There Was and There Was Not: A Journey through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond

by Meline Toumani

  Many diaspora Armenians found Hrant’s ideas offensive in the extreme. I heard that the editor of an Armenian newspaper widely circulated in Europe refused to meet with him altogether when he visited her city. Later, after my trip to Turkey, when I interviewed diaspora leaders for their thoughts on the Bolsahay community, they all repeated the same thing: “The Istanbul Armenians have Stockholm syndrome.” The term refers to a phenomenon first identified during a bank robbery in 1973 in Sweden, when several employees were taken hostage, then became emotionally attached to their captors and rejected offers for rescue. Applied to Istanbul Armenians, this struck me as a narrow, coldhearted assessment. When I heard it some months later from an Armenian activist in Brussels, who believed that living among Turks at all was a form of treason, he added that he would “not step his tiniest toe on Turkish soil until Turkey recognizes the genocide.” Good luck with that, I thought. Whose loss would it be?

  Hrant was sympathetic to the circumstances of the diaspora, even if the diaspora was not sympathetic to his circumstances. “I can really understand their strong emotions,” he said. “But we were a productive community for thousands of years. We shouldn’t just rely on our hearts and lose our heads.”

  I studied Hrant, who sat across from me in a plastic office chair, too large for it, leaning forward into an acute angle and suddenly seeming vulnerable with no table between us to contain his long limbs.

  One of his younger colleagues came in, a woman my age. She sat down and put the matter to me bluntly: “Without any contact, the diaspora maintains the image of the Turk as a murderer. They assume that Turks know all about 1915 and deny it; but of the ninety years, it has been eighty years of silence.” And when the silence was broken for Turks, it was in the form of bombings and shootings in Turkish embassies all over Europe, murders by ASALA and other Armenian terrorist groups. Those murders in the name of avenging the genocide were the first time many Turks heard anything about the genocide at all. A controversial political scientist named Baskın Oran, who wrote for Agos, would later put it to me like this: “For Turkey, the ASALA murders were like being woken up at three a.m. with a hand grenade.” It was hardly a surprise that the message was not well received.

  Hrant jumped in again, speaking with a kind of showmanship—was it masking something?—that made me feel he had given his spiel a thousand times. “Do we have any doubts about what happened? Will it be any more real if they use this word? Everything Armenian in the world is a document.”

  Before I left, we took a photo together. He gave me copies of the issues of Agos in which his controversial columns had appeared, and I left with a pile of them in a shopping bag, feeling inspired by Hrant’s optimism. Later I would hear through the grapevine that the editor’s confidence was something of an act. He was a lot more worried than he let on.

  * * *

  BACK HOME IN New York, I stacked those folded newspapers neatly on my dresser, where they remained for months. I couldn’t read them, since they were in Turkish, but just knowing what they represented gave me a sense of validation. Before having met Hrant or learning about his ideas, I had come to similar views of my own, and I took comfort in this as I struggled with the confusion of explaining to Armenian friends what I had seen in Turkey and why I had gone in the first place. Hrant was an Armenian living in an oppressive system, but he had not given in to hatefulness. Despite the challenges he faced, he projected clarity and hope.

  By October 2005, an expert committee appointed by the Şişli District Criminal Court of Istanbul had reviewed Hrant’s articles. As he had expected, the committee understood: it wrote in an unambiguous statement that within his columns, there had been no insult to Turkish identity.

  But that did him no good. On October 7, the court, ignoring the committee recommendation, sentenced Hrant to six months in prison for violating Article 301 of the penal code, which prohibited insults to the Turkish nation. The verdict said he had insulted Turkish identity by suggesting Turkish blood was poisonous. It was a “suspended sentence,” which meant that he would only have to serve the time in jail if he were found guilty of the same offense again.

  The force behind his indictment was a nationalist lawyer named Kemal Kerinçsiz, who had already tried to press charges against Turkish novelists Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak for comments each had made about the Armenian issue. But the Turkish media was undoubtedly complicit. All the major papers and TV news programs had reported Hrant’s story in just the way the lawyer Kerinçsiz had argued it—“Hrant Dink says Turkish blood is poisonous”—without explaining what Hrant had actually said.

  On Christmas Day 2005, there was more bad news from Turkey. A new lawsuit was opened against Hrant because he’d written an editorial in Agos criticizing a court decision to cancel an academic conference about the Armenian issue earlier that year (the conference, unprecedented in its openness, eventually took place, but that did not mitigate Hrant’s legal problems). The charge this time was “interfering with the judicial process.” As publisher of the paper, Sarkis Bey—despite all his carefully crafted discretion—was also named in the suit. If found guilty, they could face up to four and a half years in prison.

  I e-mailed Sarkis Bey expressing my concern about the lawsuit; it was impossible to imagine such a thing. “Please send good news,” I wrote. He wrote back and didn’t mention the charges at all. He told me he had just returned from Switzerland, where he had visited his daughter and her husband and their brand-new baby—a boy. “Finally, we are grandparents,” he said. He also asked me why I’d never written that article for Agos I promised him.

  8

  “Armenians Are Killers of Children”

  I have just turned thirty and am working as an editorial assistant at the New York Times. Standing a block away from my office, in Times Square, I take note of how perfectly the Turkish flags blanketing this intersection today match an overhead billboard for Target, the department store—Atatürk’s crescent and star on crimson beneath the red-and-white bull’s-eye of American consumerism.

  The Turks carry signs on pickets: “ARMENIANS ARE KILLERS OF CHILDREN.” A projection screen the size of a truck flashes photos of brutalized bodies along with the words “ARMENIANS! YOU’RE GUILTY OF GENOCIDE!”

  One hundred yards south stands a crowd of Armenians, a brigade of young and old, their shoulders caped in the Armenian tricolor, all holding the same sign: “TURKEY GUILTY OF GENOCIDE.”

  For a few hours of a Saturday afternoon, Times Square has taken on the contours of an Ottoman village. Turks and Armenians, side-by-side but separate. Back then, a passerby might have known a Muslim district from a Christian one by the sound of dialects or the style of turbans, veils, and other garments—clothing was regulated on the sultan’s orders to keep distinctions clear. Now, the language all around is English. There are pants and sweaters on both sides of the Forty-First Street parallel, and the only head coverings are hooded raincoats drawn tight to shield against the wind and drizzle of a Manhattan spring. Each of the two groups is penned in by metal police barriers. They would be indistinguishable but for their signs and flags.

  For twenty-one years and counting, the Armenians have held a vigil in Times Square on the Sunday closest to April 24. On this date in 1915, two hundred Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople were arrested and deported, an incident that was a kind of Kristallnacht in the way it foretold the years of deportation and massacre that would follow. The commemoration doesn’t vary much from year to year. There are elected officials on hand to praise the Armenians’ contributions to American society, clergy to lead prayers, perhaps a children’s choir, and as many centenarian survivors as are still around to hobble to their feet and receive an ovation.

  But today is Saturday, April 22. The Armenian event was planned for the following day, but the Federation of Turkish American Associations and the Young Turks Cultural Association organized today’s rally as a counterprotest preempting the vigil. And learning of the Turkish groups’ plan at the
last minute, the Armenians put together a counter-counterprotest. Both sides hired buses to bring in their members from throughout the tristate area.

  The Turkish groups are not, strictly speaking, representing just Turkey. They are joined by Azerbaijani-Americans, who carry banners about the 1990s war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh. That was a bloody ground war that saw massive losses on both sides, but in which Armenians, ultimately, came out on top, still controlling the territory in question two decades later. Many of the signs accusing Armenians of genocide actually refer to pogroms within the Karabakh war. If this is confusing for outsiders, it is perfectly clear for those involved; Turks and Azeris consider themselves cousins, and Armenians consider all of them Turks. The definition of “us against them” can expand to contain this, too.

  * * *

  THAT DAY I stood among the Turks. I wanted to see how it would feel. Nobody could tell by my appearance that I was not Turkish. The challenge was only to act natural when a young woman on a small stage in front of me, a woman about my age, with black hair dyed blond and straightened, concluded her speech in clean, unaccented English.

  “In summary, we are here today to prove once and for all that there never was an Armenian genocide.”

  The audience applauded, cheers mingling with the whirring, honking noise of midtown traffic.

  I looked at the faces of people around me and tried to imagine their thoughts. The man standing next to me caught my eye and smiled. I smiled back. Another tried to sell me a self-published book titled “False Armenian Allegations.” I handed him seven dollars and put it in my bag.

  Then I walked south toward my clan, the Armenians. At the front of the group, I saw one of my father’s old friends. Beside him, a girl I recognized from summer camp.

  An empty stretch of puddles and potholes served as a neutral corridor between the protests, and as I crossed it I was met by a young man with dark brown hair and thick eyebrows. He whipped a flyer toward me and said in a rapid monotone: “Recognize the Armenian genocide.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked, accepting his flyer.

  “It’s the first genocide of the twentieth century,” he replied, looking beyond me for the next passerby.

  “I know,” I said. “What does it mean to recognize it?”

  “It’s the first genocide of the twentieth century.”

  Another young man moved in from the opposite direction, holding a stack of glossy, colorful postcards. “It’s all lies, don’t believe him,” he said. He handed me a postcard that promised to clarify the “erroneous claims of Armenians.” These words were printed in a font more suited to promoting a nightclub.

  The Armenian fellow tried to block his hand. “He’s got the wrong flyers,” he said. “You don’t want those.”

  With that, the two of them began to shout at each other past my face, a script so familiar I could have recited it in my sleep.

  “It was a war. The Armenians were traitors—”

  “My grandmother was not a traitor—”

  “They fought with the Russians—”

  “You’ve been brainwashed by your government—”

  Now and then they gestured to me, as though the debate were for my benefit. Despite my black hair and brown eyes and a nose that defied European proportions, it didn’t seem to occur to anyone that I might have a stake in the matter, and I knew why: it was unimaginable that if I were Armenian or Turkish I would have been wandering between the two demonstrations, allowing myself to be in that kind of intolerable physical proximity to the other side—whichever side that may have been.

  As I considered whether to tell them I was Armenian—I felt somewhat guilty, and ridiculous, and irritated, and also tempted to startle these fellows with my willful calm—another guy walked up. More dark hair and eyebrows, and I couldn’t guess which side he was on, until he handed me a flyer and invoked the Armenians’ favorite trump card: “Go look up what Hitler said about the Armenian genocide before he killed all the Jews!”

  I did not need to look up what Hitler had said. It had been my catechism as much as his, but it was no longer enough for me.

  * * *

  I WAS ALREADY planning my return to Turkey. A few months after that April 24, I finished a book proposal, and soon I had offers from several publishing houses to take on my project for a sum that would enable me to spend time in Istanbul doing research. I would stay there for a month or two, maybe three at the most—I bought a one-way ticket just to keep my options open—and talk to people, but more importantly listen.

  It would be an act of diplomacy in the form of a book. I wanted to set out new rules of engagement that actually involved engagement. I would find a way to present each side to the other that would move people toward connection rather than continued animosity. I would learn to speak Turkish, and I would meet with Turks from all walks of life, and I believed—truly believed—that if I spoke to them in a certain way, with a certain kind of tact and with precisely the right words, I would be able to make some sort of breakthrough. I was sure I would discover that many Turks did actually know how much the Armenians had suffered. And that maybe they even wanted an opportunity to let the denial go. I felt that my ability to be self-critical as an Armenian—to question the dynamics of diaspora activism and to see Turks as human regardless of their views—would help me win people’s trust. I would also go to Armenia and show that Armenians there wanted open borders and an end to the relentless focus on 1915. I believed all this, and the people who pay for the creation of serious books apparently believed it, too, which gave me the confidence (and the resources) I needed.

  Soon I had an apartment reserved in Istanbul and a growing list of contacts gathered over e-mail and telephone, people in Turkey who could help me pursue my work. Since returning from the trip with Müge, I had become more involved with WATS, the Workshop for Armenian-Turkish Scholarship, which was expanding to include human rights activists in Turkey, and it seemed there were plenty of people on the other side who were eager to connect with an open-minded Armenian from the diaspora. I planned to spend more time with Hrant Dink, who perfectly embodied the approach I was interested in. I wanted to understand the Bolsahay community better; they had lived alongside Turks throughout everything, and there would be wisdom in this experience, I was convinced. But I also planned to spend time with ultranationalists, military wives, government officials, anyone who would be willing to sit down with me—the greater the challenge, the better. (I was not entirely sure how I would get some of these people to oblige, but my book proposal promised, with no sign of doubt, whole chapters profiling such individuals.)

  Over e-mail I informed Sarkis Bey that I was coming back, and through Müge I lined up a translator for myself. I read everything I could get my hands on. This time I would be prepared.

  9

  January 19, 2007

  He had just gone out for a minute. He had some business at the bank. The bank was right on the corner so he didn’t even tell his colleagues he was leaving. They had just finished a meeting to plan the next week’s paper. During the meeting, a young man wearing a white ski cap rang at the Agos office door. He was a university student from Ankara, he told the secretary, and he wished to meet with Hrant Dink.

  Hrant is busy today, the secretary apologized.

  Later, the bank’s video camera would reveal shadowy images of a young man in a white cap watching Hrant make his transaction.

  Hrant walked back toward the office. He was just a few feet from the door when the shot was fired. It came from behind him, piercing the back of his head.

  Sarkis Bey saw the body first. He had heard the commotion and ran downstairs, and then immediately turned around and told some of the younger staff members that it was nothing, to stay back. He was in a state of shock. He told me later that he could not imagine he had said such a thing.

  In minutes, other members of the Agos staff would be doubled over behind the railing of the balcony of their editor�
��s office, shielding their eyes from the sight of a white tarp on the sidewalk below. From one end of the tarp a pair of shoes extended, heels bent outward. At the other end blood soaked through as it pooled around Hrant’s head, which rested facedown on the pavement.

  A crowd formed immediately. The sound of the words “Hrant Dink” piled up from overlapping voices as bystanders dialed their cell phones to pass on the news. “Hrant Dink, that Armenian guy.”

  Police put up tape to clear a large space around Hrant’s body. Then a man burst through the crowd screaming “Abi!” Turkish for big brother. Police tried to hold him back, then let him through. Yervant Dink crouched beside his older brother’s body and sobbed, clasping his hands over his eyes.

  A few men and women from the Agos staff huddled together nearby, unable to turn toward the body, unable to go inside. “I was fixated on the bullet casing,” Sarkis Bey later recalled. “It rolled back and forth, making an arc on the sidewalk. Should we take it inside and hide it?” he wondered. “Why don’t I take off my jacket and put it under Hrant’s head? But I couldn’t do even that. I see myself in the news videos just standing there.”

  It was January 19, 2007. The wind was strong that afternoon, and the tarp kept blowing off. Somebody placed bricks at the corners to hold it in place. This made the center of the tarp rise like a sail so that for a while the body was again visible to the growing crowd. Even when the breeze settled, the tarp could not cover his shoes. Hrant’s towering height had always given him an air of invincibility, but now it meant that the image of his skyward soles, one of them torn, would be broadcast again and again for months and even years whenever the murder of the Armenian journalist was in the news once more.