Alin K. Gregorian
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.— Garo Paylan, the former member of parliament in Turkey and outspoken proponent of rights for Armenians and Kurds there, delivered a powerful speech on January 22 at the annual commemorative event held at Harvard University to mark the assassination of Hrant Dink, pleading for the world Armenian community to ensure the safety of Armenia.
The impassioned speech ended with a prolonged standing ovation.
Speaking without notes for almost 45 minutes, Paylan walked a tightrope between honoring the past and facing the future. At times he chastised diasporan Armenians for focusing more on remembering the past than ensuring a safe future for Armenia, and urged everyone to rally behind the, regardless of how they feel about its current leadership, because it faces mortal peril. He stressed that he was not implying that the quest for the recognition of the Armenian Genocide was unnecessary, just that what was possible was the very dissolution of Armenia.
Memories of Hrant Dink
Ohannes Kilicdagi, the president of the Board of the Friends of Hrant Dink, made brief introductory remarks at the event, which marked the 18th anniversary of the late Agos newspaper editor’s anniversary.
Paylan was then introduced by Lorenzo Bondioli, Harvard assistant professor of history, as one of the “foremost advocates for democracy” in Turkey.
Paylan served in the Turkish parliament representing Diyarbakir in the HDP party from June 2015 to June 2023, as part of the HDP party, where he even drafted a law to recognize the Armenian Genocide. Paylan is currently a visiting scholar with the Europe Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C., focusing on the South Caucasus and Turkey. In essence, he said, he is in exile now.
Paylan said he left Turkey last year because of the many assassination attempts and threats.
“There were so many attempts. My friends convinced me to leave. I am technically in exile now but I am keeping my struggle from Washington, DC. I am working with the rational Turks, rational Armenians and the Armenian government and Turkish Parliament to establish peace in the region,” he said.
He spoke extensively about his late friend, drawing parallels between their approaches as well as their situations in Turkey.
Greeting the audience in Armenian, Kurdish and Turkish, he paid tribute to Dink, at times getting emotional. He explained how Dink’s positions were at times hard for diasporan Armenians to understand, straddling the line between honoring one’s Armenian heritage and extending a hand in friendship to Turks.
“For Armenians — and for which Armenians — who was Hrant Dink,” he asked. “[For] some Armenians when they saw Hrant just talking about the Armenian Genocide, he was a hero but when he was talking about the sufferings of the Azeris, the sufferings of the Kurds, the centuries we coexisted together, [they] were not happy with those sentences,” Paylan said.
“Hrant described his position this way: ‘I was on the knife’s edge. I could fall this side or that side,’” Paylan said. “He tried to stay on the knife and it was so difficult.”
Similarly, Dink was hyperaware of what he was saying not only to Armenians in Turkey and around the world, but to the Turkish government, wondering if he would meet with reprisals.
Paylan alluded to the winds of change in Turkey in the 2010s which allowed many to be open about their Armenian and Kurdish heritage and for people to speak about the Genocide, as well as Kurdish rights. That Turkey is gone now, he said, under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Some of those freedoms were a result of the European Union application process for the Turkish government.
In yet another parallel tract with Dink, Paylan said many urged him to leave Turkey for fear of reprisals. They tell him, he recalled, “Garo, they are going to get you as well. You have to be silent.”
His voice choking at times, he recalled the assassination in 2007. “That assassination was coming and maybe he felt it but as an optimist, he wanted to go on. That was the question for Hrant. He was a romantic. He wanted to change Turkey. He wanted to make Turkey a democracy. He knew that was the only way for his grandchildren to not suffer the things he [had] suffered, that his grandfather [had] suffered. He wanted to live in Turkey and his children and grandchildren to live in Turkey. I begged Hrant to leave Turkey. I was feeling it. It was coming. Just a week before the assassination, I begged him to leave but he didn’t listen,” he said. “Then when he was assassinated, I was so angry at myself” for not insisting more.
He noted, “Hrant Dink had a dream and that dream was very beautiful,” he said. “He was my hero. He was my mentor. He gave [me] my name back.”
Hidden Identity
He told a story recalling that when he was 4, his mother took him to the doctor but stressed before leaving the house that she would call him Kaya and that he would have to call his mother “anne” in Turkish, rather than “mama.” “It hurt me but I understood it was the rule to survive there,” he recalled.
“I understood my identity was not something normal in that land. I used that name, Kaya, for more than a decade,” he said. Dink, in his youth, had adopted the name “Firat” before reverting to his birth name.
Paylan recalled many personal stories that exemplified the modern Turkish dehumanization of Armenians.
In secondary school history, the only mention of Armenians was one line, that they were traitors during World War I and were dealt with. Dink, he recalled, told everyone there that Armenians in fact were not traitors and that “we used to live here for 4,000 years and something bad has happened in this land.”
He added in Turkey the word “Armenian” suffices as an insult.
“They didn’t need to use another word. Just to say you are an Armenian was a swear word. Hrant Dink saved us from this,” he said. Dink, he said, managed to normalize the Armenian identity. “More important than that, he made people understand that Armenians were a part of this land and they used to coexist,” he said.
He recited another story from his military service. “I was doing my service in the office with a young soldier. One day he ran into my office and he told me, ‘Garo, you know what they told me about you? They said you are an Armenian and I punched them in the face.’ I told him I am an Armenian and he fainted. He said, ‘how can you be an Armenian? You are a good guy.’ That is what he was told, that Armenians are betrayers and something like evil. Hrant Dink dismantled that.”
“Of course, they killed us, but there were hundreds of thousands of people who survived after the genocide. They were sentenced to silence and I was one of them as well,” he said.
In fact, Paylan’s ancestors in Malatya were also killed in the Genocide.
Personal Connections
Several times during the talk, Paylan stressed the importance of Armenians coexisting with neighbors, including Turks and Azerbaijanis.
“There were so many problems but so many good days, as well,” Paylan said.
He stressed that the peoples of that region — Armenian, Kurdish, Turkish or Greek — all played parts in and contributed to shaping each other’s cultures.
“The music that he was enjoying was the music that the Kurds or the Turks enjoyed,” he said, as was the food, and therefore he found common ground.
That approach, however, was not popular with the Turkish majority there, Paylan explained. “That was a big threat to the establishment. That is why they killed Hrant. He was like an icebreaker ship. That ice was frozen for 90 years and he broke that ice,” Paylan said.
Paylan said that whenever diasporan Armenians were assassinated or publicly criticized Turks as killers, the Turkish government exploited that as a win. “They needed to keep the Armenian identity in the Turkish nation as an enemy and they benefitted from that card,” he said.
Dink Assassination
Paylan spoke about the day Dink was assassinated, on January 19, 2007, outside the offices of his newspaper, Agos, in Istanbul. That day, Paylan was working at his family’s shoe manufacturing business when he got the call. ‘I saw Hrant lying on the pavement and it was not a surprise for me, unfortunately. Thousands of people [gathered and] started to shout ‘We are all Hrant, we are all Armenians.’”
He lamented that Dink was isolated. “We are all responsible for Hrant Dink’s death. We didn’t take care of him. He was so isolated. He was a target,” Paylan said.
Because Dink was talking about peace and reconciliation, many Armenian organizations shunned him.
He noted, “Of course we all want this wound [of the Genocide] to be healed. That wound is still open and we want this wound to heal. But what is the right approach? Hrant Dink was really showing that.”
He recalled that Dink had visited the US a few months before his death and his reception had been mixed. He likened that to some comments he himself still gets. He recalled that he recently spoke in Los Angeles, where “some Armenians … asked me how much Erdogan is paying me to talk this way,” he recalled.
Paylan said that the efforts by the Armenian community to get the genocide recognized have been worthy and notable, yet, the emotional burden of the Genocide remains as it was.
“Whatever we did, it did not heal our wounds. President Biden recognized the Genocide but did it heal our wound,” asked Paylan. “I don’t think so.” He added, “Of course those are important steps.”
He stressed the only body that can help with the pain is the Turkish parliament.
Paylan in 2015 introduced a measure in the Turkish Parliament to recognize the Genocide. For years, he has been dragged through the courts in Turkey for the action.
Similarly, he said, Biden “did not lift a finger” during the Artsakh war, as he said Trump would not. He added that President Trump was in office during the 2020 war launched by Azerbaijan against Armenia and Artsakh and similarly did not interfere.
Armenia in Peril
Paylan warned repeatedly about the risk of Azerbaijani aggression and cautioned against the belief that aid would come from the US or the West because of Armenia’s Christian heritage. And he stressed that with the new administration in the US, Armenia has lost even more ground.
“What kind of national interest do we have to show Mr. Trump for him to lift his finger to stop [President Ilham] Aliyev from attacking Armenia? This is the question that Hrant Dink would ask,” Paylan noted.
He warned that the world is in a “dark era,” and that Aliyev is watching the new administration’s desire to claim the Panama Canal or Canada, and may seize an opportunity to do what it wants in Armenia. At the same time, the Middle East is being rocked by Israel committing “a genocide” against the Palestinians and looking to wound Iran. “Unfortunately, it is a totally dark era,” he said. “We need to come to terms. Armenia is at stake now.”
He urged Armenians to adopt a new way of thinking and join forces. Instead, he said, Armenians in the US should band together and present themselves as a forceful electoral bloc in the US, much like Jews.
“I believe 2 million Armenians living here should do better. Eight million Jews are living here. We don’t even have 0.1 percent of their influence. Why is that? We are as clever as them. We have great entrepreneurs and intellectuals and we suffered just like them. So what is the problem? Hrant Dink asked us to think about that. He said stop trying to just target Turks. Forget about the Turk as an enemy. Try to think of the Turk identity as a neighbor and focus on Armenia. That is what we need to do,” he said.
“This is the era of deterring” the catastrophe of Armenia being invaded. “This requires might.”
“Wherever you go in Yerevan, you see young soldiers that don’t have their arms or legs. … We lost that war. … We won the war [30 years go] but we didn’t win the peace,” he added.
He said Erdogan is successfully playing his foreign policy game, winning concessions from the West, as well as Russia. Aliyev, Paylan said, is learning from that playbook.
“We relied on Russia and thought everything would go forever like this,” he said. “I believe what we should rely on is our mind, our power and our strategic thinking.”
He said Armenians can’t think that whatever is bad for Turkey is good for Armenia. “When Turkish democracy was getting better, we benefitted from that. We could take about the Armenian genocide, we could talk about equality. When Turkish democracy deteriorated during the last 10 years, we suffered so many catastrophes again, including the Artsakh catastrophe.”
Instead, he said, “whatever is good for Armenia and Turkey, is good for the region.”
He advocated brokering a peace and opening borders to Azerbaijan, as well as creating person-to-person relations between the peoples.
“Our expectations should not be that high, but what we can do is at least to deter the massacres against the Kurds or deter a war which can be implemented against Armenia,” Paylan said.
“Turkey and the entire world is so far away from Hrant Dink’s dream. The good news is that still there are hundreds of thousands or even tens of millions that are ready to struggle for it,” he said.
“We will never forget. It is a burden we need to carry with honor. But if they don’t recognize it, it’s their problem,” but he added. “We should put 95 percent of our energy in our future,” Paylan said. “So many nations are committing genocides and massacres and it will happened unfortunately in this era. Nobody will care about a genocide that happened 110 years ago. It is up to the Turks. If they recognize it, they will get rid of this burden.”
Non-Christian Armenians
He then spoke about the complex history and identity of Armenians in Turkey who survived the Genocide, including those who had converted to Islam, either willingly or by force, and the hundreds of thousands of Armenian orphans who were adopted by Turkish or Kurdish families.
As the member of parliament representing the Kurdish-majority Diyarbakir, he said, so many people came up to him and whispered to him that they had an Armenian grandmother. “In almost every family there was an Armenian grandmother. …. When it comes to the Armenian patriarchate in Turkey, “They ask about their [own] identity, they want to send their kids to Armenian schools. The acting patriarch said whoever is not a Christian cannot be an Armenian. Hrant Dink really just struggled about this as well. He said they were forced to convert or chose to convert to Islam.”
“The dilemma of to live or to leave is the biggest dilemma of those three generations,” he said.
The hybrid event was co-sponsored by the Friends of Hrant Dink, Inc., and Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
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