Hrant Dink murder: 3 years passed

PanARMENIAN.Net - Hrant Dink, the editor-in-chief of the Armenian-Turkish Agos newspaper was assassinated three years ago today.



"Hrant Dink face the trial for using the term Genocide. Then he was killed," said Professor Taner Akcam, a Turkish scholar, the author of "Shameful Act" book.



"During a visit to Paris, in an interview with Reuters, Dink said, "We must shout it was a genocide… And I will say it in the court." It was on January 5, 2007," Akcam recollected.



"Diaspora seeks justice, Turkey seeks freedom and democracy. These two aspirations should give a start to dialogue between the civil societies. We should recognize the Genocide and reconcile," he said.



Hrant Dink (September 15, 1954 - January 19, 2007) was a Turkish-Armenian journalist and columnist and editor-in-chief of Agos bilingual newspaper. Dink was best known for advocating Turkish-Armenian reconciliation and human and minority rights in Turkey. Charged under the notorious article 301 of the Turkish Criminal Code, Dink stood a trial for insulting Turkishness. After numerous death threats, Hrant Dink was assassinated in Istanbul in January 2007, by Ogün Samast, a 17-year old Turkish nationalist.



Taner Akcam  (October 23,1953, Turkey) is a Turkish historian, sociologist and publicist. He is one of the first Turkish academics to acknowledge and discuss openly the Armenian Genocide by the Ottoman Turkish government in 1915. Akcam studied at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara. He was a faculty member of Administrative Sciences, Department of Political Economy. He received his Bachelor of Administrative Sciences in 1976. He stayed at the university as a Master's student and assistant in the same department for some time. In 1976 he was arrested and sentenced to 10 years imprisonment as the editor-in-chief of a political journal. He escaped prison one year later. He has been living in the Federal Republic of Germany since early 1978 as a political refugee. He continued his political activities and in 1988 started working for the Hamburg Institute for Social Research on the history of violence and torture in Turkey. He earned his Doctorate Degree at The University of Hannover in 1995. The topic was called Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide on the Background of Military Tribunals in Istanbul between 1919 and 1922. Currently he belongs to the scientific staff of the Hamburg Foundation to promote science and culture, working at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. Today, Akcam is currently a Visiting Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota.



The Armenian Genocide (1915-23) was the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I. It was characterized by massacres, and deportations involving forced marches under conditions designed to lead to the death of the deportees, with the total number of deaths reaching 1.5 million. 



The date of the onset of the genocide is conventionally held to be April 24, 1915, the day that Ottoman authorities arrested some 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. Thereafter, the Ottoman military uprooted Armenians from their homes and forced them to march for hundreds of miles, depriving them of food and water, to the desert of what is now Syria. Massacres were indiscriminate of age or gender, with rape and other sexual abuse commonplace. The Armenian Genocide is the second most-studied case of genocide after the Holocaust.



The Republic of Turkey, the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, denies the word genocide is an accurate description of the events. In recent years, it has faced repeated calls to accept the events as genocide.



To date, twenty countries and 44 U.S. states have officially recognized the events of the period as genocide, and most genocide scholars and historians accept this view. The Armenian Genocide has been also recognized by influential media including The New York Times, BBC, The Washington Post and The Associated Press. 



The majority of Armenian Diaspora communities were formed by the Genocide survivors.