Hrant Dink's Lawyer: Prime Minister Protecting Those Involved in Dink Murder

Fethiye Çetin, an attorney representing the family of slain Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, slammed Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Thursday for his recent remarks about the Dink murder case and claimed that the government is trying to protect those who were involved in the assassination.

The Islamized Armenians and Us

Raffi Bedrosyan

 



In early November, the Hrant Dink Foundation held a conference on “Islamized Armenians” at the Istanbul Bosphorus University, breaking one more taboo in Turkey. Islamized Armenians were hitherto a hidden reality, a secret known by many, but which couldn’t be revealed to anyone, whispered behind closed doors but filed in government intelligence offices, and it finally broke free into the public.

The late Hrant Dink would have been elated to see this conference become a reality, eight years after the first conference on “Armenians during the late Ottoman Empire era and the 1915 events” was held at Istanbul Bilgi University, when protesters hurled insults at the conference participants and government ministers, labeling them as “traitors stabbing Turks in the back.” That conference had also broken a taboo, but Hrant was already a marked man for revealing the identity of the most famous Islamized Armenian—Sabiha Gokcen, Ataturk’s adopted daughter and the first female Turkish combat pilot, who was an Armenian orphan named Hatun Sebilciyan.

"Bastards of the Infidels"

Eric Nazarian

 



“Bastards,” “infidels,” “remains of the sword” were the derogatory words directed at Armenian survivors of the genocide in Turkey as well as their offspring. Under this same umbrella was another set of “bastards” who were Christian Armenians forcibly or willingly converted to Islam in the wake of the genocide.

This was one of the many topics covered over the course of three eye-opening days at the Hrant Dink Foundation’s Conference on “Islamized Armenians” on the Bogazici University campus in Istanbul. We heard lectures and panels comprised of international scholars presenting a myriad of oral and academic histories about forcibly Islamized Armenians, as well as the histories of the willingly converted that bridge and divide these communities. The conference was a platform for these unofficial minorities, a sort of “People’s History of Islamized Armenians,” to borrow half of Howard Zinn’s title. This percentage of the Turkish population is the resurfacing “remains of the sword.”

Freeing the Pain: Turkish Writer/Lawyer Opens Dialogue with 'Hidden' Armenians in Turkey

Gayane Mkrtchyan

 

Turkish lawyer, writer and human rights activist Fethiye Cetin, the author of the memoir entitled “My Grandmother”, says that when her 70-year-old Armenian grandma Hranush was talking about her roots it felt like easing the burden she had been carrying on her frail shoulders for years. She was “emptying her soul” during the declining years of her life trusting Fethiye with what she had kept in the dark depths of her memory. Talking about it soothed grandma Heranush’s pain, and the legacy inspired her granddaughter’s first book.