SCUFFLES MAR TRIAL OF TURKISH-ARMENIAN JOURNALIST
Agence France Presse — English
May 16, 2006 Tuesday 2:12 PM GMT
Scuffles and protests by nationalist extremists forced the immediate
adjournment of the trial that began here Tuesday of a prominent
Turkish-Armenian journalist.
Lawyers for Hrant Dink, editor of the bilingual Turkish-Armenian
weekly Agos, accused a group of far-right lawyers called the Jurists’
Union of disrupting the proceedings.
The organization, led by attorney Kemal Kerincsiz, filed the criminal
complaint that led to the trial of Dink and three colleagues on charges
of attempting to influence the judiciary in columns that appeared in
Agos in October.
Dink, his son and assistant Arat Dink, publisher Serkis Seropyan and
columnist Aydin Engin risk up to four and a half years in jail if
found guilty.
A group led by Kerincsiz demanded to participate in the trial as the
intervening party for having filed the original criminal complaint.
“Kerincsiz came with a crowded team and they harassed us physically
and verbally,” Dink’s attorney Fethiye Cetin told AFP, adding that
she, the defendants and other defense lawyers left the courthouse
under police protection.
Dink said: “When I entered the court room, they came at me shouting,
‘Get out of this country’, and spat at me.”
He said he left the building from a back door under police escort.
The judge adjourned the trial to July 4.
Outside the courthouse, several dozen far-right protestors shouted
“traitors” as the defendants arrived and argued with police for not
being allowed in.
They exchanged punches with a group demonstrating in favor of Dink
with the chant, “They are our intellectuals, our brothers,” an AFP
photographer said.
The incriminated Agos articles criticized Dink’s conviction in
another freedom-of-speech case, in which he received a six-month
suspended sentence for “denigrating the Turkish national identity”
in an article on the Armenian massacres of World War I.
The Jurists’ Union has been behind a series of criminal complaints
against Turkish intellectuals who contest the official version of the
killings, the resulting lawsuits casting a pall on Turkey’s democracy
record at a time when it is seeking to join the European Union.
A public debate on the World War I killings, one of the most
controversial episodes in Turkish history, has only recently begun
in Turkey, often sending nationalist sentiment into a frenzy.
Armenians say up to 1.5 million of their kin were slaughtered between
1915 and 1917 in what they, and many Western countries, consider
a genocide.
Turkey categorically rejects the claim and the label, saying 300,000
Armenians and at least as many Turks died in civil strife when the
Armenians sided with Russian troops invading Ottoman soil.