The openMovements series invites leading social scientists to share their research results and perspectives on contemporary social struggles.
Hrant Dink..Adalet ( justice!). Demotix/J Kojak. All right reserved.
The question in the title has been posed over and over
again in the nine years since the day when Hrant Dink was shot dead in
Istanbul, in front of the offices of his Turkish-Armenian bilingual journal, Agos. Here is one answer from a young historian, Ali
Tirali, translated by the author:
The founder and editor-in-chief of the journal Agos, Hrant Dink, a Turkish-Armenian
journalist and activist was shot on 19 January, 2007, at around 3pm, on
Halaskargazi Avenue in front of his journal’s headquarters in Istanbul. The
suspect was described as a young man – later identified later Ogün Samast: “age around
18-19, wearing blue-jeans and a white beret”. Witnesses heard three shots. When
Dink was discovered lying dead, shot in the back of head, the perpetrator
disappeared into one of the crowded back streets of Şişli. Dink’s body was left
lying in front of the Sebat building for an hour before being moved to the
legal morgue and to the Church Surp Asvadzadzin in Kumkapı. At that time, people
gathering at the scene of the shooting were chanting slogans such as “Long live
the brotherhood of peoples” – “Murderer state!” – “Those Hrants don't die!”
etc. In the evening, protests spread throughout İstanbul and Ankara. Report of
the murder carried far and wide in national and international media. The
perpetrator Ogün Samast was arrested on the road making for his home town,
Trabzon. The gendarme officers who arrested the murderer posed with him in
front of a Turkish flag. That image reverberated through the social media. Public
opinion was further shocked by the statement of the President of the Police Forces
of İstanbul, who said of him: “That individual has no link with any criminal
organisation: the assassination has no political dimension. It was an act
committed out of pure nationalist sentiment.” In the days that followed this
declaration, it emerged that Samast was involved in extreme right-wing
paramilitary groups and that the police administration at different levels was
aware of the planning of the crime.
I have been collecting answers and conducting interviews since 2007 in
Istanbul to this same question: “What happened on 19 January, 2007?” Some reply
in a categorical way:
–
“On
that day, the Turkish part of my heart was shamed by its human part.”
–
“Never
before in my life had I felt myself so Turkish.”
The Armenian filmmaker Dikran Hızmalyan, remembers that during
the days of the Gezi occupation in 2013, he saw there in the Park, “the same
faces, the same protesters that have carried Hrant’s portrait as the symbol of
freedom for many years”, adding that Gezi Park was constructed from the marble
stolen from the former Armenian cemetery, and
that indeed the root of our social memory lies in that park…
In these dark days when Turkey is once again hovering
between its painful past and its hopeless future, the ninth commemoration of
Dink’s assassination took place in Istanbul. That commemoration was an opportunity
to express themselves for current ‘emancipation movements’ dealing both with
the peaceful resolution of the Kurdish issue, and the right to equal
citizenship for all who are different. In addition, solidarity has been extended
to a wide group of academics attacked because of their
petition in favour of peace and in support of the dissident Kurdish cities
under curfew and repression for many months.
New and subterranean movements of emancipation and
democratization may have only become visible since the Gezi movement of 2013,
but they have been stirring since the beginning of last decade and they have
always converged strongly around Dink’s assassination protests.
I would like to draw attention to this commemoration
of Hrank Dink, not as a single or even a recurrent event, or as a single-issue
manifestation; but rather as one of the inspirational and emotional sources of the
Gezi movement — one of its invisible and unintended tributaries. In order to
show how important Hrant Dink’s commemoration is to the renewal of social
movements, their inspiration and creativity, I want to define it as a ‘moral
shock’ and shed light on its complex emotions. It was a turning point. Collective action in Turkey
was immersed and structured through this broad panoply of emotional mnemonics
that arose from Dink’s assassination.
The assassination
as a moral shock
Following
the work of James Jasper, the meeting and long funeral
march in moral protest can be analyzed as the outcome of a “moral shock” triggered
by complex emotions. Some key moments in this mobilization: the day of the
shooting, a spontaneous gathering took place while news spread through several
media. During the following four days, a solidarity network prepared Hrant
Dink’s funeral. This event became both a public ritual and demonstration. Afterwards,
an electoral campaign of six months ensued. It was organized in order to further
mobilize and recruit the people who had already been emotionally implicated.
How does the cognitive processing of subjective emotions result in the rational
construction of collective action? What is the meaning of such collective
action? Is it solely an action against hate-crimes and violence, or can it
build a movement in favour of freedom and democracy? According to James Jasper:
Moral shocks are often the first step towards recruitment into
social movements. [They] occur when an unexpected event or piece of information
raises such a sense of outrage in a person that she becomes inclined toward
political action, whether or not she has acquaintances in the movement.
In the case of
Hrant Dink’s murder, moral shock emanated from a public event in a way that was
internalized and digested as an extremely personal experience. Even people who
did not know Dink before his assassination felt passionately involved. Take this young
female student who told me how she became caught up in the mobilization
process: “Unfortunately I didn’t know
Dink before he was killed. I never met him. But he was so close to me. After
his assassination, I read his articles, watched his lectures. I was sad not to
have discovered him before he died. It has been four years now and I am
grieving like the first day.”
The emotions of
such people are based upon collective experiences rather than personal memories
or a direct affective bond with the victim. Cognitive processing, information
gathering and the collective dimension of social and cultural grieving seem to construct
moral concern. The collective resonance of this particular assassination poses
questions.
Why was Hrant Dink
the target of this extreme nationalist attack, and why did his death have such
an impact ? Sinan, a 50 year old communist party member, was nearly in tears
when we asked him — four years after the fact — about the brutal assassination
of Hrant Dink. He stated: “It should not
have been him. Not him…” His reaction confirmed
the popular sentiment shared by many, that Hrant Dink had become a symbolic
iconic figure.
Knowledge about Dink
as a person offers more clues as to the kind of moral shock felt both in Turkey
and abroad. He was not the first journalist or public intellectual to become a
victim to violence or be pursued through the courts as a result of their
political opinions. According to the Committee
to Protect Journalists (CPJ), 20 journalists were killed in Turkey between
1992-2012; 78% of the murders have gone unpunished and with little follow-up,
while 50% have suspected perpetrators reported to be government officials.
My interviewees
were convinced that he was condemned and killed because he was Armenian; hence
their outrage and indignation, as my opening quotes show. They insist on the
shame felt by the Turkish part of their identity at such a crime. Furthermore,
Dink was an Armenian who spoke of peacemaking. He also occupied a peculiar
political left-wing position, that distanced him from both extremes in the
highly controversial debate about genocide within Turkey. His journal Agos was
mainly focused on the need for mutual dialogue between Armenians and Turks. But
Hrant Dink was concerned with human rights on the widest scale — and not solely
Armenian rights or for the recognition of the genocide.
It is this
critical dimension that underscored his role as a public intellectual and a
figure who would became associated with generalized political, cultural and
moral protest. Soon, a narrative of vulnerability and innocence enveloped Hrant
Dink, which increased the intensity of the moral shock at his assassination.
State authorities had not provided him with security despite the many threats
he received. On the other hand, Dink’s commitment to democracy and social
justice made him a highly-respected journalist among left-wing democrats and
beyond.
On the day of the
murder, hundreds of people rushed to the place where he had been killed. This
gathering was spontaneous, an immediate reactive mobilization, without any
organization. The slogan that gradually emerged from this crowd was: “We are all Hrant, we are all Armenians”.
In the Turkish
context, resistance to the national identity and identification with the absolute Other is a very powerful
expression of the outrage and indignation felt by these protesters. An Agos columnist, who witnessed
this spontaneous mobilization, described it thus:
“It
is a turning point. This slogan was not a simple slogan. It’s not me who
invented it. I really don’t know who did… At the beginning, they were
shouting, “Murderer-state”, then “Revenge against the deep-state etc.” But
suddenly somebody said “We are all Hrant” and everybody echoed this.” (Aydın, April 2008)
Complex emotions
Such
spontaneous protest and collective grieving turned into a communion of what Jasper
has described as “complex emotions”. Emotions of love and respect
for Hrant Dink became anger and indignation, in a mood of sorrow and grief.
These kinds of emotions intertwined during the spontaneous protests on the day
of the killing, beginning a political process in which cultural identities and
human rights claims converged. The slogan, “We
are all Armenians” signalled resistance against state-imposed identities. Later,
the electoral campaign of independent candidate Baskın Oran expressed solidarity
with this initial protest, and this further pried open the moral shock of
Dink’s assassination. During the campaign, the independent candidate claimed:
“Turks will defend Romani
people, Romani will defend Adyghe people, Adyhge will defend unemployed people,
unemployed people will defend women, women will defend Alevis, Alevis will
defend homosexuals”.
(Slogans excerpted from campaign press documents)
Within
this mix of shifting grammars, singular and enclosed identities lost their
extant signification. The mutual defense of different and varying identities
emerged, creating ties and affinities amongst different activists. These
critical threads of solidarity were spread via cultural claims rather than collective
identities or common political backgrounds or affiliations. Charged with the
organization of Dink’s funeral stated, one Agos
writer commented:
“Many people marched together,
not in different cortèges. With the old terminology, we would have defined them
as bourgeois liberals, workers, orthodox Marxists, anarchists, feminists, and
so on…”
(Aydın, april 2008)
This
moment of unification provided the possibility for common political
participation. During six months of political campaigning for the independent
candidate Baskın Oran in the 2007 legislative elections, people from different
political affiliations worked together with apolitical people, in the name of their
shared moral and universal principles.
On
the first day of this movement, one person observed that protest against these hate-crimes
had the potential to go on the offensive. As Michel Wieviorka suggests, “the offensive aspect of the movement corresponds to the
actor’s capacity to define a project, a vision or a utopia and, on the basis of
a strong identity, to put forward an alternative conception of community life.”
Social actors in this case were proposing the formation of new kinds of
cultural and social bonds which would impact on their sense of history.
Mass
media, personal networks and social media enabled a large and rapid
transmission of emotions surrounding the event of the assassination. The
biography of Dink as well as the history of lawsuits against him was, for the
first time, widely broadcast. For many people, his very existence came to the
fore the day he lost his life. For instance, on the fourth anniversary of his
murder, a young student said this about her experience of that moment:
“I was back home, coming from
the university. I was watching the news. The announcer said that Hrant Dink was
murdered. I didn’t even know who he was. Unfortunately, I am immune to such
news on TV. I didn’t pay attention. They added, he was an Armenian killed by a
Turk. This was the first time I felt so much a Turk… Neither our glorious
history, nor our national anthem had made me feel that. I was ashamed, I cried.
My Turkish part hurt my human part.”
These
emotions are transmitted through the media and one of the powers of new
communication technologies is to put forward shocking images. In fact, one of the
first photographs widely available in broadcast and social media on the day of
the shooting, showed the body of Hrant Dink taken from a low angle, as he lay
in the street. His feet were in the foreground; his bloody body covered with a
white fabric. The hole in his shoes was visible and has afflicted everyone.
This is far from being a meaningless detail because every single person we
interviewed noticed it. This image had a symbolic value which led to
identification with and compassion for Dink: he was an ordinary man, from the lower
middle-class. He was devoted to peace and reconciliation and far from pursuing
his own material or communitarian interests.
On
20 January, newspapers and independent media sources published the last
chronicle by Dink for Agos. In this article he spoke about the death
threats he had received and his anxiety over them. He compared himself to a
‘fearful pigeon’ in the streets, hoping that he could go on living in this
country, fearful yet free. He also declared that he could never accept being
turned into a racist against his compatriots and that he would seek justice
through the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).
The
metaphor of the ‘fearful pigeon’ to describe his emotional state was
transmitted through the full range of media outlets, ushering in yet more waves
of compassion. This metaphor provoked a strong affective identification. In the
context of moral shock, identification with Dink led to identification with the
broader Armenian community. In fact, it became a symbolic conduit for all in
the struggle against the nationalist cultural order.
Emotions
are not irrational: they must be understood as conduits for action. The
possibility of identification with an Armenian, the compassion and panoply of
emotions triggered and sustained during this mobilization, reveal the dynamics
of a cultural movement in which the emotions of the individual contain the potential
to generate a subject claiming rights in the name of values. In sum, ‘moral
shock’ gave rise to primarily negative emotions converted into collective
motivational energy by the revitalization of old political affinities, as well
as the creation of new ties between distinct movements and groups.
From moral protest to ‘emancipation
movement’?
The
moral protest after the murder disclosed the unfurling of a broader cultural
movement in Turkey. Though wide in its implications, and indicative of the
fragmented nature of Turkish civil society, the aftermath of the Hrant Dink
assassination is one case amongst other previous mobilizations that contained
similar repertoires of action and of demands. Many fragmented initiatives,
campaigns and organizations within Turkish civil society have in common an
emerging grammar of collective action, based upon the autonomy of the individual
and what Touraine has called the affirmation of
the subject. They also have in common the recognition of claims for justice
that direct us to the revitalization of social memory.
The
growing interest in memory, in and around struggles against official history,
has become evident in the way activists reinvent their militant and
organizational practices. Subjectivity is expressed through the blurring of
identities: for example when hundreds of thousands of people are united under
the slogan “We are all Armenians”, or when they research into the complexity of
their origins and multiple identities. This reconstruction of memory is not based
upon rigid collective identities but on the “public experience of self” as Kevin McDonald describes it, the “fluidarity
versus solidarity” that characterizes the organisation of cultural
movements.
In
this case, each individual is implicated in the movement through personal
emotions, moral shock or other affective bonds. Self-narratives of the recollected
past and the affirmation of an individual’s autonomy against state-imposed
identities become manifest in the human affinities created during occasional
mobilizations or gatherings. This process creates new subjects when it leads to
constructive, reflexive collective actions with embedded meanings that can
revitalize social, cultural and political life. One example of mobilization
that followed the moral protests in the aftermath of Dink’s murder, tangibly demonstrates
how self-affirmation and shared emotions open new paths to activism. On 24 April,
2010, for the first time the Armenian genocide was commemorated in a public
space in Turkey. Intellectuals and leading figures, who were already the
co-organizers of the funeral of Dink and the political campaign of Baskın Oran,
worked together in order to express their shared emotions in a public space.
This
act of mobilization was deeply performative, in that it was a mise-en-scène of
collective mourning. The emotions of anger and outrage that were transformed
into grief and sorrow during the funeral of Dink, and later at every
commemoration of his death, were again performed in the public sphere.
In
the most crowded central Taksim Square
in Istanbul, hundreds of individuals gathered together for a ritual of
mourning. Dressed in black, holding candles and flowers, they stayed half an
hour for a risky yet silent sit-in, whilst nationalist opponents were singing
the Turkish National Anthem at the other end of the square. Nobody pronounced
the word ‘genocide’ because the organizers opted for the expression “Great
Crime” (in Turkish, Great Catastrophe), as a literal translation of the
traditional Armenian expression. This commemorative action was also a turning
point, not only for the revitalization of social memory, but also for political
activism.
What
is the meaning of this rational mise-en-scène and performance of a
mourning ritual? What kind of collective action is it? It is designed to create
compassion amongst citizens, compassion as a necessary emotion for democracy
and pluralism. By contrast, standard political demonstrations, marches under
banners and slogans are rejected, in favour of using silence and embodiment as
activist tools. Without the moral protest and the strategic, rational
processing of emotions by the movement leaders, such a commemoration would be
impossible to imagine, experience or organize.
During the sit-in in 2010, participants experienced being ‘the
other’ of Turkish society: not only an Armenian but an individual able to feel
compassion, grief and sorrow with the other, able to share the sufferings and
the memory of the whole Armenian community. Historical memory and autobiographical
memory are in this case intertwined because without the direct, personal
experience of the assassination of Hrant Dink, the meaning of the actions would
have been limited to a defensive cause: the struggle against hate-crimes and
discrimination. The moral protest, buttressed by the emotion of the
participants, leads instead towards a deeper aspiration for social
transformation: one that speaks of a pluralistic democratic society, respect
for cultural differences, freedom of speech and active citizenship.
19 January, 2016 in Istanbul, where the commemoration gathers. Author’s photo.
A turning point in Turkish
society
The
moral protest that followed the assassination of Hrant Dink on 19 January, 2007
was a turning point in the reflexivity of Turkish society and its ability to
transform itself. Politically fragmented, culturally oriented movements have already
been stirring for two decades: e.g. feminist, ecologist, alter-globalization
movements as well as Kurdish cultural rights movements and other dissident
protests. Movements for the defense of human rights, freedom of expression and
cultural differences reached their climax during the mobilizations around the
death of Hrant Dink, which also crystallized social memory issues.
State-imposed amnesia about the Armenian issue confronted the community’s
narratives, along with the explosion of Dink’s murder.
Likewise,
recently the Turkish left has become more and more intrigued by its own
political memory. The once rigidly-structured revolutionary movements and
utopias have vanished and inquiries into their failure have outed the emergence
of memory claims against official history. These occur through new
representations of the past in media, art, cinema, film, literature, popular
culture and intergenerational transmission. Correlatively, the interpretation
of the military coup d’état of 1980 — and the representation of this past from
the viewpoint of its victims — displays new objectives and confers new meanings
on activism.
The
Gezi movement also revealed new transformative effects of social movements in
Turkey. The aspirations for the respect of cultural differences, the demands of
democracy and freedom, and the refusal of current economic development models
has never been so intertwined in former mobilizations as is now evident. Since
then, it is possible to outline a certain continuity between the particular
moral protests of the aftermath of Hrant Dink and the wider Gezi movement that
was firstly a non-violent uprising against authoritarianism and police
violence. This then provoked an intense indignation similar to the outrage felt
after Hrant Dink’s assassination. This was despite the fact that the emergence
of the Gezi movement was wholly unpredictable in nature, the result of
contingency, and the numerous fragmentary and smaller cultural movements that have
been active in Turkey over the last two decades.
All
these fragmented movements (i.e. alter-globalization activists, initiatives of
intellectuals in favour of freedom of speech, human rights and minority rights
as well as mobilizations against neoliberal urban planning) share similarities
in their grammar of collective action: creative, joyful, convivial, humorous
components of resistance in Gezi Park are formally similar to the mise-en-scène
of mourning in the aftermath of Dink. In addition, a totally new
martyrology is observed: portraits of citizens who lost their lives during Gezi
are the new figures of our social memory raised next to the images of elder
martyrs of the revolutionary leftwing movements since the 60’s.
The
same individuals and small groups that gathered spontaneously after the
assassination of Hrant Dink have been part of the Gezi movement. They have
protested in a non-violent similar way: through embodiment and with creativity.
They have manifested their desire to be the Subjects of their own lives. At the
same time, they are against the authoritarianism that intervenes into their
most personal and intimate decisions (recommendation from PM regarding the
minimal number of children that women should have, the debate on the banning of
abortion, the restriction on alcohol sales etc.).
The
blurring of identities is also more visible today. Nine years ago the slogan « We are all Hrant, We are all Armenians »
was a turning point. Today some of the Gezi resistance protesters are capable
of defending the rights of different oppressed categories of citizens
(Armenians, Kurds, Women, LGBTT, but also victims of neoliberal urban
renovation projects), and not only their own rights. Today, on 19 January, the
participants in the commemoration of Dink are capable of struggling against
oblivion, violence and impunity, but also capable of defending the rights of
Kurdish citizens as well as those of the academicians defending Kurdish people.
The emancipation movements recognize now that there is no such thing as
solitary emancipation.
NB: A
first version of this analysis was published under the title «Emotions, memory and new cultural movements in Turkey», in: Antimo L. Farro and
Henri Lustiger-Thaler (Eds.), Reimagining Social Movements.
From Collectives to Individuals,
Ed. Ashgate, 2014. The author is grateful to professors Hamit Bozarslan, Henri
Lustiger-Thaler and Antimo Farro for the initial book version and the editor
Breno Bringel for the updated OpenMovements edition of the present article.
How to cite:
Demirhisar D.G.(2016) «Emotion and protest in Turkey: what happened on 19 January, 2007?», Open Democracy / ISA RC-47: Open Movements, 11 December. https://opendemocracy.net/deniz-g-nce-demirhisar/emotion-and-protest-in-turkey-what-happened-on-19-january-2007
There is an acute and growing tension between the concern for safety and the protection of our freedoms. How do we handle this? Read more from the World Forum for Democracy partnership.
