Los Angeles Times, CA
Jan 20 2007

Journalist slain in Turkey

Hrant Dink, who had clashed with authorities over recognition of the
Armenian genocide, was shot on a busy street.

By Tracy Wilkinson and Yesim Borg, Special to The Times
January 20, 2007

ISTANBUL, TURKEY – An outspoken journalist who repeatedly clashed
with Turkish authorities here over recognition of the early 20th
century slaughter of Armenians was shot to death Friday afternoon on
a busy downtown street.

Hrant Dink, who as editor of a Turkish Armenian newspaper was the
leading voice for his ethnic community, was killed a week after he
wrote about threats from unknown forces who he said regarded him as
"an enemy of the Turks."

Hundreds of people marched Friday evening from Istanbul’s central
Taksim Square to the offices of Dink’s Agos weekly newspaper, near
the spot on a sidewalk where he was shot in the head. They held
candles and posters with his picture; a somber silence was
interrupted periodically with applause and chants for "the
brotherhood of peoples."

Istanbul Gov. Muammer Guler said late Friday that three people had
been detained in connection with the shooting, but no additional
details were released.

The slaying is likely to further darken Turkey’s reputation for
repressing critics of the government and for tightly controlling how
its turbulent past is portrayed.

Dink, 52, was part of an elite group of writers and thinkers,
including Nobel literature laureate Orhan Pamuk and novelist Elif
Shafak, who have been tried on charges of insulting their country’s
"Turkishness" under a controversial and ambiguous law promoted by
hard-line nationalists.

While most, including Pamuk, were cleared, Dink was convicted in 2005
for writing articles that criticized the law and explored questions
of Turkish and Armenian identity. He was sentenced to a six-month
term, which was suspended.

Last year, an Istanbul court opened a new case against him after he
told a foreign news agency that the slaughter of hundreds of
thousands of Armenians by Ottoman Turks before and during World War I
was a genocide.

"Of course I say it was genocide," Dink had said. "With these events
you see the disappearance of a people who lived on these lands for
4,000 years."

Turkey maintains that the deaths and expulsions that Armenians say
claimed 1.5 million victims at the end of the Ottoman Empire were
part of a civil conflict in which both Christian Armenians and Muslim
Turks were killed.

Dink helped promote a conference of academics in 2005 who gathered
here to examine the era’s mass killings. The government attempted to
block the conference, and the justice minister accused participants
of "stabbing Turkey in the back."

On Friday, however, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was
among the first to condemn Dink’s "traitorous" and "disgraceful"
slaying.

"Bullets have been fired at free thought and our democratic life,"
Erdogan said at a news conference. He urged calm.

European governments, Washington and intellectuals across the globe
also deplored the killing.

"We are horrified," Larry Siems, an official with the international
writers association PEN, said in a statement. "Hrant Dink was one of
the heroes of the nonviolent movement for freedom of expression in
Turkey, … one of the most significant human rights movements of our
time."

U.S. State Department spokesman Tom Casey said, "We certainly are
concerned any time someone who has been very outspoken in their views
is made to pay a price simply for their ability to speak their mind."

Turkish television Friday showed copies of letters containing death
threats that Dink said he had received in the last year. He said his
pleas for official protection went unanswered.

"We will silence you in a way that you will never speak again," one
of the letters said.

Writing in his weekly column Jan. 10, Dink said his computer was full
of "lines containing threats and rage.

"It is clear that those who try to alienate me, weaken me and leave
me defenseless have been successful," he wrote. "They managed to form
a group, with a serious number of people who see me as someone who
‘insults Turkishness’ with the dirty and wrong information they have
been funneling to society."

His friends and colleagues say Dink cherished his Armenian ethnicity
but remained loyal to his Turkish nation. His cause was freedom of
expression and an honest confrontation of the past, they say.

"I will not leave this country," Dink told the Reuters news agency
last summer, as legal charges against him mounted. "If I go I would
feel I was leaving alone the people struggling for democracy…. It
would be a betrayal of them."