Cyprus Mail, Cyprus
Jan 26 2007
Turkey is responsible for shameful murder
LAST WEEK’S murder of Armenian Turkish journalist Hrant Dink has cast
a shocking spotlight on the extreme nationalism that still pervades
Turkish society.
Political violence is of course not unique to Turkey. One only needs
to think of the assassinations of Pim Portuyn and Theo Van Gogh in
The Netherlands, one of Europe’s most tolerant societies. Indeed, the
Turkish authorities would like us to believe that, as in those cases,
the killing of Hrant Dink was the work of a deranged individual.
But while the youth who pulled the trigger is certainly deranged,
Dink’s murder did not come down from a clear blue sky. Last year, he
was prosecuted under Turkey’s infamous Article 301, accused of
`insulting Turkishness’. Unlike other intellectuals against whom
charges were eventually dropped, including Nobel Prize winning
novelist Orhan Pamuk, Dink was convicted and given a six-month
suspended prison sentence.
Dink may not have gone to jail for his articles, but from the moment
procedures against him were decided, he became a marked man. In an
interview given two days before his murder, he said: `Sure, I am
[afraid]. To be honest, I feel haunted day in, day out. Ever seen a
pigeon? Seen how it keeps turning its head? It shudders at the
slightest noise, ready to fly away any instant. Can you call that
life? The difference is that I can’t fly away like a pigeon.’ Every
day, he would receive death threats, some over the phone, others by
email.
Turkey will argue that no one is being sent to jail for insulting
Turkishness, indeed that the vast majority of cases fail to reach a
conclusion. But what Dink’s assassination shows is that anyone
charged under Article 301 is at best sentenced to a life of fear, at
worst, sentenced to death.
Can some good come from such a tragedy? Some have pointed to the
genuine revulsion across the political spectrum, to the thousands who
took to the streets carrying placards that read `We are all Hrant
Dink. We are all Armenians’. This is indeed remarkable, and shows
that Turkey has come a long way from the militarist nationalist
monolith of years past.
But what Turkey really needs to address is the pathological
nationalism that breeds the kind of hatred that drove a boy of 17 to
pull the trigger on a man he’d never met. That pathological
nationalism is nurtured by the state, by its worship of the founding
father, its obsession with the flag, its violent sensitivity to
anyone who insults the nation, as enshrined in Article 301.
One of the main duties of a state is to protect its citizens. The
Turkish state failed to protect Hrant Dink; worse, it marked him out
as prey to the prowling wolves.