Dominican Today, Dominican Republic
Jan 20 2007

Turkish journalist murdered

Istanbul.- An outspoken journalist who repeatedly clashed with
Turkish authorities over recognition of the early 20th Century
slaughter of Armenians was shot to death in broad daylight on a busy
Istanbul street on Friday.

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

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

Istanbul Governor Muammer Guler said late Friday that three people
were 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 or of the country’s tight
control on 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
Safak, who have been tried on charges of insulting their country’s
"Turkishness" under an 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 World War I-era slaughter of
hundreds of thousands of Armenians by Ottoman Turks was 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."

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"
murder.

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