Murdered journalist’s funeral is a silent rally of defiance
By Suna Erdem in Istanbul

The Times/UK
January 24, 2007

A 100,000-strong crowd of Turks, ethnic Armenians and foreigners followed
Hrant Dink’s coffin (Reuters)

Turkish dissent law under spotlight
Big international presence at service

Tens of thousands of mourners marched in silence through Istanbul
yesterday behind the coffin of the Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant
Dink, who was shot dead by a teenager with suspected nationalist links.

Carrying black banners bearing the slogans "We are all Armenian"
and "We are all Hrant Dink", the 100,000-strong crowd of Turks,
ethnic Armenians and foreigners walked nearly five miles (8km),
expressing their anger without chanting but with their quiet presence,
as requested by Mr Dink’s widow, Rakel.

In an emotional speech outside the offices of Agos, the Turkish
Armenian newspaper, where Mr Dink, its editor, was shot, Rakel Dink
urged the mourners to work for an end to the hostile nationalistic
environment that still has many Turks in its grip despite recent
liberal reforms.

"Do not be satisfied with this much, do not be satisfied with today,"
she cried out to the crowd. "The killer was a baby once. We cannot
achieve anything if we do not question the darkness which creates a
murderer out of a baby."

Mr Dink, along with several other writers, including the Nobel laureate
Orhan Pamuk, had been prosecuted under the controversial Article 301
of the Turkish penal code for his views on the killing of Armenians by
Ottoman Turks in 1915. Turkey denies strongly that this amounted to
a genocide and treats any departure from the official line with deep
suspicion. Liberal Turks, including Mr Pamuk, say that they believe
that Article 301, which punishes "insults to Turkish identity",
is used to set people up as targets.

Seventeen-year-old Ogun Samast has confessed to the murder of Mr Dink
for " insulting Turks". Another man, Yasin Hayal, jailed recently
for bombing a McDonald’s restaurant, has admitted inciting him. A
university student is being held under suspicion of organising a
nationalist "cell" that included Hayal and commissioned the murder.

The killing of Mr Dink, 52, who had sought reconciliation between
Muslim Turks and Christian Armenians, harked back to the dark decades
at the end of the 20th century when dissenting journalists and other
activists were felled by militants with suspected links within the
state and intelligence apparatus.

The President and the Prime Minister were conspicuously absent at the
service in an Armenian church by the Golden Horn waterway, but the
public and international response has been overwhelming. Ambassadors,
Turkish ministers and MPs, members of the European Parliament and
leading Armenian clerics from across the world crowded into the church.

"He died defending his conscience and beliefs and the right to express
these beliefs," Patriarch Mesrob Mutafyan told the congregation.

Newspaper columnists have been railing against curbs on free speech
and nationalism in a way that would once have been considered
treacherous. "A giant awakened today," the commentator Mehmet Altan
said. "For the first time the Turkish people took a stand which
was distanced from the kind of propaganda by which it is usually
influenced. We gave him in death what we could not in life."