Turkish court upholds sentence for Armenian journalist

Agence France Presse — English
July 12, 2006 Wednesday 9:00 AM GMT

ISTANBUL, July 12 2006 — Turkey’s appeals court has upheld a
six-month suspended sentence against a Turkish-Armenian journalist for
"denigrating the Turkish national identity," his lawyer said Wednesday.

Hrant Dink, editor of the bilingual Turkish-Armenian weekly Agos,
was convicted in October for an article about the collective memory
of the mass killings of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire, which
many countries recognize as genocide.

"The confirmation of the sentence is a very regrettable decision,
particularly because the chief prosecutor — in quite an unusual
move — objected to the conviction with very solid arguements,"
Dink’s lawyer Fethiye Cetin told AFP.

The European Union, which Turkey is seeking to join, has repeatedly
warned that the prosecution of intellectuals and writers is casting
a pall on Ankara’s commitment to the bloc’s democratic norms.

Dink now faces the risk of going to prison if he commits a similar
offense over the next five years.

He is currently on trial in another freedom-of-speech case, in which he
risks up to three years in jail, on charges of attempting to influence
the judiciary in an editorial that criticized his first conviction.

Cetin said she was "more hopeful" about the outcome of that case.

The February 2004 article that led to Dink’s conviction complained
that hostility to Turks had become part of the Armenian identity.

Its most controversial phase called on Armenians to "cleanse the
impure blood of the Turk" from their veins.

The appeal court’s chief prosecutor argued that this was not an
insult to Turks but a metaphoric reference to the Armenians’ hostile
perception of Turks.

Public debate on the Armenian massacres has only recently begun
in Turkey.

Armenians claim that up to 1.5 million of their kin were slaughtered,
and campaign for the massacres to be internationally recognized
as genocide.

Turkey rejects the genocide label and argues that 300,000 Armenians
and at least as many Turks died in civil strife when Armenians took
up arms for independence in eastern Anatolia and sided with Russian
troops invading the crumbling Ottoman Empire during World War I.