Aegean Disclosure

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Yasar Kemal: Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.





There's nothing like an 83-year-old dude who's had enough and isn't taking shit from anybody, which is why, in the midst of all the pain and anger, one had to laugh away the tears if they witnessed the footage of Yasar Kemal leaving the crowded apartment after paying Hrant Dink's family his respects. It was one of my favorite moments during this entire ordeal and contained in it the exasperated feelings of many. Because of the language many newspapers left out his last few words, but it was those last few unexpected words coming out of the country's oldest literary giant that sealed the deal.

Yasar Kemal: My father was killed in a mosque when I was four that's why I can't stand these deaths. Hrant wasn't just an Armenian, or just a Kurd. He was a human being...passionately in love with Anatolia.
Reporter: The suspect is seventeen years old...
Yasar Kemal: These sort of people are a large group in Turkey. No country in the world has this much racism.
Reporter: They say you are a Kurdish writer, and--
Yasar Kemal: I have never said I was a Kurdish writer in my entire life. If I write in Turkish I'm a Turkish writer, if I write in Kurdish I'm a Kurdish writer, so what? Some people shamelessly write this about me. Try calling Mevlana a "Turkish poet." Mevlana wrote in Farsi, he resides at the top of Persian literature. I'm as much Kurdish, as Mevlana is Turkish. Watch what's going on here, these guys are looking for an excuse to kill people.
Reporter: Aren't you afraid of death threats?
Yasar Kemal: I don't give a damn. I lived my years, let them come and try. They can go fuck themselves.

Well, better if you watch it. It's in the delivery.

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"I needed to have an operation...he came to my aid...I'm shattered inside, I can't..."
--A weeping mourner placing a rose on the ground where Hrant Dink's body lay

Hrant Dink's Shoes

Translated from Turkish in Ekşi Sözlük (Read original here):

This shoe is the thing that strangles my heart, that makes me a scattered mess...destititution and poverty is always hard to witness...especially when it goes hand in hand with death...all the tears one has saved throughout the day will be set free and flooded...

It will unleash my tears but I can't even begin to think what it will do to his girl who will look at this photograph for an entire lifetime...fathers are the love of a girl's life...no matter what kind of father he is...and if he is a father that makes one proud, she would never want his father to be hurt..she would want her father always to stand up straight...never for his hands to shake...The most painful moment in my life was not when my aunt died, but when I saw my father cry for the first time the day my aunt died..when my father resisted and resisted and when he broke down when I, at last, hugged him...when we were little and when our living standards were below the average, and when he would take us to dinner and provide us with whatever we wanted while he just ordered tea, I would feel storms shattering in me--I couldn't eat when he couldn't eat.

And when this was what it was, when I had suffered what I suffered the entire day a thousand fold when I saw this photograph, when I couldn't imagine what I would feel if a saw my father in this way...Delal Dink seeing this photograph, I can't imagine the moment she sees it, and I don't want to...everything aside, a father is laying on the ground, his shoes punctured with holes...for one's father to have holes in his shoes at times fills one with pride, especially a man like this, especially while there are those who speculated about his wealth when it suited them..but sometimes a daughter may see her father in her dreams for a lifetime, her father's shoes...a father who completed his life far too early, and when he died--forget completing his life comfortable and rich--completing his life with holes in his shoes...a father whose life was made into a prison, who dismissed his own life and worried about his family...a father who, loving his homland to the extent of consciously seeing that it could cost his family's life, was declared a traitor...became a fearful pigeon...a father of such scale that one cannot imagine the way he kisses his children..his wife...

I hope Delal doesn't see this picture...but if she does, she should not weep...in this country sometimes fathers die with holes in their shoes, they will complete a lifetime with holes in their shoes but their hearts and minds will not bear the tiniest scratch...in this country most eyes won't see the burning livers, won't hear a mother's, tomorrow, a son's scream...and those fathers with holes in their shoes will spend their entire lifetime trying to open those un-seeing eyes and un-hearing ears...those fathers will not leave bank accounts as their finest inheritance but their honor.

"...and whenever men an women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can't ride your back unless it is bent." --Martin Luther King Jr.

Sabah compares the murder of Hrant Dink and Talat Pasha.