Today’s Zaman, Turkey
Feb 2 2007

[NEWS ANALYSIS]
The murder solved, hunt for killers goes on

A confessed killer may be behind bars, but recriminations and
conjecture still rage two weeks later over who is really guilty of
the death of Agos newspaper editor Hrant Dink.

The police are themselves under investigation for failing to protect
a man whom they knew to be in danger for his outspokenness on the
fate of the Armenian people in 1915. However, Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdoðan has hinted that the crime was not simply the work of a
provincial gang of ultra-nationalist thugs but part of a covert plan
to create political mayhem ahead of presidential elections due to be
held in May.

A confessed killer may be behind bars, but recriminations and
conjecture still rage two weeks later over who is really guilty of
the death of Agos newspaper editor Hrant Dink.
The police are themselves under investigation for failing to protect
a man whom they knew to be in danger for his outspokenness on the
fate of the Armenian people in 1915. However, Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdoðan has hinted that the crime was not simply the work of a
provincial gang of ultra-nationalist thugs but part of a covert plan
to create political mayhem ahead of presidential elections due to be
held in May.
Erdoðan spoke this week of Turkey `paying the price’ for not
dismantling the `deep state’ — shorthand for the self-styled
guardians of the Turkish Republic, often the military, whose grip on
the state apparatus would be weakened if Parliament voted Erdoðan
into the presidential office.
`It sounds paranoid, but that’s the way Turkey is,’ said Cüneyt
Ülsever, a liberal columnist on Hürriyet — a newspaper that has in
the past been vociferous in questioning Dink’s patriotism. In death,
however, Dink has been rehabilitated and is being depicted as the
latest in a series of politically motivated assassinations.
Even so, the great difference between the Dink murder and, with rare
exception, that of other journalists and political figures in
previous years is that a perpetrator has been caught still in
possession of the murder weapon. Six other people are also under
detention, including Yasin Hayal, who served 10 months for the
bombing of a McDonald’s restaurant and who has admitted recruiting
17-year-old Ogün Samast to fire the gun.
So far there have been no revelations that would link the gang to a
wider conspiracy, although there is circumstantial evidence
suggesting they had sympathy with the Grand Unity Party (BBP), which
espouses the same heady mix of nationalism and religion.
Ýsmail Çalýþkan, spokesman for the police nationwide, dismissed as
speculation press accounts of what the police did or did not know. He
was responding to criticism that the police acted incompetently or
even out of tacit sympathy for the crime. Both the governor and the
chief of police in gunman Samast’s hometown of Trabzon have been
recalled from their posts to answer accusations that they failed to
act on informers’ reports. Sections of the press are now calling for
their Istanbul counterparts to be removed as well for failing to
provide protection for Dink even after he himself published fears
that his life was under threat.
Police in Samsun also face criticism that they allow Samast to be
photographed in a heroic pose at the very police station where he was
first detained. He was given a Turkish flag to hold beneath a
quotation attributed to Atatürk reading `The soil of the homeland is
sacred and cannot be left to fate.’ However, Turkey’s most-wanted
fugitive, Kurdish militant Abdullah Öcalan, was also photographed in
front of a flag, a symbol that he was subdued by the Turkish state,
not that he had been acting in its name. Yet video footage of police
hoping to be photographed with Samast suggests that they were not
convinced of his crime.
Deniz Baykal, leader of the opposition, has now called for the
resignation of Minister of the Interior Abdülkadir Aksu for
overseeing a police force that appears to have ignored 12 informers’
reports of specific threats. Yet the vast crowds who kept a noisy
vigil outside Agos the night of the killing chanted accusations that
Baykal was himself culpable of doing everything but pull the trigger.
They accuse the leader of Turkey’s left-wing Republic People’s Party
(CHP) of failing to deflect the hate campaign directed against Dink,
even refusing to side with critics of the notorious Article 301 of
the Turkish Penal Code under which Dink was prosecuted, making it an
offense to `insult Turkishness.’
`We all share responsibility, but those who defended 301 bear the
greater share in Hrant Dink’s death,’ said Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s
Nobel Prize winner who was himself prosecuted under the same law.
Pamuk’s word echo suspicions that Dink died not as the result of an
intricate conspiracy but an institutional intolerance against anyone
opposing orthodox views.

03.02.2007
Andrew Finkel

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress