The New York Times
STEPHEN KINZER
A journalist’s dangerous mission
By Stephen Kinzer | January 20, 2007

THE LAST TIME I met Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian journalist who
was murdered in Istanbul yesterday, I felt a sudden need to do more
than just exchange pleasantries. This was several months ago, and we
were sampling one of Turkey’s great delights, dinner aboard a boat
cruising the Bosphorus. Life for Dink, however, had become less than
delightful. He was being fiercely denounced by the ultra nationalist
press, and seemed subdued and preoccupied.

I pulled him aside and told him how important his work was, how much
support he had in Turkey and beyond, and what a journalistic hero he
had become. "I understand," he replied simply. "I do not stop."

Dink was in the forefront of a growing number of Turks who want their
government to admit that leaders of the crumbling Ottoman Empire
directed a mass slaughter of Armenians in 1915. These are the same
Turks who want their country to break away from its authoritarian past
and complete its march toward full democracy.

Some Turkish nationalists, however, feel deeply threatened by their
country’s progress toward modernity. During the 1980s, they gunned
down the country’s leading journalists. In the 1990s they concentrated
their fire on Kurdish nationalists, hundreds of whom were killed by
death squads that acted with absolute impunity.

In recent years, many Turks had allowed themselves to believe those
bad days were over. But with an election campaign approaching,
nationalist rhetoric is again surfacing in political speeches and
militant newspapers. Much of it contains ugly insinuations that
Armenians, Kurds, and members of other minority groups threaten
Turkey’s national unity and its very survival.

Rare is the government official or military officer who condemns this
rhetoric. Some not only encourage it but protect accused killers from
prosecution. That has emboldened radicals and led them to believe that
the state tacitly supports them.

By their silence, and by failing to condemn attacks like a bombing
evidently staged by army officers in the Kurdish town of Semdinli 14
months ago, Turkish political leaders and military commanders helped
set the stage for yesterday’s murder. In his weekly newspaper, Agos,
which was published in both Turkish and Armenian, Dink wrote as he
pleased, refusing to observe unwritten taboos that shackle the Turkish
press. He was charged several times with the Orwellian crime of
"insulting Turkishness." On one occasion he was convicted, although
his six-month sentence was suspended. Each time he appeared in court,
a crowd of ultra nationalists staged a violent scene, showering him
with abuse and trying to assault him.

This was the same gang that screamed insults at the Nobel
Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk when he was brought to trial last
year. Dink attended Pamuk’s trial in a show of solidarity, driving the
militants to new heights of fury.

Turkish nationalists believed they won a great victory when, at the
end of last year, the European Union suspended talks aimed at making
Turkey an EU member. They still hope to turn back the democratic tide
that is engulfing their country. Some apparently believe that if they
cannot do it by indicting free thinkers, they can do it through
murder. This attack has generated revulsion across Turkey. It will
undoubtedly galvanize the country’s large and increasingly bold corps
of human rights advocates.

Their first step may be to intensify their campaign for repeal of the
notorious Article 301 of the Turkish penal code, which places a series
of restrictions on free press. To achieve that, and to finish
reshaping Turkey’s political system, will not be easy. Turkey is being
torn by an epochal crisis of identity. The old and oppressive
political tradition is dying, but its death throes are becoming
disturbingly violent.

Political leaders, and their colleagues in uniform, seem to believe
they can tolerate and even make use of ultranationalist
ideologues. Yesterday’s murder shows how dangerous that course
is. Reports from Istanbul suggest that the man who committed the
murder was very young, perhaps a teenager. His arrest will not calm
outraged Turks. Their anger is directed not simply against the man who
pulled the trigger, but also against those who created the venomous
climate that made this crime possible.

Turkey’s violent ultra nationalist fringe, long supported by elements
in the police and military, aims not only to kill journalists but also
to stop the progress of Turkish history. No government has tried
seriously to crush it. Yesterday’s murder, and the wave of anger it
has set off, gives Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan a chance to do
so.

Stephen Kinzer is a former chief of the New York Times bureau in
Istanbul and author of "Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds."