Thank you Zeynep for this introduction.

Thank you Selcan, Saygun, Zeynep, Tolga, Kutlu and Ahmet for this invitation.

I am sorry I cannot be with you in person, not only do I miss visiting my favourite city, but I would have loved to stand with the students and faculty of Boğaziçi University in solidarity, holding a plaque reading “akademi biat etmez”.

Dear Rakel Dink, dear members of the Dink family, members of the Hrant Dink foundation, dear faculty and students, dear guests:

It is my great honour to be invited to deliver the 2021 Hrant Dink Memorial Lecture, a little over 14 years after his assassination.

I took this invitation as more than just one meant for delivering a lecture.

I took it as an invitation to learn more about the life, the work, and about the death of Hrant Dink.

My friend, Hrag Vartanian, a NYC based editor, sent me an interviews Hrant Dink has given to him, a few months before his assassination in which Dink says: “…one thing I know is that things will change, for better or worse. How do I know? I don’t see the change, I’m living the change.”

He ended up dying the change, or for the change, and if change will come, it will be largely thanks to your ongoing efforts here and elsewhere to use the commemoration of his life to promote values of human rights and democracy.

From a life that is so rich, and from a death that is so brutal and tragic, there are many lessons to learn.

These lessons — formative for Turkish Civil Society — also resonate well beyond these borders.

Thinking about Dink, helped me — a Jewish, Israeli-born scholar and human rights activist — reflect about my own history and the place I come from.

It takes the courage and dignity of Hrant Dink to insist we look back at the most unspeakable and horrific violence of the Armenian Genocide, and acknowledge it as the foundation violence of the state.

From my perspective, I’m thinking not only at the Holocaust, but of the violence that lies at the foundation of Israel, the Palestinian catastrophe or Nakba of 1948 — the expulsion, massacres and land theft that continue to the present day.

However, there are laws in Israel that forbid the uttering the word “Nakba”.

And so, when one is unable to utter the word, every murder of every Palestinian, and the ensuant denials or justification, inevitably becomes the continuation of the Nakba, a catastrophe of destruction that last to this very day.

We, in Israel/Palestine must also consider the truth of the Nakba, as horrible as it is, as the necessary ground for claim for democratisation and for the “right of return”.

Learning about the life of Dink, made me reflect about the interplay he had demonstrated between a forceful insistence on the truth, and the multiple subtle ways he practiced to pursue it.

It made me think of how to deal with laws, legislated also in Israel, that protect the “honour of the state” (states that need laws to protect their honour have none).

Learning about Hrant Dink made me think about what it means when a state refers to political murderers as “rotten apples” or “bad weeds” — as Israel did to every political murderer from that of Rabin to that of Abdel Fattah al-Sharif who was shot when lying wounded in Hebron. A state absolving itself of responsibility for murders nourished from the cultural violence and structural racism it promotes promotes further terror.

Other lessons I drew reading about Hrant Dink were to do with how careful we must all be to resist letting authoritarian states aggravate tensions between marginalised groups.

Palestinians and Mizrahi Jews speak the same language, which could be the basis for a shared existence in a democratic state.

Equally we must resist falling into the trap of manufactured tensions between Armenians, Kurds and Jews.

Learning about Dink make me reflect upon how limited are the remedies that the law could offer; about what happens when we cannot rely on the law to provide justice, or worst, when the legal process becomes political repression by other means.

My friend the legal scholar Basak Ertur wrote of the assassination of Dink: “Law forgets… Then it forgets that it forgot… When it is reminded… it postpones the remembering so that the forgetting will be deeper and darker.”

Learning about the assassination of Hrant Dink made me think of the price one must risk to pay for speaking the truth…

…and it made me think of Tahir Elci, and our investigation of his killing, of which I am unable to speak today, due to the ongoing legal process.

History is a hall of mirrors; in each individual story we can see the reflection of other stories.

In each life lost we see those of others.

Each political situation resonates across territories and generations.

But historical mirrors can also be partial, distorted.

We must be aware of illusions, and partial truths. I am not a student of Turkish politics and history, and it will be up to you, to decide whether in what I will present today might also be lessons relevant to your society and struggle.

 

Eyal Weizman was the 2021 Hrant Dink Memorial Lecture keynote speaker.

Read Agos’ coverage of the event here.