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

by Meline Toumani

  By evening, thousands had gathered, Istanbul dwellers of all backgrounds, filling the six-lane boulevard in front of Agos and the expanse of nearby Taksim Square. On pieces of cardboard people scrawled a few words in Turkish that had never been put together before: HEPIMIZ HRANTIZ. HEPIMIZ ERMENIYIZ. “We are all Hrant. We are all Armenian.”

  Days later, tens of thousands of mourners of all ethnic and social backgrounds would carry the same message on placards in a silent funeral march.

  * * *

  THE FOLLOWING NIGHT they caught the killer. His image was there on the security cameras of nearby shops as well as those of a public surveillance system that continuously monitored Istanbul’s streets. When the pictures were broadcast on television, the boy’s own father, sitting in the living room of the family home, at the other end of the country in the Black Sea city of Trabzon, recognized his son. He called the police. “He told us he was just going to his uncle’s house.”

  The gunman was a seventeen-year-old high school dropout named Ogün Samast. After completing his task in Istanbul, Samast had boarded a bus back to Trabzon, but about ten hours in, a little more than halfway there, as the bus neared the city of Samsun, the driver received a call from the police: you’ll stop at Samsun. They told him why.

  Once the Samsun police had Samast in custody, they asked him if he had killed the Armenian newspaper editor. He confessed immediately. They asked him why and he answered that he had read on the Internet that Hrant Dink said Turkish blood was poisonous. He was defending the honor of the Turkish nation.

  Before they sent him back to the Istanbul authorities, a few junior officers posed for souvenir snapshots with Samast. They positioned him in front of a poster of Atatürk and handed him a Turkish flag.

  The killer’s personal motives, it would soon come to light, were incidental; he was merely the henchman for a network of people—including some with ties to Turkish intelligence and security forces—who had been planning the murder for some time. Hrant himself knew he was in danger. A search of his computer turned up thousands of e-mailed death threats.

  Hrant’s lawyer had worried about his client’s growing anxiety, he later told me. “We met at his office one evening. I told him it was time for him to keep his distance—go to Europe for a month or two,” he said. “But he told me he can’t stand being away. ‘After two days in Europe I find I just want to come home.’ Then he asked me if he should write an article about the threats he had received. I said yes, I’ve been telling you for more than a year to do that. Write it step by step. Explain the trials, how you were summoned by the governor, the demonstrations in front of Agos, and publish it in all the liberal newspapers. But as we came down the steps and kissed each other on the cheeks to say good-bye, I was thinking there’s no way he’ll write it. Then he looked into my eyes and he said ‘I’m going to write it.’”

  The column ran in the issue of Agos that came out a few hours before the murder. The title was “Why Have I Been Targeted?”

  * * *

  SOON HRANT’S ENTIRE life story was encapsulated in media coverage. He was born in the eastern town of Malatya. His father had a gambling problem that tore the family apart. He and his two brothers were sent to an orphanage in Istanbul run by the Armenian Protestant church. He met his wife, Rakel, at the orphanage summer camp. Decades later, pious Christians both, they helped rebuild the camp with their own hands. They had four children and a second grandchild was on the way.

  “Hrant Dink Is Turkey” was the headline at the top of Milliyet newspaper.

  “The Biggest Treachery” came from the front of Sabah, another major mainstream daily.

  For the first few days the TV cameras did not leave the scene of the crime. This media reaction might be understood as repentance, considering what had come before. It so happened that the morning of the murder, all the major papers had run provocative stories reporting that Sylvester Stallone was rumored to be making a movie about the “so-called genocide.” Sabah’s front page said, “Rambo Is Like an ASALA Militant.” This sort of gratuitously charged presentation of any fragment of news about Armenians was as regular an occurrence in the Turkish press as the soccer scores and weather reports that abutted it. References to ASALA were shoehorned into seemingly unrelated stories as often as possible.

  Yet even as politicians, journalists, and other public figures condemned the crime and sent condolences to the family, many of their comments had a particular emphasis: “It Is Turkey That Was Shot” was the banner headline on Hürriyet, the country’s largest paper. “Turkey will be blamed for everything,” wrote a prominent columnist. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan made a statement on the evening of the murder saying that dark forces had once again chosen Turkey. He went on to note that it was significant that the murder occurred at the same time that parliaments around the world were considering resolutions about the “so-called genocide.”

  International media outlets covered the murder extensively and suggested that judging from the hundred thousand people shouting “We are all Armenian,” the awful crime might be the catalyst for bringing Turks and Armenians together. It would seem that way, wouldn’t it? They were words nobody could have imagined hearing and their echo would not soon fade. But the opposite sentiment could not be drowned out so easily. The night of the murder, a message in blue spray paint appeared on the wall of an Armenian church in Istanbul: “One Hrant killed, here’s to many Hrants. Die, filthy Armenian.”

  A couple days later a group marched down İstiklâl Street, Istanbul’s pedestrian avenue, chanting, “We are all Mustafa Kemal. We are all Turks.” One of the protesters was questioned by a reporter. “When our ambassadors were killed by ASALA, did any Armenian say ‘We are all Turks’?” the protester said.

  The leader of the Nationalist Action Party made a statement: they were not all Hrants, they were all Mehmets. “In some circles this event is being used to paint a picture of Turkish society as guilty. We do not accept this.” (His party would double its popular support in that summer’s elections, winning 15 percent of the vote.)

  The weekend after the murder, a widely beloved singer, Bülent Ersoy, shared a similar view while serving as a judge on the popular music show Popstar Alatürka. Ersoy, a transsexual dressed in gaudy gowns that showcased giant breast implants, announced condolences to the family but then said, “I absolutely don’t accept that ‘We are all Armenian’ slogan. If it were only ‘We are all Hrant’ that would express our unity. But I am not Christian, so even if you tied me up I could never say that I am Armenian. I’m a Muslim girl and I will die a Muslim,” the transgendered pop star said.

  The same weekend, at a soccer match between teams from Trabzon and Kayseri, young fans sported white ski caps similar to the one that had been the killer’s identifying feature. A pep rally leader shouted into a megaphone, “Get up on your feet or else be Armenian!”

  And in the city of Sinop, a small-time journalist named Mete Cağdaş decided to sue the mayor of Şişli, the Istanbul district where the funeral march began. Turkish law allowed private citizens to initiate such lawsuits. “They carried placards saying ‘Hrant’s murderer is Article 301.’ They branded the laws of the Turkish Republic as murderers. Shouting ‘We are all Armenian,’ they violated the constitution. They insulted the unity of the nation with separatism based on race. They caused traffic congestion. With live broadcasts, they encouraged others to take part in the demonstration. They did not carry even one Turkish flag. What more do you need? Treason, provocation, separatism and extreme disturbance. I am complaining and am a plaintiff. Honorable Prosecutor, please start an investigation.”

  * * *

  THE NEWS OF Hrant’s murder reached me by e-mail when I woke up in New York that morning. The e-mail came from an American, a distant acquaintance who ran a hedge fund that did business in Turkey.

  “This doesn’t sound like good news,” he wrote, forwarding me an alert sent less than an hour after the murder from a Turkish investment bank t
o its clients:

  “Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian editor of Agop newspaper is assassinated. Last year he was tried under Turkey’s freedom of expression laws regarding his comments on the so-called Armenian genocide. The identity of the murderer is not identified yet. The market reacted to the assassination by a sharp fall in the afternoon session.”

  January 19, the day of the murder, was supposed to be my last Friday of work at the New York Times. The following week I would leave to spend some time in London and Vienna, then go on to Turkey. My department had arranged a little going-away party for me for that afternoon, champagne in the conference room. Somehow, I got dressed and arrived at the office. In the hour between receiving that first e-mail at home and reaching my computer at work, my brain had constructed the possibility that there was a mistake and that the news was inaccurate—not just in the shell-shocked way one rejects information when grief first explodes, but in a rational sense, because I could imagine nearly any magnitude of falsehood being generated by the Turkish or Armenian media. Maybe this was just a really heinous rumor.

  But by the time I sat down in my cubicle, my in-box was flooded with e-mails that eradicated any doubt. My boss passed by and said good morning, and I stared right past him, then started to sob. I tried to explain what had happened. Colleagues gathered around to find out why I was hysterical, and I heard somebody say, “Her friend was shot.”

  Hrant wasn’t my friend. He was a person I had spoken to for an hour, more than a year before. In the days and months to come, anybody who had ever shaken the man’s hand would claim the honor of his friendship. He didn’t need to be my friend: what was unbearable was that the person who had tried harder than anyone to use love to fight hatred, to believe in the power of patience and compassion, was the one they had killed. And something even simpler: that they hated us—Armenians—that much. For the first time in a long time, I felt like a part of that “us.” I was terrified.

  * * *

  THAT E-MAIL FROM the investment bank had contained a mistake: “Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian editor of Agop newspaper is assassinated.” The misspelling of Agos was an oversight, but not necessarily a random one. “Agop” is a common Armenian name, the Turkish-Armenian spelling of Jacob. In Turkey, the name Agop is sometimes used as slang for any Armenian man—an average Armenian Joe. Or maybe not quite average: the name is tied to a range of cultural references in which Agop is an unfortunate character for one reason or another—now blind, now missing an arm, now a hopeless glutton—but always a good guy. A good guy with bad luck. A person who would do well to be more careful.

  PART THREE

  Turkey

  10

  Paradoxes

  Ertan, my interpreter, told me to meet him at the office of the publishing house where he worked. When he gave me the address on İstiklâl Street, he offered two different numbers. “It is either 465 or 231,” he said.

  In the past few years, the municipality of Istanbul had renumbered all the addresses in the historic Beyoğlu district, a decision made to account for new buildings and other problems of urban evolution. But it was unrealistic to expect everyone to adjust overnight, they reasoned, so the old address numbers had not been removed. On each building up and down İstiklâl Street, a mile-long pedestrian stretch that was the heart of Istanbul’s social and retail life, one set of numbers was in blue and the other in red. After a while, people lost track of which were old and which were new, so it was typical to hear addresses including both. Ertan had also said to look for the doorway next to Starbucks, but there were three Starbucks just on the ten-minute walk from my house to his office.

  When I finally found 465 or 231, I searched the jumble of business signs tacked up around the entryway but saw no mention of Aras Publishing. Inside, at the end of a long corridor, a man carrying a tray of tiny glass teacups—the building çaycı, or tea seller—pointed me to the right office.

  Aras Publishing specialized in books about Armenian subjects; this explained its inconspicuous entrance. What was strange was that Ertan, who was not Armenian, had been working there for several years, translating English-language books into Turkish. Since Hrant’s death, he had also been working as an editor at Agos. Ertan was a Turk—not a Kurdish Turk or a Greek Turk or even a Jewish Turk, although he did like to point out that he had roots in Salonika, so who knew?—but just a regular Turk. Müge had helped me find him when I told her I needed an interpreter, somebody with excellent English skills and experience with the Armenian community.

  Ertan was thirty-four years old and skinny to the point of looking malnourished, with profound eyes, bristly brown hair that grew out rather than down, and a beard that was getting thick enough to seem like some kind of statement. The first time I met him, he told me, unbidden, that he had stopped cutting his hair after Hrant’s death. I assumed this was a custom of mourning, but as I got to know him better I realized he meant he was simply too busy to go to the barber. Ertan was the kind of person who did not waste time on ordinary vanities when there was more important work to do. If that had a way of becoming its own sort of vanity, it was nonetheless clear that in this season of his life, there always was more important work to do. I trusted Ertan instantly. How could I not? He looked, inarguably, like Jesus.

  In the Aras office, tables were piled high with scores of books the company had published, all sorts of books about Armenian topics, written in or translated into Turkish. There were novels by Armenian writers, classics and obscure ones, all of which Ertan was able to speak about in admiring detail. There were memoirs describing life in Ottoman villages, volumes of poetry, photography, even cookbooks. Running my fingers over these stacks, I was amazed that just a few steps off one of Istanbul’s busiest streets, a world of Armenian culture was flourishing. But as I looked at the titles more carefully, I realized that none of them crossed a certain line: none were directly about the genocide. The reason was obvious: the company would have been shut down immediately. More interesting was the effect: the literature Aras published may have been restricted in its subject matter, but in a different way it was liberated. To my eyes, fatigued by the thought of ever reading another genocide memoir, Armenian culture seemed enriched by this vast collection of books that were not directly about 1915. It was forced to find itself in topics other than the genocide.

  * * *

  ERTAN AND I set off for what was our main purpose that day: to meet his friend Deniz, who had agreed to share the job of being my translator, and to lay out the plans for my project. There were two reasons Ertan wanted to split this job with his friend; the first was that he was already overcommitted, with his work at Aras and Agos and a variety of other projects. The second was that Deniz was apparently leagues deep in a procrastination vortex related to his PhD dissertation in sociology, and Ertan thought working with me would help get him out of his rut.

  “How is your new flat, Meline?” Ertan asked as we walked.

  “It’s lovely.”

  “How much is your rent?”

  “Um, well, it’s not cheap,” I confessed.

  “How not cheap?” he asked.

  “I don’t want to say. It might be embarrassingly not cheap.”

  “These landlords can really take advantage of foreigners. We can talk to him for you if necessary. But I cannot assess the situation if you do not tell me the price.”

  A few days earlier, when I had exchanged money and keys with the landlord, I had been a feeble haggler. Armenians have a reputation as penny-pinchers, shrewd businessmen, and although I had not even told the landlord I was Armenian, I could not bear the thought that if he found out, I would seem to fit the stereotype. This notion of some innate Armenian talent for commerce mystified me; I had seen no evidence of it myself. But throughout the Middle East and Russia we were considered Shylocks one and all, always out to cheat and scheme and get a better deal. In the Ottoman era, an American missionary writing in the Christian Herald summarized it neatly, reporting that “the people of the
East” sized up their neighbors as follows: “two Jews are equal to one Greek, and two Greeks are equal to one Armenian. This means that in commercial shrewdness one Armenian is equal to four Jews. Such people are generally unpopular everywhere.”

  My landlord was a forty-something man named Sinan who had studied in London and spoke good English. Apart from his price gouging, he had welcomed me warmly, walking me through my new neighborhood and explaining how things worked. First he took me to the grocer on the corner. In a closet-sized shop, four women in head scarves stood behind the counter chatting. Sinan told them that I had moved in across the street.

  “They say you should call them if you need something but don’t want to leave the house,” he told me.

  One woman wrote down the phone number and extended it in my direction, her smile encouraging. Stepping back outside, I looked at my new home, only thirty feet away, and tried to imagine a circumstance in which I would feel the need to have groceries brought right to my door.

  But it turned out this sort of microdelivery was not treated as a luxury in Istanbul. Continuing up the street, I saw a round wicker basket descending slowly through the air, being lowered on a long rope by a man in a fourth-floor window. As it neared street level, a younger man removed a few coins from the basket and replaced them with a loaf of bread and a pack of cigarettes. The basket then wobbled back up to its owner. I was transfixed.

  “I guess you haven’t seen that in New York,” Sinan said, laughing.

  In Istanbul, service like this had a particular grace about it, felt less like exploitative labor than like a matter of the merchant’s pride. At a bar or restaurant, if someone ran out of cigarettes, it was entirely normal to ask the waiter to get a fresh pack—not because cigarettes were kept in stock but because there was always a nephew on hand to run across the street to buy them; and when the pack arrived at the table a few minutes later, it might be on a silver plate, the wrapping removed and the top cracked open, with one cigarette pulled halfway out as if beckoning. It was typical, too, to request items not on the menu such as a last-minute birthday cake; the restaurant owner would simply call a cousin nearby who ran a pastry shop, and when the meal was finished an elaborate torte would appear with candles flickering.