In December 2006, we met, as we do every year at this time, in a café in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy. The warm nights had returned, the festive season was in the air. The annual letting-go was within reach like a tape at the end of a long distance run.
There were perhaps 20 in the group, members of the Melbourne Centre of International PEN. Each of us had a list of names and addresses of writers who had been imprisoned, persecuted, threatened and, in some cases, tortured for their work in the past year. They resided in dictatorships, left and right, in theocracies and monarchies, and in countries that claimed to be democratic.
The lists included writers from China, Burma, Ethiopia, and Iran, to name four quite different political regimes.
Our task was simple: to send a card with a message of support to the persecuted writers. To wish them well, and let them know they were in our thoughts; that they were not alone.
There was good reason for keeping the message simple. We wanted our cards to get past the censors. There is a time for advocacy, and a time for simple words of support. They work in tandem. Together they make up the 'human' and the 'rights' in human rights.
*****
One of the writers we wrote to on that December night was Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink (pictured). A founding editor of the weekly newspaper Agos, Dink had been outspoken about the 1915 massacres of the Armenians, and named it genocide. For his efforts he had been prosecuted for 'denigrating Turkishness' under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal code.
He was acquitted the first time, received a six-month suspended prison sentence the second, and was facing fresh charges drawn up by the prosecutor's office in a renewed attempt to have him jailed.
Dink was a leading advocate for freedom of expression in Turkey. In his editorials and newspaper columns, he championed a pluralistic democratic system. He reached out across the cultural and historical divide, and called for dialogue between the Turks and Armenian minority. As a bilingual publication, Agos opened up channels of communication between the two communities.
While Dink sought to build bridges between cultures, he understood there could be no genuine reconciliation without recognition of past and present injustices. He exposed discrimination against Armenians in Turkish society, and cases of destruction of the Armenian cultural