PROTESTS MARK TURKISH-ARMENIAN EDITOR’S MURDER TRIAL

Reuters
The Nelson Mail, New Zealand
The Dominion Post, New Zealand
Marlborough Express, New Zealand
Oct 1 2007

SOLIDARITY: Demonstrators at an Istanbul court hold up placards which
read: ‘We all are Hrant Dink, we all are Armenians’ during the trial
of the suspects charged with the killing of Turkish-Armenian editor
Hrant Dink.

Hundreds of demonstrators fearing a state cover-up of the murder of
a Turkish-Armenian editor demonstrated outside an Istanbul courthouse
proclaiming: "We are all witnesses. We demand justice."

The EU, which opened membership talks with Turkey in 2005, sees
the case of Hrant Dink as a litmus test for a judicial system often
accused of conservative political bias.

Police imposed heavy security outside the court house where 19 suspects
were being tried over the killing of Dink, gunned down outside his
Istanbul office in January by a 17-year-old who has confessed to
the killing.

"We are all witnesses, we demand justice," said banners held aloft by
the protesters outside the court as the trial resumed in the Besiktas
district of Istanbul.

Dink’s lawyers have complained that the murder has not been properly
investigated and have expressed fears for the independence of the
court, reflecting concerns about the possible involvement of Turkey’s
so-called "deep state".

The "deep state" is a term coined to describe hardline nationalists
in the bureaucracy and security forces who are prepared to subvert
the law for their own political ends.

At the weekend, Turkey’s liberal Radikal newspaper published the
transcript of a conversation between one of the suspects and a police
officer two hours after the shooting which it said showed the officer
was aware of a plan to kill Dink.

The Interior Ministry has launched a probe into the the telephone
conversation.

Dink had angered Turkish nationalists with his comments on the
massacres of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey during WW1. More than 100,000
people turned out at his funeral to show solidarity and protest against
violent nationalism. Lawyers were expected to question the suspects
for the first time at Monday’s hearing. Eight suspects are in custody.

Media reports have said one of the suspects had repeatedly tipped
off police about a plot to kill Dink and that these tip-offs had been
conveyed to the Istanbul police headquarters.

Several officials, including the head of police intelligence in
Istanbul, have been sacked or reassigned to other jobs over their
handling of the Dink case.

Ankara denies Armenian claims, backed by many historians and by a
growing number of foreign parliaments, that the killings amounted
to a systematic genocide. It says large numbers of both Muslim Turks
and Christian Armenians died in ethnic fighting as the Ottoman Empire
collapsed during WW1.