I MET HRANT Dink, a journalist who was assassinated earlier today in Istanbul, in 2005. A Turkish businessman organized a lunch to introduce me to a few journalists and civil society activists who had attended a recent conference on the Armenian Genocide. The successful staging of the conference, the first of its kind in Turkey where the state has long sponsored a campaign to deny the killings, came only after repeated efforts by Turkish nationalists to stop it through legal challenges.
Dink believed that efforts to block the conference were designed to undermine Turkey’s bid to join the European Union by casting Turkey as irredeemably hostile to freedom of speech. And, he thought such efforts would fail. Quite possibly, there was a similar motive for his murder. “Hrant’s body is lying on the ground as if those bullets were fired at Turkey,” fellow journalist Can Dundar told a Turkish television station.
