Turkish professor: Dink murder a revenge for Talat Pasha assassination

PanARMENIAN.Net - Taraf newspaper published an article by Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, Taner Akcam, who argues that Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink’s murder was orchestrated as revenge for the assassination of Talat Pasha, the mastermind of the Armenian Genocide, The Armenian Weekly reported.

“Hrant Dink was murdered in order to avenge Talat Pasha’s murder,” Akcam believes.

“Everything, and I mean everything, was organized in a way to seek revenge for the assassination that occurred in 1921. Upon his release after serving time in prison for his role in the McDonalds bombing of 2004 in Trabzon, Yasin Hayal, the person who planned Hrant’s murder, spoke about Talat Pasha with his father. He asked his father, “Dad, do you know how Talat Pasha was killed?” Yasin Hayal himself knew a thing or two about it, and added, “Did you know that the man who killed Talat Pasha was never punished, and that he was released?”

Why didn’t they kill Hrant Dink in front of his home? Or why didn’t they kidnap him, kill him, and dump his body in some remote location, just like the many crimes designated “perpetrator unknown” in Turkey? If they had wanted to, they could have, but they preferred not to. Instead, they killed him on the street, in broad daylight, with a bullet to the back of his head. Why? Because through Hrant, they wanted to take Talat Pasha’s revenge from the Armenians. Talat Pasha was murdered by Soghoman Tehlirian, a survivor of the Genocide, in Berlin on March 15, 1921. Tehlirian approached Talat Pasha from behind and shot him in the head. On June 3, after a two-day trial, the assassin was found not guilty of murder,” Akcam’s article said.

“But the murder has another similarity that we’re not aware of. Those who planned Talat Pasha’s assassination had decided that Tehlirian shouldn’t escape, that he should remain at the scene and submit himself to arrest. Likewise, according to evidence from the Hrant Dink investigations, gunman Ogun Samast was to remain at the scene, or submit to arrest elsewhere in Istanbul. Everything was supposed to occur the way it had in 1921. The goal was not only to avenge Talat Pasha’s assassination, but to remind us of the Genocide of 1915, of the strangling of the voices of Armenians. They were trying to say, “We will not give a single Armenian the chance to speak freely on this soil after 1915.” Oh, if only we had known what they knew, seen what they saw…,” the author notes.

“The president of the Executive Board of the Talat Pasha Committee Rauf Denktas, who died around the same time Dink was murdered. Denktas supporters, getting in line to attend Rauf Denktas’s funeral, were sending a following message: “We built up this state on 1915. To shed light on the Hrant Dink murder means to question the establishment of this state, to pull bricks out of its foundation. Why would you expect us to reveal the truth of Hrant Dink’s murder? Don’t you get it? We are all Rauf Denktas, and we will always be on Talat Pasha’s side.”

“Ninety years of denial policies have blinded our eyes, dulled our brains, and atrophied our brains. Gul administration is said to be unhappy with the ruling and that the public conscience has been wounded. There’s no better way to mock someone than this. As an old politician once said, “Did someone tie your hands, that you weren’t able to capture the murderers?”

We will never learn the truth about this murder without saying, “Yes, 1915 was a Genocide and it must be recognized,” and “Hrant was murdered because he reminded you of all the Hrants from 1915.” This is the only way to save our Turkishness from the past and from the hands of today’s murderers,” Akcam stressed in his article.