Who Killed Hrant Dink?

Hrant Dink was a Turkish-Armenian journalist.  He was murdered yesterday. 

Like many liberal Turkish writers, including Nobel winner Orhan Pamuk, he’d been to court charged with breaking the infamous “regulation 301”.  It forbids anyone from insulting “Turkishness”.  Hrant believed that Turks must be reconciled with their own history before genuine reconciliation can take place between Turks and Armenians.

In the past such murders were ascribed to “shadowy figures in the deep state”.  Not any more.  The nationalists, reacting in part to Western, particularly American, cultural and political ambitions in the Middle East, have created a monster which freely roams the streets.  It kills Christian priests, fires guns and lobs Molotov cocktails at Protestant churches, and makes a mockery of Turkey’s claims at being a cross-roads of diversity and multi-culturalism.

The monster is a deliberate creation of nationalist politicians, newspaper men (and women), and film producers, notably the creators of the violent series Kurtlar Vadisi (Valley of the Wolves).  A like-minded group of lawyers led by the infamous Mr. Kemal Kerincsiz hauls those who think slightly differently to court on the least excuse.  If they cannot see you behind bars, they’ll blacken your name.  You might even be killed… Like Hrant Dink.

Hrant is not the first, and won’t be the monster’s last victim.  It will continue to devour until the Turks, en masse, are sickened by it.  Only then will the politicians, newpapermen and women, and film producers change their tunes; they, after all, are merely driven by the vote and the bottom line. 

Who killed Hrant Dink?  Every nationalist voter.

“A Fine Balance”

Although I have not been there, I feel as if I have just returned from 1970s India.

Set against the backdrop of the so-called emergency measures of Indira Ghandi’s government, Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance follows the lives of four unlikely individuals.  The book takes you to a level of involvement and emotion in another culture of which you may not perceive yourself of being capable.  Yes, there are some crude descriptive passages in this book; they are less crude, I dare say, than the world it seeks to describe.  The book just might move you to be a little kinder, a little more compassionate…

Mistry shows once again that no anthropology course is able to humanize the way a good novelist from the culture under investigation can.