TRIAL OF ARMENIAN-TURKISH NEWSPAPER EDITOR POSTPONED AFTER RUCKUS IN ISTANBUL COURTROOM
Benjamin Harvey
AP Worldstream
May 16, 2006
An Armenian-Turkish newspaper editor faced nationalist lawyers and
shouts of “traitor” as he went on trial Tuesday, forcing the judge
to postpone the case because of the ruckus in the courtroom.
Prosecutors have charged that Hrant Dink, a Turkish citizen, committed
the crime of “attempting to influence the judiciary” when his bilingual
Turkish-Armenian newspaper ran articles criticizing a law that makes
it a crime to “insult Turkishness.”
The law has been used to try writers and intellectuals, including the
novelist Orhan Pamuk, for commenting on the mass killings of Armenians
by Turks around the time of World War I, which a number of governments
and scholars have said were the first genocide of the 20th century.
Dink has been careful to avoid public comment on the issue, but has
supported an open discussion of the issue among historians and has
become a target of nationalist lawyers who see genocide allegations
as treason.
Armenians say around 1.5 million of their ancestors were killed in
a genocidal campaign carried out by Ottoman Turks beginning in 1915.
Turkey acknowledges mass killings, but insists the numbers are inflated
and vehemently denies that Turks committed genocide, saying Armenians
were killed as the Ottoman Empire tried to secure its border with
Russia and stop attacks by Armenian militants.
Three other writers at the Agos newspaper, including Dink’s son,
also went on trial Tuesday.
Turkey has been struggling to balance EU demands for tolerance of
free expression with a reluctance to discuss the mass killings of
Armenians or to tolerate arguments that they constituted a genocide.
The subject is rarely discussed openly in Turkey, and those who say
Turks were guilty of genocide can end up in a Turkish court and be
branded as traitors.
Nationalist lawyers led by Kemal Kerincsiz of the Turkish Lawyers’
Union frequently stand in on trials dealing with what they see as
threats to Turkish interests, and can be disruptive to proceedings.
At Dink’s case on Friday, the lawyers argued heatedly with defense
lawyers, yelled for the removal of the judge and apparently threw a
coin at Dink, the Anatolia news agency reported.
Saying “the trial’s discipline has been broken,” the judge postponed
the case to July 4, Dink’s lawyer Fethiye Cetin said.
Internationally, Turkey has been struggling to fight genocide
recognition by other countries with a combination of political and
economic threats.
In the past week, Turkey has lobbied French politicians and companies
to help kill a proposed French bill that would make it a crime to
deny that Armenians were victims of genocide, in the same way that
denying the Holocaust is a crime in France.
The French parliament is expected to vote on the bill on Thursday.
Turkey also briefly recalled its ambassadors to both France and
Canada last week after developments in those countries related to
the genocide issue, and pulled out of a Canadian military exercise
because Canada’s prime minister said he supported a parliamentary
declaration stating that Armenians were victims of genocide.
Prosecutors have asked the court to sentence Dink to a jail term of
up to three years.
As he left, protesters threw eggs and chanted the Turkish slogan,
“How happy the person is who says ‘I am a Turk.'”
In addition to the trial for attempting to influence the judiciary,
Dink has also been tried previously for “insulting Turkishness”
and for saying the Turkish national anthem was discriminatory.