Bekir Coskun; In what sense are we all Armenians?
Güncelleme Tarihi:
These days, when we get together, we all talk at the same time about this phrase "We are all Armenians." (From the banners carried by the hundreds of thousands protesting journalist Hrant Dink's death in Istanbul last week.) We all tell eachother how our "grandfathers died fighting in Yemen," and then go on to ask: "In what way are we Armenian?" In fact, some of our nationalist siblings even stretch out their necks to show the shape of their heads, asking "What kind of head is this?" Receiving the reply they want-"a Turkish head of course,"-they go on to say "eh, so how does that make me Armenian?"
Our fellow citizen, the one who hijacked the ferryboat a few days ago as a protest to the "We are all Armenian" banners carried at the Dink funeral, wound up displaying to us not the outside look of his head, but instead what occupies the inside of his mind. By hijacking and scaring the wits out of a boatload of people, he tried to underline the answer to the question "In what way are we all Armenian?"
(By the way, the man who hijacked the boat was a "nationalist," but I should add he was also kicked out of the military at an earlier time.)
And the large banners unfurled at football matches this week reading "We are not Armenians, we are Turks" really prove that when we get together, our minds truly work wonders.
The rally leaders at the football matches yelled: "Those who are sitting are Armenians!" Everyone then stands and is saved from "being Armenian."
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In the end, the nationalist was angry. I guess the message of peace, love, and tolerance which people had wanted to give to the world didn't work for him. Maybe he really thinks that the one hundred thousand people all chanting "We are all Armenian" at Dink's funeral march actually, in one moment, became Armenian.
This same nationalist must think that when people say "I flew like a bird," they actually became birds, or when they say "I worked like a donkey," they became donkeys. To put it the other way, just as people don't actually become "true and hardworking" when they say that they are (this is from part of a saying which many schoolchildren across Turkey repeat every day), they also don't become Armenian when they say they are.
But how can we explain this to the nationalist?
This was really just an expression; a representation of the pain felt by everyone in the wake of Hrant Dink's murder, of the sincere desire to share these human feelings.
It was a response to racism and nationalism of the ugly sort.
It was the uplifting of the idea of "Above all else, we are all humans."
Or, should we just leave it at "In what sense are we all Armenians?"