Armenian-Turkish Journalist Shot for Speaking of the Armenian Genocide
I read a book about a family fleeing the killings in Turkey when I was a child (The Road from Home: The Story of an Armenian Girl by David Kherdian--based on the author's mother's experiences). It, along with several children's books on the Holocaust (including The Diary of Anne Frank) fueled my interest in genocide and how to prevent it in the future--and remembering what happened so that we learn from the past. As a result, I've gone on to study the situations in several of the genocides of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Turkey does acknowledge the deaths, but insists that it was not genocide, even though Armenians were targeted specifically because of their ethnicity and religion (they are Christian; the bulk of Turks are Muslim). They say it came during the unrest as the result of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
Sounds like what happened in the Balkans in the collapse of Yugoslavia and the Communist rule that was keeping various ethnic groups relatively together. I think we can agree that what happened in Bosnia was, in fact, genocide.
I don't think the past should keep Turkey from joining the European Union per se. It would be good it they acknowledged that past fully. I'd like to think it was a different country now. But Dink was tried for insulting Turkey with his words. And now he has paid a far greater price.
It's sad that this sort of thing continues in the world. Violence cannot destroy ideas, only bodies.
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