T H E L E GAC Y O F

Hrant Dink

Hrant Dink
rights activist.
was a Turkish Armenian journalist and life-long human

He started to publish the Turkish-Armenian weekly newspaper Agos

HRANT
on April 5, 1996 to establish a bridge of communication and under-
standing between the larger Turkish population and the Turkish-
Armenian community. One of the major aims of the newspaper is to
DINK
contribute to dialogue between the citizens of Turkey and also between
Turkey and Armenia. Turkish Armenian Human Rights Activist
Dink was best known for advocating Turkish-Armenian reconciliation
and human and minority rights in Turkey. PANEL DISCUSSION
“Pigeons can live in cities, even in crowds.
A little scared perhaps, but free.” Rakel Dink
Hrant Dink, AGOS, Jan 19th, 2007 Honored Guest, Hrant Dink's Widow
Prof. Peter Balakian
Author, The Burning Tigris
Andrew Tarsy
Facing History and Ourselves
Dr. Oktay Ozel
Friends of Hrant Dink
Visiting Scholar, Harvard University
“A 501(c)(3) non-profit organization”
—————————————————————————-
—————————————————————————-
P.O. Box 382061 Cambridge, MA 02238-2061 Welcoming remarks
www.friendsofhrantdink.org Robert J. Lifton, M.D., Harvard Medical School
E-MAIL: info@FriendsofHrantDink
Moderator
Contributions to Khatchig Mouradian, Editor, Armenian Weekly
“Friends of Hrant Dink, Inc.”
Kresge Auditorium at MIT, Cambridge, MA
Are Tax-deductible
February 1, 2009
 Rakel Dink
Widow of the journalist and life-long human rights activist
Hrant Dink. In a eulogy she called "Letter to my Beloved",
Rakel Dink had addressed the huge crowd of mourners
who had gathered to accompany Hrant Dink's coffin to his
burial place on 23 January 2007. She awakened great
admiration for her forgiving words, when she talked about
the young triggerman: "Whoever the assassin may be, whether he was 17
or 27 years old, I know that he was once a baby. My brothers and sisters,
one cannot accomplish anything without first questioning the darkness
that creates an assassin from such a baby".
Prof. Peter Balakian
Peter Balakian is the author of many books including
June-tree: New and Selected Poems, 1974-2000
FRIENDS OF HRANT DINK
(HarperCollins 2001) and The Burning Tigris: The Armenian
Genocide and America’s Response (HarperCollins, 2004), which
won the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize and was a New York
Times Notable Book and a New York Times Best Seller.
His memoir, Black Dog of Fate won the 1998 PEN/
Martha Albrand Prize for the Art of the Memoir and the New Jersey
Council for the Humanities Book Prize, and was a best book of the year
for the New York Times, the LA Times, and Publisher’s Weekly, and was
recently issued in a 10th anniversary edition. He is also the author of a
book on the American poet Theodore Roethke and the co translator of
the Armenian poet Siamanto’s Bloody News From My Friend, and co-
translator of Girgoris Balakian’s Armenian Golgotha. Balakian holds a BA
from Bucknell University and a Ph.D. in American Civilization from
Brown University. He is Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of
the Humanities, Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at
Colgate University. He was the first Director of Colgate’s Center For
Ethics and World Societies.
ROBERT Jay LIFTON, M.D.
Robert Jay Lifton, Lecturer in Psychiatry at Harvard
Medical School/Cambridge Health Alliance and Distinguished
Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Psychology, The City
University of New York, is an author, a scholar-activist, and the
recipient of many national and international awards and
honorary degrees. The overall themes of his work have been holocaust and
transformation; more recent work involves atrocity-producing situations
and medical complicity and torture in connection with the war in Iraq.
A n d r e w Ta r s y
Andrew Tarsy joined the senior management team at the
international education non-profit organization Facing History
and Ourselves in 2008. He is focused there on external affairs,
public policy and strategic growth of the organization. Before
that, he was with the Anti-Defamation League for 8 years, as
northeast civil rights counsel and then as Executive Director
of ADL New England. He separated from ADL in 2008 after
a public clash over the organization's policy on recognition of the Armenian
Genocide. Andy previously served as a Trial Attorney in the Civil Rights
Division of the United States Department of Justice.
D r . O k tay O z e l
Oktay Ozel is an Assistant Professor at the Department
of History, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. He has
FRIENDS OF HRANT DINK
instructed several courses on the subjects of Ottoman
socio-economic history, demographic changes, methods and
problems in historical writings He has recently been working
on the late nineteenth century mass migrations, immigrants
and the inter-communal relations in the central Black Sea
region, including the Armenians. He has also published articles on the
journals and newspapers, publicly criticizing the popular-political pressure
on scholars in discussing the Armenian Genocide, while being one of the
participants to the 2005-Symposium on "Ottoman Armenians" convened in
Istanbul. He is a visiting scholar at Harvard University currently.
KHATCHIG MOURADIAN
Khatchig Mouradian is a journalist, writer and
translator. He was an editor of the Lebanese-Armenian daily
newspaper Aztag from 2000 to 2007, when he moved to
Boston and became the editor of the Armenian Weekly.
Mouradian has lectured extensively and participated in
conferences in Armenia, Turkey, Cyprus, Lebanon, Syria,
Austria, Switzerland, Norway and the U.S. He has presented papers on
genocide and the media at several academic conferences including the 5th
and 6th Workshops on Armenian-Turkish Scholarship, held at NYU in
2006 and at the Graduate Institute in Geneva in 2008. Mouradian’s articles
and poems have appeared in many publications worldwide. Many of his
writings have been translated into more than ten languages. He contributes
to a number of U.S. and European publications, including ZNet, Jewcy,
The Jewish Advocate, and Radikal (Turkey).