JUDICIAL AUTHORITIES URGED TO PRESS AHEAD WITH HRANT DINK MURDER CASE

Reporters without borders
Jan 23 2015

Published on Friday 23 January 2015.

This week saw the eighth anniversary of Turkish-Armenian newspaper
editor Hrant Dink’s murder, while the trial of his accused killers
continues today in Istanbul. Reporters Without Borders hails the recent
progress in the judicial investigation and urges the authorities to
press on to the end without letting politics influence the outcome.

The founder and editor of the weekly Agos and a leading civil society
figure, Hrant Dink was gunned down in broad daylight in central
Istanbul on 19 January 2007. A tireless campaigner for democratization
and for reconciliation between Turks and Armenians, he was the victim
of a media and judicial lynching in the run-up to his murder.

His death was a turning point for Turkish society, which began to
ignore the taboo about discussing the Armenian genocide and to debate
the fate of Turkey’s minorities more freely. Will light finally be shed
on a crime whose shock waves are still being felt eight years later?

At the end of a half-hearted trial concerned above all with protecting
the state, a court ruled in January 2012 that Ogun Samast, the
ultra-nationalist youth from the northeastern city of Trabzon who
shot Dink, did so at the behest of a single instigator, Yasin Hayal.

The Court of Cassation overturned this ruling in May 2013, opening the
way for a more thorough investigation into the suspected instigators
and those within the state who are suspected of being accomplices or
providing protection. More than a year went by before the judges in
charge of the case acted on this ruling, but the judicial investigation
is finally making progress.

“Now that the judicial system has at last removed its blinkers after
a very long wait, the testimony of police and intelligence officers
is starting to shed light on the organized nature of Dink’s murder
and the involvement of state officials, something that was obvious
from the start,” said Johann Bihr, the head of the Reporters Without
Borders Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk.

“It remains to be seen whether it is not too late to shed light on all
aspects of this murder or whether the case will again be manipulated
for political ends. Time is running out if justice is to be rendered
to Hrant Dink.”

Prolonged injustice

Investigative journalists such as Nedim Sener, Kemal Goktas and Adem
Yavuz Arslan had revealed that members of the police and gendarmerie
in Istanbul and Trabzon and members of the MIT intelligence agency
received information about the plan to kill Dink and did nothing to
prevent it.

The European Court of Human Rights reached a similar conclusion and
issued a ruling against Turkey in 2010. And after examining the case,
the offices of the president and prime minister also criticized the
police and intelligence services.

Nonetheless, the Turkish judges responsible for the various aspects
of the case continued for a long time to refuse to take account of
these facts. Obstructive manoeuvres by the police and state agencies,
combined with judicial foot-dragging, contributed to the fiasco of
the first trial and its verdicts, which Reporters Without Borders
condemned as “outrageous.”

What little progress was made at that time was due to the tireless
efforts of the Dink family’s lawyers, who conducted investigative
work that the investigating judges refused to do. It was therefore
with immense relief that Reporters Without Borders hailed the Court
of Cassation decision recognizing that Dink’s murder was a “criminal
enterprise” and not just the work of a small group of fanatics.

The appeal trial opened in September 2013 but it was not until the
end of October 2014 that the court decided to incorporate the Court
of Cassation’s findings. Since then, it has been accepted that the
police and intelligence services had a role in the murder.

Police finally treated as suspects

Most of the various components of the case were then merged into one –
an indispensible step for a better understanding. Until then, they
had been handled by different courts, which helped complicate the
case unnecessarily and led to delays, a lack of cooperation between
judges and overall lack of effectiveness.

When Reporters Without Borders visited Trabzon in September 2013,
it pointed out that it was much harder for the city’s judges to
question the behaviour of the local police because of the close
relations within the provincial elite.

The main investigations into the Istanbul and Trabzon police were
finally merged on 7 November 2014. The case of the hit-man, Ogun
Samast, who was 17 at the time of the shooting and who was originally
tried before a court for minors, was also attached to the main case.

Sentenced to 23 years in prison on a charge pre-meditated homicide
in 2012, Samast is now additionally charged with “membership of a
terrorist organization.”

The Istanbul prosecutor-general for terrorism and organized crime
has been questioning nine senior police and intelligence officials
as suspects since November 2014. They include former Istanbul police
chief Celalettin Cerrah, former Istanbul prefect Ergun Gungor, former
Istanbul police intelligence directors Ahmet Ilhan Guler and Ali Fuat
Yilmazer, and the former head of the intelligence department of the
General Directorate for Security, Ramazan Akyurek.

As a result of the initial hearings, two Trabzon police officers,
Muhittin Zenit and Ozkan Mumcu, were placed in pre-trial detention on
13 January on charges of negligence and abuse of authority for doing
nothing to prevent Dink’s murder. Phone calls reportedly established
that Zenit had been told of the murder plans.

Ercan Demir, who was recently appointed police chief of the
southeastern district of Cizre and who was working in Trabzon police
intelligence at the time of the murder, was also arrested on 19
January.

Caution

Nonetheless, problems remain. The case of Retired Colonel Ali Oz,
who headed the Trabzon gendarmerie at the time and who is being tried
before a Trabzon court on a negligence charge, has yet to be combined
with the main Istanbul trial. No progress has been registered in this
aspect of the case for the past three years, despite repeated requests
by the Dink family’s lawyers pending a Court of Cassation decision.

The recent sudden progress in the case has come at a time of extreme
tension in Turkey. The judicial system has emerged as one of the
chief bones of contention in the rivalry between the government and
its former allies in the Gulen Movement, which President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan now regards as public enemy No. 1.

A major anti-corruption investigation targeting senior government
officials that was launched last December was regarded by the
government as a Gulen Movement “conspiracy.” The investigation was
suppressed and hundreds of police officers, inspectors, judges and
prosecutors have been fired in the past few months.

These purges have made it possible to question the police, but they
do not necessarily make it more likely that the truth will emerge. In
fact, the government could again exploit the trial of Dink’s killers
for political ends, as it did already in its battle with former
officials who espouse the secularist views of the Turkish Republic’s
founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

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