TURKISH NATIONALIST VIDEO PRAISING MURDER SPARKS INVESTIGATION

Earthtimes.org
Posted : Tue, 18 Sep 2007 09:08:30 GMT

Ankara – Prosecutors have launched an investigation into a song
and video broadcast on the Youtube video-sharing website that
praises the January murder of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant
Dink, the English-language Today’s Zaman newspaper reported on
Tuesday. Prosecutors are looking into whether the folk singer Ismail
Turut, lyricist Ozan Arif or the unknown person who created the video
could be charged with inciting hatred.

The video posted on Youtube is a montage of images which Today’s
Zaman described as being "ultra-nationalistic, religious, anti-
American and anti-Israel" and is set to the music of Turut’s song
"Don’t make any plans."

The song contains lyrics such as "if a person betrays the country,
he is finished off" and shows images of the body of Dink after he
was shot dead outside his newspaper’s offices in Istanbul in January.

The video, which also shows images of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk and captured
Kurdish Workers Party leader Abdullah Ocalan allegedly accusing them
of betraying Turkey, has since been removed from the Youtube site.

Dink was a prominent member of Turkey’s Armenian minority who
campaigned for tolerance but was hated by Turkish nationalists for
describing the massacres of Armenians in the last years of the Ottoman
Empire as genocide.

Editor of the Armenian-language newspaper Agos, Dink was shot dead by
a 17-year-old nationalist outside his office in Istanbul in a murder
that shocked the nation.

The Human Rights Association and the Association of Human Rights and
Solidarity for Oppressed Peoples have announced that they will also
bring cases against Turut and Arif.