SPEAKING OUT IN THE SHADOW OF DEATH: WHY TURKISH INTELLECTUALS NEED ARMED GUARDS
Nicholas Birch in Istanbul
The Guardian
Saturday April 7, 2007
· 20 offered protection after murder of editor
· Activists urge end of ban on insulting Turkishness
Abdurrahman Dilipak, an Islamist columnist and outspoken advocate
of freedom of speech, has been tailed by the police for years. But
these days, they shadow him for his own protection.
"Death threats come with the job," he said. "But I take them seriously
now."
Following the murder in January of Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink,
who was shot on a crowded Istanbul street by an ultra-nationalist
teenager, he is not the only dissident getting used to life with a
personal bodyguard.
It seems clear now that the Turkish security services knew of the plot
against Dink. His death spurred them to offer protection to about
20 journalists, writers and academics. One of them is Atilla Yayla,
a political scientist who was branded a traitor by the press last
November for questioning the cult surrounding Turkey’s founder, Kemal
Ataturk. Though the death threats have now slowed to a trickle, he
faces up to three years in jail for "insulting the legacy of Ataturk".
"It’s a strange feeling, living with a bodyguard," he said. "He
protects me and I look after him. He is so much a part of me that I’m
planning to buy him and his family presents." He points to the books
lining the walls of the liberal association of which he is president:
volumes of John Locke and Friedrich Hayek. "He’s improving himself
here," he said.
Other Turkish intellectuals find it harder to see the funny side.
Best-selling novelist Elif Shafak, one of the most well known of 50
people taken to court by ultra-nationalists last year on charges of
"insulting Turkishness", now makes few trips outside her house .
Dink "was a close friend, and I haven’t got over the shock of his
death", she said in a recent phone conversation. She declined to talk
at length.
Interviewed by the daily Hurriyet in February, her husband, Eyup Can,
said she was so upset that she was unable to breast-feed her daughter,
born last September.
Meanwhile, Orhan Pamuk, the novelist who won last year’s Nobel
prize for literature, left Turkey under police escort on February 1,
days after the man believed by police to have organised Dink’s murder
threatened him as he was taken into custody. Turkey’s tourism ministry
has since said it plans to use Pamuk in a campaign to attract tourists
to the country.
When more than 100,000 people attended Dink’s funeral procession,
many hoped his death might mark the end of what one columnist called
"the ultra-nationalist tsunami" sweeping Turkey since the start of
efforts to join the EU.
In fact, the mourners and their slogan, "We are all Armenians",
further angered nationalists. And one of their key demands, that
the law criminalising "insults to Turkishness" should be changed,
has been ignored by a government afraid of losing nationalist support
in elections due this autumn.
But despite the risks they face, Turkish dissidents say they have no
intention of shutting up. "Such a thing has happened that you cannot
be cautious any more," said Etyen Mahcupyan, the Turkish-Armenian
columnist who took over as editor of Hrant Dink’s weekly newspaper,
Agos, after his friend’s murder. "It is immoral to be cautious."
Unprotected until January, Agos’s offices are now under police guard,
and a new CCTV camera surveys the patch of street where Dink died.
Like Mahcupyan, Baskin Oran knows his bodyguard will not be able to
stop a professional assassination attempt.
"This nice person is protecting me from amateur killers, like the one
who killed Hrant," said the political scientist, who co-wrote a 2004
government report on minority rights that many see as the catalyst for
today’s nationalist surge. He quoted a Turkish proverb: he who fears
birds doesn’t plant corn. "If you are afraid, you should stop. But
how can I look into the mirror in the morning if I do stop? How can
I lecture my students?"
He said that the threats and restrictions on freedom of movement were
part of the growing pains of Turkish democracy, adding: "The road to
paradise passes by hell, and we are walking."
–Boundary_(ID_QKxqhN/RQlVDLdGHMzU AgA)–
From: Baghdasarian