Nominated as a leading human rights activist, a witness to the bitter legacy of a most tragic page in the history of Turkey, the chief advocate for the Dink family in the Hrant Dink murder case, and a voice of law, reason, and compassion.
Fethiye Çetin was born in 1950 in the small town of Maden in Elazığ. She was four years old when her father passed away, leaving her mother as a widow of 24 with three kids to take care of. The family moved to live with Çetin’s maternal grandparents. She completed her elementary and high school education in Maden, Mahmudiye and Elazığ. After graduation, she started teaching primary school since the family had no income except for her grandfather’s pension. She was also studying law at Ankara University.
Fethiye Cetin was arrested right after the military coup of September 12, 1980, and was held for three years at Mamak military prison in Ankara. After her release, she has pursued her law career, and currently works as a solicitor in Istanbul, with a particular focus on human rights law and minority rights. She has been a member of the executive committee of the Human Rights Center of the Istanbul Bar Association, as well as establishing and representing its Minority Rights working group. She is one of the initiators of a campaign to identify and expose racist and discriminatory expressions in textbooks. This work later evolved into a bigger petition campaign called the History for Peace Initiative, which was organized by the Human Rights Association, the Union of Teachers, and the History Foundation, and has received wide public support.
Fethiye Çetin was Hrant Dink’s lawyer when he was alive and subsequently became the chief lawyer in his murder case. She continues to legally represent the Dink family and the weekly AGOS.
Although she insists that she is “not a writer,” Fethiye Çetin’s book Anneannem (My Grandmother) has become an international bestseller. Moving back and forth in time, the book narrates the life and death of Grandmother Heranush/Seher and Çetin’s own story of the discovery of her grandmother’s hidden life. Grandmother Heranush, known to her family and friends as Seher, was born in the small Armenian village of Habab (Palu) in Southeast Anatolia at the turn of the century. At age 10, the death march of 1915 separated her from the rest of her family, leaving her in the small town of Çermik as the adopted daughter of an Ottoman sergeant. Heranush/Seher was 70 years old when she started telling her story to her granddaughter Fethiye. For Fethiye Çetin, the initial moment of shock (my grandmother is originally Armenian!), was followed by years of painful sharing. The grandmother had opened the Pandora’s Box to tell her granddaughter things that she had not shared with anyone. In 2003, almost 30 years after Fethiye had started her slow and painful discovery into her grandmother’s “other life”, the book Anneannem (Grandmother) finally materialized. Since its publication (and re-publication in several languages), the book has opened many new doors to reconciliation with a difficult past. Since 2004 it has gone through ten editions in Turkey, and has been translated into Bulgarian, Eastern Armenian, English, Dutch, German, Greek, Italian, French, Romanian, and Western Armenian. It was awarded the Prix Armenia 2006 in Marseilles.
In 2011, Fethiye Çetin personally undertook the Hrant Dink Foundation Project to restore the “Habab Fountains” in her grandmother’s village, living in the village for a few months and overseeing the challenging restoration project. Supported by the Ministry of Culture, and undertaken with the labor of many villagers and national/international volunteers, the project brought back water and life to the two historical fountains of Habab, reminding everyone of the Armenians who lived there until 1915, and providing a new site for meeting and sharing. This restoration project is the first civilian collective effort to restore a site of (Armenian) memory, and brought together close to 1000 people from Turkey and abroad in its first Spring festivities in May 2012.
