Armenian dissident sees a threat to free speech

Turkey: Hrant Dink knows all about freedom of speech and the lack of it.

Turkey: Hrant Dink knows all about freedom of speech and the lack of it.

An Armenian Turk who edits the bilingual Istanbul-based weekly Agos, he is the only person to have been convicted so far under a notorious law that has been used to bring Nobel prize-winner Orhan Pamuk and dozens of others to trial.

With a six-month suspended sentence under his belt for "insulting Turkishness", Dink now faces up to three years' prison under the same law for describing the deaths of at least 600,000 Armenians in 1915 as "genocide". Not that that has stopped him criticising the French parliament's vote yesterday morning to make denying genocide a punishable offence.

"If this law passes through the senate, I will go to France and say that there was no genocide, even if it pains me to say so," he said. "There is no difference in mentality between the Turkish and French laws. Let French and Turkish justice compete to see which of them can judge me faster."

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Like other liberals here, Dink sees both pieces of legislation as flagrant breaches of the European Convention on Human Rights, which argues that freedom of speech can only be limited if national security, territorial integrity or public safety is under threat.

But his greatest concern is that this slew of legislation and counter-legislation will stifle the rapidly growing debate in Turkey on the reality of 1915.

The biggest taboo in a country political analyst Fuat Keyman describes as "founded on historical amnesia", the Armenian genocide is the subject of an increasing number of books, exhibitions and academic conferences. "Beneath the bluster, the Turkish establishment's position is crumbling," says Halil Berktay, referring to the state's insistence that Armenians were the victims of a civil war that killed more Muslims.

A historian at Istanbul's Sabanci University, Berktay was the target of months of death threats in 2000 when he became the first Turkish historian publicly to describe 1915 as a genocide.

He doesn't like using the word, though. "Turks are furious when you use it, Armenians when you don't", he said. "What is needed is to find common ground, but the climate of polarisation makes that near impossible."

For him, the meddling of any parliament in the matter is "no better than those Turkish policemen who used to raid tourist hotels at night to check couples were married."

The author of a powerfully moving 2005 memoir of her grandmother, who told her late in her life that she was an Armenian who converted to Islam in 1915, Istanbul lawyer Fethiye Cetin agrees: "These debates over terminology and statistics are barren,", she says. "They hide the lives and deaths of individuals and do nothing to encourage people to listen."