İsmail Beşikçi receives Dink Award

ISTANBUL - Doğan News Agency

Prominent scholar Beşikçi (2nd L) is given the fourth Hrant Dink award.

Prominent scholar and sociologist Dr. İsmail Beşikçi has received the fourth International Hrant Dink Award for his work on Kurds, the foundation of the Republic of Turkey and the single-party era in Turkey.

The award, named in honor of the assassinated Turkish-Armenian journalist, is the first Beşikçi has accepted. Thirty-two of the 36 books the scholar has written are currently forbidden in Turkey. For many years, he was the only non-Kurdish person in Turkey to speak out loud and clearly in defense of the rights of the Kurds. He has been described as “modern Turkey’s pioneer of Kurdish studies”. At the ceremony he said he was honored by the jury’s selection.

The second laureate this year was the International Memorial Society, a Russian human rights organization founded by the mothers of Russian soldiers who stood against the Russian-Chechen war.