Hrant Dink

Fırat Hrant Dink (in Armenian: ՀրանդՏինք) (born the September 15th 1954 with Malatya - died assassinated the January 19th 2007 with Istanbul) is a journalist and a Turkish writer of Armenian origin. It was Assassiné in the district of Osmanbey with Istanbul, in front of the buildings of sound bilingual Journal Agos .

Biography

Hrant Dink was the founder, the publication director and the chronicler as a chief of the weekly magazine Agos , a newspaper published with Armenian Istanbul in and Turkish. He also wrote for the national newspapers Zaman and Birgün .

Born with Malatya the September 15th 1954 from a modest family, Dink arrived at Istanbul at the 7 years age when it passed its childhood in orphanages. All its schooling took place in the Armenian schools and it was graduate college Surp Haç with Üsküdar. It is graduate in Zoologie of the Université of Istanbul and it continued to study in the same university the Philosophie. He married Rakel Dink in 1977, which also grew in orphanage, with which he had two girls (Delal and Séra) and a son (Arat).

He founded Agos in 1996, and became little by little the leader of opinion of the Armenian community of Turkey.

In October 2005, Dink, defended by the lawyer and écrivaine Fethiye Çetin, was condemned to six months of Prison with deferment for an article affirming that the Armenians were to be released from “Turkish obsession” by a periphrasis evoking “the running out blood of the noble vein connecting the Armenians to Arménie will replace that poisoned by the “Turkish element””. It defended, in a series of eight articles published in Agos , the thesis which the Armenian identity was to be rebuilt around the question of survival of the young Armenian State and not only about the requirement of the recognition of the genocide by Turkey. Part of the press had then interpreted this sentence taken out of its context as a racist declaration what had deeply shocked it, him which defended with eagerness the “food together”.

The court, against the opinion of a commission of experts, had estimated that these remarks went against article 301 of the Penal code Turkish revised which sanctions the “denigration of the Turkish national identity” and makes thus possible the continuations of authors or of Universitaire S for insult to the Turkish identity. Dink had then said to the agency Reuters: “It may be that I pay the price of them but the Turkish democracy will gain there, I hope for it. ” This verdict was highly criticized by the European Union, to which Turkey aspires to adhere.

Death threat because of its remarks concerning the Armenian genocide made under the Ottoman Empire was worth the hostility of the Turkish government to him, but also and especially of the nationalist mediums, from which its assassin would come. The Turkish authorities refuse to recognize the genocidary character of the massacres of Armenians made in 1915-1917 and practice a policy of Négation of the Armenian genocide.

Hrant Dink always underlined its Turkish citizenship and the need for democratization of the Turkey, affirming that the payment of the Armenian problem is only one shutter of the democratization of the country. From the same point of view, it defended the adhesion of the Turkey within the European Union. Throughout its life, it was focused on the questions of the rights of the minorities, the civic rights and the problems concerning the Armenian community in Turkey. He was a very important activist for peace.

The October 11th 2007, his/her son, Arat Dink, and Serkis Seropyan, respectively directing of the drafting and person in charge of the weekly magazine Agos , are recognized guilty to have insulted the Turkish identity and, for this reason, condemned to one one-year suspended sentence by a Turkish court, under the terms of article 301 of the Penal code Turkish, to have reproduced, during the summer 2007, in the columns of Agos , part of the remarks of Hrant Dink which had been worth with this one the legal proceedings which had stopped only with its assassination.

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