Monday, February 05, 2007

Murder of the Armenian Journalist

Hrant Dink was an Armenian. Armenia was the first nation to, as a nation, convert to Christianity. The next was Ethiopia. The next was the the Roman Empire. Obviously then, the Armenian people see the Christian faith as something absolutely essential to their identity.

Recently, an Armenian journalist in Turkey was murdered. He was one of the very few Christians or Armenians remaining in Turkey these days.

A good article on the source of the violence aginast him is found at the link below. Suffice to say the motivation was not Islam, but rather nationalism:

"Hrant Dink was a member of Turkey’s seventy-thousand-strong Armenian community. But he was not just any member. As the founder and editor of the weekly Agos, the bilingual Turkish/Armenian newspaper, he was certainly the most prominent Armenian public intellectual in the country. He was, like many Turkish democrats, critical of the authoritarian measures of the state, with a particular emphasis on the taboos about the Armenian tragedy of 1915. Mr. Dink, like many others, believed that the tragedy was indeed a planned genocide. (The Turkish view, on the other hand, is that hundreds of thousands Armenians did indeed perish in 1915, but so did many Turks and Kurds, and what happened should be defined as intercommunal violence, not as a campaign of extermination.)"

OnTheSquare

No comments: