The cost of remembering

My name is Alexa Woodward, and I am a first year law student at the City University of New York. It's exciting to be a part of the student board on genocide prevention. I have been interested in genocide prevention ever since working in Cambodia during my undergraduate studies, where I learned about the genocide of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. I was teaching visual art at an orphanage while doing an independent study in Phnom Penh, the capital, and I was struck by the continued impact the genocide had nearly thirty years later. It occurred to me during those months of living and working in Cambodia that some of the people who had been victims years before may now be neighbors of those who perpetrated violence during the genocide. Ever since my experience there I have wanted to understand how a collective social memory can be a part of healing. One important way of healing seems to be speaking: remembering what occurred and telling the story. Today, in Turkey, one such story teller lost his life.

One of Turkey’s leading voices for free speech, Hrant Dink, the editor of Turkey’s leading Armenian Newspaper, was assassinated today in Turkey. He has received death threats for the last three years after being tried by the Turkish government under Article 3 of the Turkish Penal Code, a controversial provision that has been widely criticized for criminalizing negative remarks about the Turkish State. Mr. Dink was an Armenian Turk, and he was convicted based on his outspoken efforts to raise awareness about the Armenian genocide in Turkey, which preceded the Jewish Holocaust by about twenty years. This is an example of the importance of memory: Mr. Dink’s efforts to ignite a collective memory of the Armenian genocide came at a great cost. To read more about his life, the New York Times devoted the front page story to him today, and you can read it here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/19/world/europe/19cnd-turkey.html?hp&ex=1169269200&en=e33786f3af02d03c&ei=5094&partner=homepage