BURADAYIZ! WE ARE HERE! If we need to tell a story, we have to begin with 1915.* It has been almost a century since the Ottoman government razed the villages of its Armenian citizens, ransacking their homes, forcefully deporting and massacring nearly one million people. These crimes remain unrecognized by the Turkish state, just as the Armenians still living in Turkey today are subjected to discrimination and violence. Today, January 19th, is the 7th anniversary of the assassination of the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in front of the Istanbul office of his newspaper Agos. We know that the murder was not an isolated crime, but rather it was the last instance of a long chain of state-orchestrated persecutions directed against non-Muslims and other marginalized populations of Anatolia. The Armenian Genocide of 1915 and its denial were the original sins, the constitutive crimes of modern Turkey. It was from the same political and military groups responsible for the near total annihilation of Armenians in Anatolia that the Turkish Republic was formed in 1923, instituting a similarly racialized conception of citizenship that was enforced through a nation-wide program of Turkification. This legacy continues today, as evidenced by the state’s obstruction of justice in the investigation of Dink’s assassination. Not only was the rule of law systematically undermined during the investigations, but it was soon apparent that murderers were working directly in collaboration with the Turkish state. Against this racist state ideology, this tradition of brutality, we find hope in the hundreds of thousands of people who have taken to the streets since January 19th, 2007 shouting “we are all Hrant, we are all Armenians.” We gain strength from the millions of people who resisted the authoritarian Turkish government in Gezi Park and elsewhere in 2013, and we stand in solidarity with the many international networks that have formed in recognition of these atrocities. With the courage and enthusiasm we take from these struggles and in advance of next year’s 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, we invite all to form networks for dialogue, critical encounters and reconciliation. As students of Turkish Studies in the University of Washington, we call on the Seattle community to join us on February 7th, 2014 in order to plan and organize a series of events for commemorating April 24th , the Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, as the first initiative to build a platform for continuing discussion. Students of Turkish Studies Initiative, University of Washington Seattle, 1/19/2014 *Bandista – İnkârın Şarkısı (The Song of Denial)
Posted on: Mon, 20 Jan 2014 05:54:12 +0000
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