Nationalism and its Discontents

Here a text we published recently in the Dutch magazine Flexmens. It's quite an impressive analysis on the circumstances surrounding the murder of the Turkish journalist Hrant Dink, in Januari this year. An attack on Turkish nationalism and western xenophobia.

Nationalism and its Discontents

On the murder of Hrant Dink

In shock I scan the past two and a half months’ online news sources about the assassination of the journalist Hrant Dink, shot in Istanbul on January 19, 2007 in front of his bilingual newspaper Agos, by the seventeen year old O.S. I am shocked by the tacit and explicit racism I see in the commentary sections. It's present in Turkish, European and American sources: Racism against Armenians in Turkish news sources and web sites of Turkish communities throughout Europe. Racism against Turks in Dutch and English news blogs.

The unity of Turkey

Everyone seems to pull the issue in another direction. Many columnists, editors, public and political figures in Turkey condemned the assassination. But many of them at the same time pointed to “foreign powers which aim to destroy our peace and stability”, a popular political tactic of beating around the bush in Turkey. They mean that there might be people, countries, pertinacious lobbies, terrorist organizations etc. trying to dismantle “us”, the “unity” of Turkey. These “foreign factors” are trying to “deform the image of Turkey” against the (Western) rest of the world. The reference is also to the Swiss and, newly passed, French law forbidding the denial of the Armenian genocide, which is also under discussion in the United States’ Congres. But whichever “image of Turkey” is painted, the fact remains that it was not “us” who was murdered. Instead, it was an Armenian citizen of Turkey who was shot because of his ideas and intellectual position. Why doesn’t the discussion stick with this simple fact? Among the writers who were prosecuted for “insulting Turkishness” on the basis of the law 301, Hrant Dink was the only Armenian. He was also the only one actually convicted of this crime. There is more than enough reason to believe that many things, including his death, befell Dink at least partly because he is an Armenian. The question which comes up here is only recently publicly phrased and is therefore very important: Are some judged differently than others even though they are of the same nation? Is the category of nationalism exclusive for certain people of Turkey? Any attempt to begin such a questioning is warded off by defensive “nationalistic reflexes” such as the initial reactions to this murder. The term nationalism is, after all, almost always positive in Turkish discourse, be it popular, intellectual, political, left-wing or right-wing. It carrries with itself a character of wholeness and naturalness. Yet, people have experienced deep feelings of self-guilt and complicity after the murder – a sign that this category is indeed not broad enough to allow for a truthful public discussion about the reasons for this murder.

An Islamist component?

On many Dutch and English news blogs, a discussion is going on about the Islamist character of the assassination. Many commentators refer to one specific detail left unaccentuated by Dutch and English professional media, namely that the murderer shouted “I shot the non-Muslim” after killing Dink. This appeared as “I shot the Armenian” in all Turkish media – not primarily a religious statement but an ethnic one – which might tell us more about nationalism than about religious fanaticism. Yet, for the Dutch and English commentators, the assassination is rather of a religious nature than of an “extremely nationalist” one. They see this as another act of Muslim extremism, even as a part of the Jihad against the Christians. Eventually, they reinforce their beliefs about the backward fundamentalist Turks who should be kept out of the European Union at all costs. But Hrant Dink, as an intellectual, was much more than just a Christian killed by a Muslim. He himself was put in the crosshairs because he refused to oppose one identity, one culture, one ethnicity to another – let alone one religion to another one. He didn’t have any religious goals, but instead worked to reach a common narrative about the past shared by the Armenians and the Turks. This common narrative was only a matter of the Armenians and the Turks, in his opinion, not of the Europian Union and so forth. When French parliament passed the law banning the denial of the Armenian genocide, he proposed to go to France and be prosecuted there for denying the genocide whereas he had been prosecuted in Turkey many times for recognizing it. “It is much more important that Turkey becomes a more democratic country than that Turkey recognizes the genocide. Only a democratized country would dare to face with her history and discuss her problems. Only then could Turkey learn to emphatize with others, and events of the same sort would not happen any more”, he said. But to force Turkey into recognizing the genocide through the French, Swiss, United States’ or whichever parliament has an adverse affect upon the chances of open discussion because such a sanction is perceived in Turkey to be a foreign encroachment. This would be seen as an imperialist infringement by both the leftists (of whom Dink is a good example) and the rightists in Turkey. Dink knew this very well, and also that these half anti-imperialist, half nationalist sentiments might ultimately end up in remarks fed with racist, anti-Armenian prejudices that have little to do with anti-imperialism. This is also what we have seen to come true in the European reactions where the blind focus on the religious character of the murder is fed with xenophobia and anti-Islam prejudices, and it has little to do with a real political gesture against Turkish extreme nationalism.

Opinions in Turkey

The unique intellectual and political characteristics of Hrant Dink; the people who possibly were involved in the assassination, directly or indirectly (In one of his last articles “Why am I Chosen as a Target?”, Dink suspects some groups within the state and the military of guiding the ultra-nationalists against him); the public discussions and ideological fights after his death all show that this murder has a political character. It has aroused a public political discussion and made a hundred thousand people, Turkish, Kurdish, Armenian etc., participate in Hrant Dink’s funeral with slogans as “We are all Armenians.” This was a surprise and a hint of hope for many who were used to encountering nationalistic reflexes only. Yet, Turkey’s Foreign Ministry chided a United States Senate panel on a resolution for condemning the murder, because, according to the Ministry, “the bill was politically motivated.” The Ministry states that “bringing this resolution to the agenda of the Senate serves only to exploit the loathsome murder for political aims by referring to the events of 1915” . This line of reasoning is an interesting example of the Turkish state policy, which distinguishes between the factual piece of disputed history (when more than a million Armenians died and were slain during a long and harsh deportation from all over Anatolia to the Syrian deserts in 1915) and the political character of current matters relating to it. What is implied is that whenever this political component is accentuated, this is done so by insurgent groups or individuals whose aim is attacking Turkey’s unity. In other words, it should remain a historical discussion from which no present consequences should be derived. The fact that many chief columnists of widely read Turkish newspapers seek to maintain the image of the murder as a singular event is a derivate of this state policy. While it is possible that an explanation should involve matters like self-claimed extremism, youth problems, radicalisation of marginal groups, and underdeveloped Anatolian provinces (The murderer O.S. is from Trabzon, an underdeveloped city on the North-Eastern coast), these opinionists don’t place any emphasis on the political aspects. Even when it turned out that those accused of the assassination were heavily involved with the local youth chapter of the ultra-nationalist Buyuk Birlik Partisi (Grand Unity Party), and that the authorities have been proven heavily negligent in preventing the assassinaton, the picture didn’t change. In fact, the slow proceedings of the interrogation and O.S.’s merely being the smallest link in a broad and complicated network of people, make it easier for some commentators and politicians to evade a fruitful political reflection about their own possible share in the process leading to the slaying of Hrant Dink. Instead, they go on to claim that this murder shouldn’t be a reason to attack Turkish nationalism.

The facts

But is this murder really only about the alarming new extreme nationalism of a few groups? About radical sunnite sentiments? Backward provincialism? When, in 1992, Büyük Birlik Partisi (Grand Unity Party) split from the ultra-nationalist MHP (Nationalist Movement Party), they started propagating a combination of Turkish ultra-nationalism and Sunnite Islam, whereas MHP had become more secular and moved towards the centre-right. In the recently uncovered facts surrounding the assassination, it is now known that the high local politicians of BBP knew O.S. and his co-defendants, Yasin Hayal and Erhan Tuncel, and had been present while these defandants were discussing their plans of the assassination in various situations. Of course, the leader of this small party, Muhsin Yazicioglu, denied any involvement with the assassination. In order to get investigators off his back, he also took the “singularity approach” as well as blaming the state. This proved to be a valid accusation because Erhan Tuncel, the brain of the assassination, turned out to have been a civilian secret agent of the police, who had informed the Trabzon police department seventeen times in detail about the impending assassination he himself had a big role in. The position of civilian secret agent was given to him by the Trabzon Police Chief at the time, Ramazan Akyürek, who is now the head of the national Police Intelligence Bureau. Tuncel’s appointment, moreover, took place after he and Hayal were apprehended for bombing a McDonald’s in 2004. The serious questions why Tuncel was made into an intelligence agent by the police and how this agent became a chief inspirator for the assassination of Hrant Dink remain. The public also blame the police and the military because of the pictures of some policemen and gendarmes posing proudly with the convict O.S. and because the police intelligence bureaus in Trabzon, Ankara and Istanbul hardly processed the information they received from Tuncel prior to the murder. The scheme has become yet more complicated, as some police sources imply that Tuncel could also be working for the military intelligence of the Gendarmerie Intelligence Bureau at the same time he worked for the police, yet without the knowledge of the police.

Why was he chosen as a target?

Trying to build up a dialogue among people rather than merely come up with historical and academic theses, Hrant Dink believed that the sufferings borne in 1915 would be understood by the people of Anatolia. The Armenians, the Turkish, the Kurdish and other peoples next to them have lived together for thousands of years. They share their geography and with it they share a common understanding towards each other, no matter what the state policy. With this socialist perspective, Dink was on both Turkish and Armenian sides. In Agos, published bilingually, the current issues of the Armenian community were discussed. Dink wrote about the present identity problems rather than pinning this identity on the traumatic 1915, out to open the community to the world. In this way, Agos was also a secular, liberal challenge to the image of the Armenian community of Turkey under the Armenian Patriarch’s wings, which became clear when the Patriarch Mutafyan criticized Dink and his newspaper Agos in 2006 to “cross the line” and to be “a child of the 1968 generation in an identity crisis”. Dink replied him that “Agos is a leftist and revolutionary newspaper. Revolutions only happen when you cross the line.” It was inevitable that Dink challenged identities on both sides. However, when, in 2004, the news suggesting that Sabiha Gökçen, Atatürk’s adopted daughter, could have been an Armenian taken from an orphanage, was published in Agos, it aroused great hostility. De Turkse Joint Chief of Staff (one of the most powerful institutions of Turkey) stated that questioning the Turkishness of such a symbolic figure could only be a “crime committed against national unity and social peace”. After this statement, Dink writes in “Why am I Chosen as a Target?” that he got invited by a governor’s assistant of Istanbul. He was intimidated by him and two other people in his office (who turned out to be from de National Intelligence Organization Milli Istihbarat Teskilati): They warned him to be more careful with what he writes. A few days later some MHP (Nationalist Movement Party) connected groups protested and issued explicit threats against Dink in front of the Agos newspaper building. Afterwards, the prosecutions by the nationalist lawyer Kemal Kerinçsiz and his friends on the basis of Law 301 for “insulting Turkishness” started. The trials were accompanied by intimidating provocations and threats by self-claimed nationalists, whom a pan-Turkist retired brigadier general Veli Küçük (who is known to have a lot of power and popularity among extremely right-wing circles) supported by his participation in one of these trials. News and articles showing Dink as an enemy of the nation, more and more death threat letters followed.

So what is nationalism and Turkishness?For a murder, only one madman is needed. The question for Turkey should be what fed the madness? In this sense, the problem is not a spontaneously growing number of Turks who have become so crazy as to kill Dink, the ideas of whom they sure haven’t read once. The murderers did not get their ideas out of the blue. They are not simply the too radical instances of nationally and naturally rising Turkish sentiments, which hearken at both nationalist and religious reasons for this murder. And this is exactly the reason to question what is called the broader, and supposedly innocent, Turkish nationalism. Is this concept itself not used to normalize, in other words depoliticize, the murder? The many veiled facts around Hrant Dink’s assassination imply that the killers take their power and authority to act in the name of Turkish nationalism from a broad range of figures including writers, politicians, policemen and retired soldiers no matter whether these people directly and consciously supported them or not. As such, this murder is evidence of a problem in society. The assassins’ allies are those who have fed their “nationalistic reflexes”, those who have provided them with guns and taught how to use them, those who ignored their inclinations either because they didn’t mind their cause or because it came in handy for their own, those who claimed after the murder that this was a marginal case having nothing to do with real nationalism and it shouldn’t be a reference point in discussions about the Armenian genocide. But actually, this does have to do with what many call nationalism. The question is now whether there is a kernel of racism at the heart of this nationalism. How can a political murder such as this, which suits a fascist regime at best, be implicitly defended in the name of nationalism? For many columnists, bloggers and commentators, there still should be a punishment for the real traitors of Turkey even though they do not see Hrant Dink as one of them. But who are the traitors of Turkey if they are not those who are legally prosecuted for “insulting Turkishness”? The politicians and authorities mostly either defend the nationalistic views or keep their silence to maintain appearances. It was the AKP (The Justice and Development Party) Minister of Justice Cemil Çiçek, who, in 2005, called the organizers of a conference on the Armenian genocide traitors and the conference had to be cancelled de facto. Since then, the object of debate has shifted away from the genocide to “national sentiments” and the debate itself became a hunt for the “traitors of Turkey”. Erdogan’s government now heavily condemns the murder but they would not directly scrap off the Article 301 (which is not the first of its kind anyway) in fear of the nearing elections. Deniz Baykal, the leader of the extremely secular governmental opposition party CHP (The Republican’s People Party), on the other hand, underlines the roles of Ramazan Akyürek, the ex-Trabzon Police Chief, and Celalettin Cerrah, the Istanbul Police Chief, in the assasination. The leader of this oppositional party blames AKP’s anti-laicist “Islamist cadres” situated in the police organization for the ill workings of the institution. As opposed to the police, CHP sees the military as a guardian against the “radical Islam” and demonizes any criticism relating the military to this assassination. However, also this isn’t the solution to aim for, as the military often tries to determine the content of the concepts of Turkishness and Turkish nation in public discussions. For instance, in the reaction of the Joint Chief of Staff to the news I mentioned earlier about Sabiha Gökçen, they refer to the constitutional definition “Everyone who is connected to the Turkish state via citizenship is Turkish”, which means, as they note, that the term “Turk” is no ethnic or religious definition in the constitution. However, from this definition we can imply that the military treats any critical attempt to mention other ethnicities, to look back at history and question Turkish identity as treachery. As long as this is considered to be so, the Turkish identity will be defined by what it excludes and the defenders of this Turkishness will be hunting people, who are considered to be traitors, with the help of those who depoliticize a murder by protecting the nationalism and ignoring the signs of racism and fascism involved in that murder. In this light, the attempts of the Dutch and English commentators to underline the Islamist character of the assassination of Hrant Dink interfere without contributing to a political debate about the assassination and the Armenian genocide. Religious sentiments could be a part of the murderer’s mindset. The commentators are right in that, but for the wrong reasons. Among other things, most of them conclude that Turkey with its undemocratic, barbarian Turks doesn’t belong to Europe and should never be a part of it. However, is this again a remark about the Turkish identity or does it rather have to do with something like Europeanness? A feeling of threat towards themselves and reluctance to understand this political event in itself make the commentators act on xenophobia, read a merely cultural side into this murder, and sweep Islam and Turkey together to one side without any attempt to look beyond the singular aspects of the murder, hence moulding the discussion to their xenophobic homeland politics. Whereas, in Turkey, the murder of Hrant Dink, the facts surrounding it and the hunt in discussions for insider traitors are an indication of the problems Turkey has with its organization along strictly nationalistic lines. Any identification of a national body destroys that body in the divisions and exclusions it creates. We can see this on the complicated façade of Turkish nationalism itself, where certain groups and opinions are left voiceless. Hrant Dink was one of the very few who swam against the tide on all sides: He was not only an Armenian from Turkey but also a socialist, and a voice of dissent against the self-image of the Armenian community as well as the historical-political theses of the Turkish state. However late, it is this legacy of Hrant Dink’s affirmative politics which shows us the way: to see other narratives come into play, to listen and to act.

Funda Özokçu, April 2007