First they came for the Armenians

Agos is the only bilingual Turkish-Armenian newspaper in the world.Its founder, Hrant Dink, was murdered in 2007, yet somehow Agos has continued to print weekly since.Over the past couple of decades, Turkey has been chief among countries ailing from the pandemic of democratic backsliding.One of the many ways to gauge the strength of a democratic society is to examine its treatment of minorities.Another measurement of a democracy's strength is the independence of its press.So, as an independent newspaper that reflects Armenian and minority life, Agos lies in the intersection of these two weak pillars of democracy in Turkey.Six months before he was killed, Dink claimed that "For us, the people of Turkey, this is our greatest trouble: We have not come to terms with our history.And because we have not managed to come to terms with our history, we relive our experiences in almost the same manner and taste the same defeat over and over again."The tragic irony of Dink's life was that his fight for democracy and against this cycle of violence and denial pulled him further into it, until he was made another victim.But since his death, the paper still goes to print every week.It writes about political corruption in spite of a regime that targets dissent; it covers minority life in spite of a society that disregards pluralism.Its pages track for us how a regime chips away at democracy; and its work tells us how civil society might work to preserve it.