Chelsea Manning nominated for Hrant Dink Award

JINHA

NEWS CENTER – Chelsea Manning, the trans woman praised by human rights defenders around the world for exposing human rights abuses by the U.S. military, is a nominee for the Hrant Dink Award this year.

According to the news website KaosGL, Chelsea is a nominee for the Hrant Dink Award, named after the Armenian journalist assassinated in Istanbul in 2007. The Hrant Dink Award is presented "to individuals or groups that work for a world free from discrimination, racism and violence, and who take personal risks to achieve those goals."

Chelsea leaked hundreds of secret military documents demonstrating human rights abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2010. In 2013, a military court issued her a 35-year prison sentence. Chelsea has been detained in inhumane conditions, including spending nine months in a solitary cell, where she was denied any possessions—allegedly because she would kill herself.

While in jail, Chelsea came out as trans. Although she is not being allowed to grow out her hair and is detained with male prisoners, she is undergoing hormone therapy. Chelsea says that she maintains correspondence with many trans women from jail, where she is working on a degree in political science.

Chelsea, speaking in a recent interview with Cosmopolitan magazine, noted that she spent her life struggling with being trans. She says she enrolled in the Army in part to escape thoughts about living as a woman. While deployed in Iraq, the experience of witnessing death all around her shook her faith in war at the same time as they strengthened her conviction about her identity.

Previous Hrant Dink Award recipients have included, in 2013, the Saturday Mothers (Saturday People), who struggle for justice for the disappeared in Turkey, and Serbian activist on war crimes Nataša Kandić; and in 2014, anti-militarization activist Angie Zelter and lawyer on torture cases Şebnem Korur Fincancı.

The award will be presented on Hrant Dink's birthday, September 15.

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