serious problem of internal incoherence raised by the statements and activities of Hrant Dink’s “heirs.”

On January 17, 2008, for the first anniversary of Hrant Dink’s assassination, Ochin Tchilinguir, an Agos journalist and “one of the lawyers of Dink family,” attended an event organized by the Unitary Committee of Alfortville’s Armenian Associations (CUAA).[1] Alfortville is a kind of French Glendale or Watertown, for the numeric importance of its Armenian community. The CUAA is dominated by the ARF, and is even located in the House of Armenian Culture (MCA), a branch of the Dashnak Party. Another important component of the CUAA is the Hunchak, another nationalist party which practiced terrorism—including against Armenians—during the Ottoman period and supported ASALA during the 1980s. The event was also attended by Ara Krikorian, ex-leader of the ARF in France and editor in 1981 of a book glorifying the Dashnak terrorist S. Tehlirian.

It is difficult, for somebody who received a French education, to refrain from thinking of François de La Rochefoucauld’s saying: “Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue.”

Another event took place in Arnouville, also a Parisian suburb with an important Armenian community. The conference was hosted by the Hrant-Dink school, whose founder denied any connections with the ultra-nationalist organizations. However, one of the participants was Alexandre Couyoumjian, member of the bureau of the strongly nationalist—and above all, anti-Turkish— Coordination Council of France’s Armenian Associations (CCAF). A lawyer by profession, Mr. Couyoumjian was one of the supporters of the defunct bill presented to the French Parliament, which was designed to forbid the “denial” of the “existence of the Armenian genocide.”[2] Ochin Tchilinguir also participated. Mr. Tchilinguir saw no contradiction between the proclaimed goal of Hrant Dink’s “heirs” to fight for the freedom of expression and cooperating with an activist who fights this very same freedom. At the time, when the censorship bill was discussed, Hrant Dink stated that he was ready to go to France and say: “There was no Armenian genocide.

These examples are by no means isolated or limited to France. Talin Sucyan, who wrote in Agos from 2007 to 2010 is now a contributor of the Dashnak Armenian Weekly. During the 1970s and the 1980s, this newspaper published both the communiqués of the JCAG and inflammatory articles of its staff, supporting Armenian terrorism. In the 1930s, The Armenian Weekly (at that time named Hairenik Weekly) unconditionally supported Nazism and was proud to mention the assassination of numerous Armenians by the ARF, because they did not want to give money to this party. The Armenian Weekly also published numerous defamatory attacks against Archbishop Leon Tourian, who was eventually assassinated by the ARF in New York on December 24, 1933.

Ms. Sucyan published an article in The Armenian Weekly viciously attacking Turkey without any evidence. She mentioned a conference of the Armenian General Benevolence Union (AGBU), which failed to take place in Jordan.[3] Ms. Sucyan wanted to present a speech on “The Legacy of Hrant Dink.” The AGBU is a branch of the Ramkavar Party. The Ramkavar allowed its members to support Armenian terrorists in the 1980s, and as late as 2000, Moorad Mooradian, an important figure of the Ramkavar, justified the assassination of Turkish diplomats by Armenian terrorists, and failed to write a single word of criticism about the other kind of attacks, like the bombing of Orly airport (The Armenian Mirror-Spectator, March 25, 2000). The Ramkavar-dominated Armenian Assembly of America (AAA) supported countless anti-Turkish initiatives since its creation in 1972. The French branches of AGBU and Ramkavar supported the censorship bill.

Even more strikingly, the widow of Hrant Dink received an award from Robert Kocharian, at that time President of Armenia.[4] Mr. Kocharian played a central role in the aggression toward Azerbaijan as well as in the ethnic cleansing of Azeris. He supported most of the claims of the Diaspora’s extreme nationalists and attacked even (verbally) the Jews.

These acts of cooperation make even more sense considering that the Hrant Dink Foundation established in 2010 a “Support Fund for History Studies” focusing on the “1915 events.” The jury includes the German sociologist of Kurdish heritage Taner Akçam, whose methods are proven to be less than scientific (mistranslations, misquotations, use of fakes, allegations without proof)[5] and who even dared calling the well documented slaughters of Muslim civilians by Armenian volunteers of the Russian army “a legend” on PBS, in April 2006. The jury also includes Raymond Kévorkian and Hans-Lukas Kieser, two authors with a strongly anti-Turkish bias. There is not any specialist of Ottoman and Turkish history, not even Hilmar Kaiser, a supporter of the “genocide” allegation who accepts the debate and recognizes the high scholarship of Yusuf Halaçoğlu; Donald Bloxham, who at least admits that there were actually Armenian insurrectional activities at the beginning of WWI and that “During the Russian advance into eastern Anatolia at the beginning of 1916, vengeful Armenian forces […] murdered many Muslims, as testified to in the British sources;” or Ara Sarafian.

The Silence vis-à-vis Other Attempts of Misuse

In addition to the active and direct participation of the Hrant Dink Foundation, the Dink family or their friends to the propaganda allowed, at least by their silence, a recurrent misuse of Hrant Dink’s assassination by the most radical, anti-Turkish, Armenian nationalists. In one of its inflammatory articles against Turkey—and actually, against most of the Turkish people themselves—The Armenian Weekly (January 27, 2010) concluded “in the memory of Hrant Dink.”[6] The text is full of praise for the PKK, an old comrade in arms of the ARF, and the owner of The Armenian Weekly. In reading such absurd allegations like “In a place like Turkey where the call to speak is an invitation to prosecution, to harassment, in a place where historical truths do not exist, where contemporary human rights are trampled, minority rights are unfathomable, and women’s rights unimaginable,” it is hard to forget what the very same newspaper wrote during the years of Armenian terrorism:

“Out of the East came a foe unequalled in his barbarity—the slit-eyed, bow-legged Turkic nomads. […] The Seljuks and Ottomans with their ferocious customs were determined to annihilate the whole Armenian race.”(The Armenian Weekly, June 1st, 1983, p. 42).

This tone is still common among the readers’ comments on the Web site of The Armenian Weekly and its counterpart of California Asbarez. In the newspapers, the same racist ideas continue, this time using the screen of “human rights” even more than before. In such a context, the silence of Hrant Dink’s “heirs” is an act of complicity. The title of an article from 2010, “Commonalty in Struggle” makes special sense considering the kind of “struggle” which The Armenian Weekly advocated for years—and continues to justify, not to say glorify, today.

Similarly, Peter Balakian, considered “the number 1 enemy of the Turks” in the U.S. delivered a speech during a panel discussion on the legacy of Hrant Dink on February 1, 2009. The text of the speech was published—not surprisingly—in The Armenian Weekly.[7]

Ara Sarafian pointed out in The Armenian Reporter of December 18, 2008:

“Our understanding of the Armenian Genocide has been influenced by partisan scholarship because a number of academic institutions and political parties in Armenian communities, such as in the United States or Great Britain, have nurtured a prosecutorial approach to the subject. Consequently, some important elements of the events of 1915 have been distorted. The main thrust of the prosecutorial approach has been the assertion that the genocide of Armenians was executed with the thoroughness of the Nazi Holocaust, and that all Turks and Kurds were involved in the genocidal process. This approach is best exemplified by Vahakn Dadrian’s The History of the Armenian Genocide.”

To speak even more clearly, the “prosecutorial approach” criticized rightfully by Mr. Sarafian is a racist approach. Peter Balakian’s bestseller, The Burning Tigris, is barely more than a degraded version of Vahakn N. Dadrian’s publications. Most of the main arguments of The Burning Tigris are copied without particular originality from Mr. Dadrian’s book and articles. It can be noticed in the endnotes.

In The Burning Tigris, Mr. Balakian praises the Armenian terrorism of the 1920s—using even the fake documents of Aram Andonian—and attenuates the circumstances of the terrorist attacks of the 1970s and the 1980s. Mr. Balakian largely deserved the numerous congratulations and honors which he received from the ARF.[8] But his misuse of Hrant Dink’s cadaver for his anti-Turkish crusade should have been denounced by the Dink family and the Hrant Dink Foundation. It was not.

However, the manifesto of Anders Breivik demonstrated how much this far right terrorist was obsessed by Turkey. The unsubstantiated claims of “Armenian genocide” or “Greek genocide” and even more the racist conceptions diffused by the most radical versions of these allegations played a central role in Mr. Breivik’s Weltanschauung (world view)—and eventually in his decision to commit terrorist acts. The main reactions in the West demonstrated one more time that in the matter of terrorism, the kind of reactions depend largely on the religion of the perpetrator.[9]

Conclusion: practicing double standards, supporting prejudices

This active and passive cooperation with groups and individual notorious for their praising—or, in the case of the ARF, their practicing—of terrorism is by no means coherent with the self-description of Hrant Dink’s “heirs” as people fighting for justice, against hatred and restriction of freedom. Elementary logic should lead them to stop such cooperation. Until then, the single cohesive factor in such an attitude is a permanent defamation against Turkey—not to say against the Turkish people themselves. In the world as described by the Hrant Dink Foundation, the perpetrators of crimes are ethnic Turks and the victims are ethnic Armenians—never the reverse.

The concrete effect of the Hrant Dink Foundation was to give respectability to anti-Turkish speech and a window on Turkey to some of the most extremist nationalists of the Armenian Diaspora. This is in complete contradiction to Dink’s thoughts, and even more so to the great tradition of Turkish Armenians, illustrated by Bedros Kapamaciyan, Berç Kerestecıyan Türker, and many others.


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[1] http://www.collectifvan.org/article.php?r=&id=14957
[2] http://www.imprescriptible.fr/dossiers/couyoumdjian/negationnisme
[3] http://www.armenianweekly.com/2010/06/10/jordan-cancels-armenian-youth-conference/
[4] http://www.azad-hye.net/news/viewnews.asp?newsId=356gsl14
[5] Erman Şahin, “Review Essay: A Scrutiny of Akçam’s Version of History and the Armenian Genocide,” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, XXVIII-2, Summer 2008, pp. 303-319, http://www.tc-america.org/files/news/pdf/Erman-Sahin-Review-Article.pdf id. “Armenian Question: Scholarly Ethics and Methodology,” Review of Armenian Studies, n° 19-20, 2009, pp. 141-152;id.  “Review Essay: the Armenian Question,” Middle East Policy, XVII-1, Spring 2010, pp. 144-157, http://www.mepc.org/create-content/book-review
[6] http://www.armenianweekly.com/2010/01/27/commonality-in-struggle/
[7] http://www.armenianweekly.com/2009/08/08/balakian-remembering-hrant-dink/
[8] For example : http://www.ancsf.org/pressreleases/2003/11062003.htm
[9] Süleyman Özeren, “Terrorist or Crazy: Irresistible Denial of Naked Truth,” The Journal of Turkish Weekly, July 28, 2011; Lenka Kantnerova, “Reactions to Norwegian Massacre: A Double Standard?”, id., August 17, 2011, http://www.turkishweekly.net/op-ed/2860/reactions-to-norwegian-massacre-a-double-standard.html