Hamilton Spectator, Canada
Jan 27 2007

War is going on for the soul of Turkey

>From their powerful positions in the army, the judiciary and the
bureaucracy, ‘republican elite’ work to undermine the reforms and to
wreck Turkey’s chances of joining the EU.

By Gwynne Dyer
Independent

When they buried Hrant Dink in Istanbul last Tuesday, more than
100,000 Turks came to his funeral, filling the streets and chanting
"We are all Armenians." There is a war going on for the soul of
Turkey, but at least a lot of Turks are on the right side.

Dink, who called himself "an Armenian from Turkey and a good Turkish
citizen," was murdered because he insisted on talking about the great
crime that happened in the country 92 years ago: the mass murder of
most of Turkey’s Armenian population in eastern Anatolia. The
newspaper he founded and edited, a bilingual Turkish-Armenian weekly
called Agos, had only a small circulation, but his outspoken
editorials had made him one of Turkey’s most famous journalists —
and a target for assassination.

His killer, 17-year-old Ogun Samast, was a semi-educated young thug
from Trabzon in the far north-east of Anatolia. He was given the gun
by a group of older ultra-nationalists including Yusuf Hayal, who was
convicted of bombing a McDonald’s restaurant in Trabzon in 2004. But
these marginal characters are just pawns in the larger war between
those who want a more democratic, more tolerant Turkey and those who
are desperately defending the power and privileges of the old
"republican" elite.

Samast shot Dink from behind in the street in front of his newspaper
office. "I feel no remorse," the killer allegedly told investigators.
"He said that Turkish blood was dirty blood." Of course, Dink never
said any such thing. What he actually said, in a newspaper article
addressed to his fellow Armenians, was that their obsession with the
massacres of 1915-17 was having "a poisonous effect on your blood."

But it’s east to see how a useful idiot like Samast could have
believed that Hrant Dink was an enemy of the Turks, because just over
a year ago a Turkish court took that phrase out of context, found
Dink guilty of "insulting Turkishness", and gave him a six-month
suspended sentence under Article 301 of the Criminal Code. A number
of other Turkish citizens including Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan
Pamuk have been prosecuted under the same law for daring to discuss
what happened to the Armenians, and most of them have received death
threats too.

It really is a kind of war, and the villains of the piece are
precisely the army officers, judges and senior civil servants who
were once seen as the guardians of the "republican" tradition, the
people who were going to modernize and democratize Turkey.
Unfortunately, "republican" doesn’t really mean the same as
"democratic."

The forms of the Turkish republic were democratic from the start, but
for a very long time the reality was a mass of illiterate peasants
under the harsh tutelage of a narrow educated elite who were
determined to Westernize the country. The "republican" elite rewrote
history (including the denial of the Armenian massacres) in order to
mould a new Turkish national consciousness, and saw religion as a
retrograde force that must be banned from politics.

The decades passed, and much of the elite’s dream came to pass.
Turkey today has a per-capita income higher than Romania or Bulgaria,
the most recent countries to join the European Union. Democracy is a
reality, and the current prime minister, Recep Tayyib Erdogan, leads
a party whose members openly refer to themselves as "Muslim
Democrats." Under Erdogan, there has been a wave of legal and
administrative reforms designed to qualify Turkey for EU membership.
But all this threatens both the rigidly secular ideology and the
autocratic privileges of the old republican elite.

>From their powerful positions in the army, the judiciary and the
bureaucracy, they work to undermine the reforms and to wreck Turkey’s
chances of joining the EU. In de facto alliance with
ultra-nationalist right-wing parties that also oppose EU membership,
they incite hatred of minorities, bring false prosecutions against
the advocates of a more open and democratic Turkish society, and
pursue the long-term goal of destabilizing the democratic order.

It was they who smuggled the notorious Article 301 into the Criminal
Code when it was being reformed to align Turkish law with EU
standards, they who brought false prosecutions for "insulting
Turkishness" against Hrant Dink, Orhan Pamuk, and other well-known
writers, journalists and scholars, they who spread the lies about
what Dink had actually said. It is they, not some ignorant, angry
teenager, who are really responsible for his death.

But the war is not over yet, and the good guys have not lost. Foreign
Minister Abdullah Gul vowed last November to change or abolish
Article 301, and last week 100,000 Turks thronged streets of Istanbul
to mourn the country’s best-known Armenian and condemn his murderers.

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles
are published in 45 countries.