Click here to read my next post: 'Abolish Article 301 Now!'
"When the European Union is asked why it wishes to include Turkey, with its lower economic and democratic standards, the answer suggests an uncomfortable truth - that the relationship between Turkey and the EU is governed less by reciprocal desire than by fear.The military elite of the Turkish republic probably calculates that a Turkey unable to enter the European Union is in danger of becoming a strategical irrelevance, while the European Union's power-brokers must consider that a Turkey remaining outside of Europe might become a combatant on the other side of a 'clash of civilizations.'
As long as the engine of fear pushing from the back is stronger than the engine of desire pulling from the front, the dynamics of Turkish-European Union relations will be uneasy and contested on all sides - not just in Turkey.
Where fear is dominant, it produces symptoms of resistance to change at all levels of society. The more some people yearn and work for openness and enlightenment, the more others who are afraid of such changes struggle to keep society closed. In Turkey, the legal cases against Hrant Dink, Orhan Pamuk, Ragip Zarakolu or Murat Belge are examples of how the breaking of every taboo causes panic in the end.
This is especially true of the Armenian issue: the greatest of all taboos in Turkey, one that was present at the creation of the state and which represents the principal 'other' of Turkish national identity."
Dec. 2005 - Hrant Dink - A prominent Turkish-Armenian
shot to death on January 19, 2007.
I am sick and tired of the 'business as usual' attitude shown by Turks and the Turkish government up to now and extending even beyond this latest assassination to silence the voices of reason. Wake up Turks in Turkey and abroad! And prepare to not only 'debate' this issue (but act on it as well,) of Turkey's greatest taboo, unilaterally if need be. But settle this once and for all.
I challenge you to be brave and standing tall amid your own discoveries of self-realization at the expense of the indefensible, and of the good, the bad, and the ugly, or I condemn you to become prisoners of fear for which you will forever be sentenced to without any chances for redemption and revaluation.
