How easily we squander values in Turkey!

Anatolia is a garden in which a thousand cultures blossom. Anatolia is the cradle of the most ancient of civilizations. Having shared the joy, sorrow, enthusiasm and pain of a large number of communities for millennia, Anatolia has become the homeland of the culture of living together.

However, what we have been witnessing lately are efforts to crack and shatter this culture through mockery. Whether it is called "neo- nationalism," "ultranationalism," "ethnic discrimination" or "fundamentalism" -- or you may call it Article 301 -- ridicule is replacing this culture of mutual respect. It is as if some people are trying hard to replace the tolerantt culture that had distinguished this land with a "culture of chaos." And to this end, they kill souls from among us, just as they killed our dear Hrant Dink.

He was from Malatya just like me. Looking at a map, Malatya seems to be an extension of the eastern Anatolian region that has been thrust into central Anatolia. In the past, Malatya was a crossroads between northern Anatolia and southern Anatolia and between East and West. Malatya has been a minor Anatolia reflecting a tolerance-based wealth enriched by a thousand cultures. It is for this reason that during our childhood, it never crossed our minds to separate the Christian Bedriye Abla from the Muslim Hatice Teyze, or the hard-of-hearing Armenian İshak (Isaac) Amca from the Muslim grocer Haci Amca.

Although this is the real face of Anatolia, it is also possible to observe a disintegration of the values keeping the people of this land together. It is possible to enumerate many reasons for this disintegration, such as the Armenian terrorist organization ASALA, the separatist terrorist group PKK and the mistake the state has been making by trying to resolve every problem by approaching it from the perspective of security.

The last time I felt similarly was in 2001, when businessman of Jewish origin Üzeyir Garih, who, like Hrant, defended Turkey's interests more diligently than most of us and who was more Turkish than many who are Turks only by blood, was murdered. The Turkish public was as horrified as I was in the face of this horrendous murder. We have been experiencing the same horror once again since Friday and hope that this will be the last.

Don't you also think that the political tradition in Turkey that caused the deaths abroad of Ahmet Kaya, a true musician fed by the Anatolian soil (in France) and Mahmut Esat Coşan, a man of great ideas who pioneered many charitable organizations and works (in Australia), a tradition that still forces the overseas residence of Fethullah Gülen, the leader of the greatest civil initiative ever launched in the world for the benefit of humanity, is also responsible for Hrant's death?

The last time I met Hrant was at a meeting in Paris. "Turks see us as Armenians, and Armenians see us as Turks, and thus neither approaches us in a friendly manner. We cannot endear ourselves to either the Armenian diaspora or the Turkish nationalists," he told me there. Dink was indeed an Armenian; however, he was more Turk than Armenian. He thought of himself as someone belonging to this land, and indeed he was so.

Dink neither tried to engage in politics by abusing ethnicity like our cheap chauvinists nor did he need to adopt enmity against Turks as his identity like the well- off Armenian diaspora around the world. Dink, whose life we made miserable by trying him at every opportunity on grounds that he had insulted Turkishness, kept saying that he was well aware that "insulting Turkishness was tantamount to insulting himself." But how much of this was he able to explain, and to how many people? He did explain, but did anyone prick up their ears?

We weren't like this in the past. We were incomparably more appreciative of all sorts of merits and values. We were all together: Armenians, Jews, Greeks, Circassians, Kurds, Alevis, Yazidis, Assyrians and Arabs all together. Only by looking at the kitchen that feeds us every day will we see how much "ours" is each of one of us. Is there anyone who hasn't called in at Armenian, Jewish or Greek restaurants and grocers abroad to taste or buy something Turkish?

We who are fed by the same kitchen and culture are "Anatolian siblings," as different as and at the same time as similar as siblings. In this respect, each such loss is as painful to us as losing a brother or sister.