Letters to Agos from its readers on 20th year
Started to be published in April 5, 1996, Agos is 20 years old now. 20 years is a good period for evaluating the past and making plans for future. On the occasion of 20th anniversary, Agos welcomes its readers to its pages and will hold series of panel discussions and sessions about the topics that concerns Agos and that our founder Hrant Dink was concerned about.
Our priority is our readers. Starting from the next issue, we ask our readers to “tell about Agos to Agos”. Write about Agos' place in your heart and mind, its meaning in your life and the transformation it caused in you; write your expectations, criticisms and suggestions. We created an e-mail address for your letters: [email protected]
We will publish your letters that you can send to [email protected] on “'20th anniversary letters” column for a year. There is no limitation on the length of your letter, but we ask you not to write longer than an A4 page or more than 3000 characters. And we care about these letters. We want to shape the next 20 years of Agos with our readers and friends. Please don't hesitate to write you suggestions and criticisms. We know that you will do it friendly. The readers who don't use computers or have an e-mail account can send their letters in the traditional way. If you write “20th Anniversary Letters” on the envelop along with our address, it would make our work easier. In sum, we are expecting to receive your letters with excitement.
Moreover, there will be series of events on the occasion of Agos' 20th anniversary. We have been missing Hrant Dink for 9 years. On the other hand, we are sure that Hrant's discourse is growing and getting stronger year by year, though they have taken him away from us. So, we decided to organize a series of panel discussions and sessions for evaluating what we have done and what we might do about the topics that Hrant and Agos focused on. We started to make preparations for holding panel discussions and sessions about topics like legal status of the minorities, minority schools and education, the problems with the representation of Armenian society, relations between Armenia and Turkey, expectations of young Armenians, the future of Armenian language, Armenian cultural heritage in Anatolia. We will inform you about those events, as the details are specified.
Armenian society and minorities (or the ones who were turned into minorities) in Turkey have a lot of problems. Some of those problems are legal problems or obscurities that arise from to be turned into minority and some of them arise from the problems of representation and being unable to predict the future. For 20 years, we have been trying to be a platform for expressing those problems. And we will try to maintain this mission. In fact, this is our promise to Hrant Dink. Let's do this together.
