KILLING PUTS SPOTLIGHT ON BLOODY PAST
Thomas Seibert, Foreign Correspondent
The National
9/FOREIGN/630244377/-1/NEWS
Jan 19 2009
United Arab Emirates
Hrant Dink’s funeral procession was attended by thousands who showed
solidarity with the slain journalist.
ISTANBUL // Hrant Dink, a prominent Turkish journalist of Armenian
descent, was walking back from a bank errand to the office of
his newspaper Agos in a busy Istanbul shopping district one Friday
afternoon two years ago, when a young man stepped up from behind and
shot him in the head and the neck.
As Dink lay dead on the pavement and a crowd of shocked passers-by
and friends gathered around the body that had been quickly covered
with a blanket, it became clear immediately that the murder was a
defining moment for Turkey.
Television stations interrupted their normal programmes to report
on the killing, and the government in Ankara broke off a cabinet
meeting to dispatch two ministers to Istanbul to watch over the
investigation. A few days later, tens of thousands of people joined
the funeral march for Dink, carrying signs that read: "We are all
Armenians." Turkey had never seen anything like it.
Even though radical Turkish nationalists had long regarded Dink as a
traitor because he wanted Turkey to face up to the massacres against
the Armenians in the First World War and called for a reconciliation
between Turks and Armenians, the murder came as a shock for the
country. Nationalists had brought Dink, the outspoken editor of Agos,
and other intellectuals to court for expressing their views about
the Armenian question, but the killing crossed a line. Dink himself,
in his last column for Agos, had compared himself to a dove: "I know
that in this country no one will hurt a dove."
Two years after the shots that were fired on Jan 19, 2007, Turkey is
still haunted by the murder, but the debate about what happened to
Armenians almost 100 years ago is much more open than before. Several
hundred thousand Anatolian Armenians perished in massacres and death
marches that started in 1915. Turkey says the deaths were the unwanted
results of a relocation move under wartime conditions.
Armenia and many international scholars say that up to 1.5 million
people were victims of a genocide.
"The funeral march was a turning point," said Aydin Engin, a
Turkish journalist who briefly took over as editor of Agos after the
murder. "Many Turks were forced to think: what happened in 1915? Was
there a genocide or not? People recognised there is a problem."
The probing is new for Turkey, where public talk about the Armenian
question was long considered taboo and can result in jail sentences
even today. Mr Engin, who is not of Armenian descent, said he still
receives many e-mails from high school and university students asking
him to explain what happened to the Armenians.
"The taboo has been broken for good," Mr Engin said. "People talk
about it in coffee houses, in their families."
Shortly after the murder, police caught the confessed killer, Ogun
Samast, a teenager from the Black Sea city of Trabzon, which is known
as a nationalist stronghold. The trial against Mr Samast and several
other defendants accused of incitement or of being accomplices
continues in court in Istanbul. It has kept the case of Dink on
the agenda.
Friends and family members meet today for a remembrance march from
Taksim Square in Istanbul’s city centre to the scene of the crime in
front of the building that houses Agos.
Ever since the killing, the government has been under public pressure
to investigate reports that those guilty acted with the knowledge of
leading police officers. When Mr Samast was arrested, some policemen
posed with him and a Turkish flag for souvenir photos. Only a few
days ago, Turkish media reported that Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the
prime minister, had given permission to open investigations against
two high-ranking police officers who are accused of having ignored
information about the plot to kill Dink.
Still, Armenians in Turkey feel exposed. This month, police in the
central Anatolian city of Sivas arrested about a dozen nationalists
after discovering a plot to kill a leader of the local Armenian
community. The plot is said to have been ordered by members of the
Ergenekon organisation, a right-wing group that prosecutors say tried
to provoke a military coup against Mr Erdogan by creating chaos in
the country with the help of terrorist attacks and assassinations.
Fethiye Cetin, a lawyer for Dink’s family in the murder trial, has
claimed that there are "very strong connections" between the Ergenekon
gang and the killing of Dink.
"Right now every Armenian can feel like a target," Dink’s brother
Orhan told the Sabah newspaper last week.
Mr Engin said every time the Armenian question receives heightened
publicity, Armenians felt under threat by nationalists.