The truth behind the murder of Armenian journalist Hrant Dink little more than a year ago in Istanbul remains a mystery.
Turkey’s truth is often stranger than fiction
Jenny White, author and Boston U. professor
Who killed Dink?
White says secret NATO-sponsored armies may have played a role:
“It’s so extensive that it’s hard to even fathom. It goes back several decades. Assassin-ations of intellectuals looking into this stuff, journalists —they kind of had a very high death rate. There was the killing recently of Hrant Dink, the Armenian journalist, whose trial is still ongoing. It’s clear that the police knew about it before it happened. The files are lost, the video of it has gone missing. So, there’s a lot of weird stuff going on.”
INTERVIEW. When you spend your days analyzing the religious, nationalist and militaristic tendencies of a country as complex as Turkey and a city as vibrant as Istanbul, sometime you just want some peace and quiet.
For Jenny White, an anthropology professor at Boston University and the author of the “The Abyssinian Proof,” the only solace she could find was in the 1880s.
Compared with her research work on Turkish nationalism, White says her novel’s mystery surrounding religious artifacts that go missing in Ottoman Empire-era Istanbul is fairly tame.
You’ve gone back to Turkey during the time you were writing the book. What is the situation there now?
There’s some bizarre stuff going on over there, with all of these secret NATO armies that were set up during the Cold War and are still active. If I saw this in a movie, I would think it was too bizarre to be true.
What was the story on these secret armies?
Each NATO country had one, and they were apparently set up during the Cold War to prepare just in case the Communists took over Europe. They would be in place to start resistance activities. However, to make sure these people were anti-Communist, they chose really right-wing people. Talk about blowback. So, each country had an Army operating outside of the law. The Turkish one, it turns out, has produced all of these trials and arrests, and no one knows how far up into the military it goes.
What did the members of these armies do to warrant this kind of action?
These people are responsible for all types of stuff: killings, assassination. Apparently they were plotting a coup and blaming all of these killings on the [Kurdish rebel group] PKK and religious types so that the military would overthrow the government.
Why hasn’t this come up before?
That was my research project, the nationalism that’s going on there. It’s just worsening. This is stuff that nobody was able to talk about until now. The editors were fired, their journals were all closed down, and they were blacklisted if they even mentioned what was involved. To have it in all the papers now is huge.
Considering all of the pivotal periods of Turkish history you’ve covered, why did you set your book in this particular period?
I started in the 1880s because it was a relatively quiet period in terms of the things that are kind of hard to write about: the Armenian massacres and so on. There were some a decade earlier and some decades later, certainly, in Istanbul that you can’t write novels about Istanbul without including. If I do enough of these stories, eventually I’ll get to the 1890s and write about that. I wanted a period where you could have discreet crimes instead of social movements that take up all the oxygen.
