Vocal Turkish-Armenian Journalist Slain
Friday January 19, 2007 9:46 PM
By BENJAMIN HARVEY
Associated Press Writer
ISTANBUL, Turkey (AP) – Hrant Dink, the most prominent voice of
Turkey’s shrinking Armenian community who stood trial for speaking out
against the mass killings of Armenians by Turks, was shot and killed
in broad daylight Friday at the entrance to his newspaper’s offices.
Just hours after a gunman pumped two bullets into the journalist’s
head, thousands marched down the bustling street where he was
slain. They blocked traffic, carried posters of Dink and shouted
slogans in favor of free expression.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan twice addressed the country to
condemn the killing and vow to capture those responsible. Late Friday,
Istanbul’s governor announced that three people were arrested,
CNN-Turk television reported without giving further details.
Most Turks assumed the shooting was politically motivated, a reaction
to Dink’s public statements that the mass killings of Armenians around
the time of World War I constituted genocide. Nationalists see such
statements as insults to the honor of Turks and as threats to national
unity.
Regardless of the motive for Dink’s killing, Turkey remains a place
where people speak freely at their own peril despite generations of
Western-looking liberal reformers. The New York-based Committee to
Protect Journalists said that in the past 15 years, “18 Turkish
journalists have been killed for their work, many of them murdered,
making it the eighth deadliest country in the world for journalists.”
Dink, 53, was one of dozens of journalists, writers and academics who
have gone on trial for expressing their opinions here, most under the
infamous article 301 of the penal code, which makes it a crime to
insult Turkey, its government or the national character.
In the most famous case, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk
faced jail time last year for insulting Turkey by saying Turks had
killed a million Armenians. His case was dropped on a technicality.
Dink, a Turkish citizen of Armenian descent who edited the bilingual
Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos, clearly sensed his life was in
danger. “My computer’s memory is loaded with sentences full of anger
and threats,” Dink wrote Jan. 10 in his last newspaper column. “I am
just like a pigeon. … I look around to my left and right, in front
and behind me as much as it does. My head is just as active.”
In the column, he complained that authorities had not responded to his
letters about threats against him – and his death less than two weeks
later will raise yet more questions about Turkey’s commitment to
democracy as it strives to join the European Union.
“I have become famous as an enemy of Turkey,” he wrote.
Dink was charming, soft-spoken and eloquent, even debonair. He was
respected and beloved by many Turks who disagreed with his views but
admired his courage in stating them.
He was hated by just as many.
The last that many Turks saw of Dink was the shocking image of his
body, face down and covered with a white sheet, his dress shoes
awkwardly splayed, lying in a small pool of blood on the middle of an
Istanbul sidewalk.
Witnesses said four bullet shells could be seen near his body. Family
members and co-workers cried and consoled one another as police
cordoned off the area and the crowd of onlookers, some of them with
sadness and shock etched onto their faces, grew larger.
In the past few years, Turks had come to know Dink well, most often
because of the high-profile freedom of expression cases opened against
him, in which he faced jail time for talking of genocide.
In late 2005, Turks saw Dink lose his composure, crying on national
television as he discussed his latest court case and what it was like
to live amid people who hated him and what he stood for.
“I’m living together with Turks in this country,” he said in an
October interview with The Associated Press as he contemplated his
trial. “I don’t think I could live with an identity of having
insulted them in this country. … If I am unable to come up with a
positive result, it will be honorable for me to leave this country.”
His friend Can Dundar, also a journalist, said he wished Dink had
left, as he once promised to do.
“Hrant’s body is lying on the ground as if those bullets were fired
at Turkey,” Dundar told private NTV television.
Dink said he would stay in Turkey, however, in the hopes that cases he
opened at the European Court of Human Rights would be resolved in his
favor, and do something to improve his country.
Turkey’s relationship with its Armenian community has long been
fraught with tension, controversy and painful memories of a brutal
past. Much of Turkey’s once-sizeable Armenian population was killed or
driven out beginning around 1915 in what an increasing number of
countries are recognizing as the first genocide of the 20th century.
Turks vehemently deny that their ancestors committed genocide,
however, and saying so is tantamount here to treason. In the 1970s and
1980s, tensions were further inflamed as dozens of Turkish diplomats
were killed by Armenian assassins seeking revenge.
Turkey, which is 99 percent Muslim, and Armenia, which claims to be
the first country to officially adopt Christianity, share a
border. But the border is closed, and the two countries have no formal
diplomatic relations.
But it’s not only the Armenian issue that draws fire here. Kurds have
suffered for years with oppressive laws limiting their ability to
speak their own language or speak up for equal rights. The country’s
dwindling Greek Orthodox community is the target of frequent protests
against its leader, the Istanbul-based Patriarch Bartholomew I.
A Catholic priest was murdered last year as he prayed in his church,
apparently by a teenage Turk incensed by the publication across Europe
of cartoons lampooning Islam’s Prophet Muhammad. Other priests were
also attacked and threatened.
Reporters Without Borders, a press freedom organization, urged
Turkey’s government to do everything possible to catch Dink’s killers,
and to recognize the “extreme gravity” of the crime.
“This murder will distress and disturb all those who defend the
freedom of thought and expression in Turkey and elsewhere,” the group
said in a statement. “This will be a key test for a country that
hopes to join the European Union.”
Dink’s killing will likely come to many as a final warning of the
consequences of failure, and his last column suggested he wasn’t
optimistic.
“For me, 2007 is likely to be a hard year,” Dink wrote. “The trials
will continue, new ones will be started. Who knows what other
injustices I will be up against.”