In memory of Hrant Dink - the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation

More than a million Armenians were killed in the genocide of 1915. The Turks seized great tracts of Armenian land that have never been returned. Now, Hrant Dink’s murder in Istanbul serves to remind us of this first holocaust of the Twentieth Century, even as the BBC repeatedly remarked on the “alleged mass killings” of Armenians by Turks, notwithstanding the abundant evidence of that genocide that has been presented over the years. But Mr Dink stood for a different and higher standard of journalism. When we received news of his murder, Ayse Berktay, a Turkish friend of the Russell Foundation who lives in Istanbul, put it this way: “Our dear friend Hrant Dink, one of the endorsers of the World Tribunal on Iraq, a peace and truth-loving Armenian journalist, founder and editor-in-chief of the journal AGOS, a foremost, courageous and most outspoken voice of the Armenian community in Turkey, was murdered in broad daylight in front of the journal building yesterday. He was a staunch but very human and very convincing defender of brotherhood between peoples and put his life at stake to build such genuine brotherhood because he believed that to be genuine, this brotherhood had to base itself on truth and acknowledgement of the identity and plight of one another, on getting rid of prejudices, on recognising the potential richness of the variety of cultures that exist in our land.” Hrant Dink will clearly be missed by many people in Turkey as well as in Armenia, but we should join them in honouring him ourselves As Robert Fisk has pointed out, one of the sobering lessons of the Armenian genocide is that some of those Germans who went on to perpetrate the Nazi genocide of the Jews witnessed first-hand the slaughter of 1915 in eastern Anatolia. It is vital that the whole truth is told about these events, which are still more often denied than one would think possible. That is the best tribute we can pay to Hrant Dink’s memory. Ken Coates, Tony Simpson On behalf of the Bertrand Russel Peace Foundation