IS THERE A CURSE hanging over Turkey? Each time the country achieves sustained development, something trips it up. This time it was the assassination on Friday of Hrant Dink, a newspaper editor, peacemaker and one of Turkey's most prominent Armenians.
Turkey is trying to rise to the challenge, as its credibility in talks on membership in the European Union is at stake. Denunciations of the slaying -- from the government, from Islamic leaders, from the army -- fill the airwaves. Thousands of Turks marched through the streets of Istanbul hours after the editor was shot, shouting, "We are all Armenians! We are all Hrant Dink!"
Police have arrested a suspect who has confessed to pulling the trigger, but no murkiness must remain about the people and the thinking behind the killing. The alleged killer is under 18 and is close to right-wing nationalists. Dink, who was repeatedly threatened by such nationalists, was left unprotected, but not just by the Turkish police. Bad laws, malevolent prosecutions and a growing nationalist hysteria helped create a lynch mob atmosphere.
What killed Dink, in short, is the Turkish republic's inability to deal with the Armenian issue -- the charge that its predecessor state, the Ottoman Empire, killed 1.2 million Armenian men, women and children in a genocide that began in 1915.
Official Turkey is stuck in a rut of denial. Discussing the great omissions on the subject in Turkey's public education remains taboo. Efforts to open archives and to "leave it to the historians" lead to dead ends, partly because a scholarly debate won't assuage diaspora Armenians who demand formal acknowledgment of the genocide, and partly because of Turkey's anti-free-speech laws -- most notoriously Penal Code Article 301, with its catchall penalties for "denigrating Turkishness."
The Turks have reasons to feel victimized. Christian powers don't apologize much for ethnic cleansing carried out between 1821 and 1923, when they rolled back the borders of the Ottoman Empire. Millions of Muslims were killed. In 1915, World War I was raging. Turkey was again under attack from Russia in the east and Britain and France in the west. The Armenian leadership openly sided with Turkey's enemies, demanded a state on Ottoman land and formed anti-Ottoman militias. Many Turks were killed by these Armenian groups.
