PAIR GUILTY OF ‘INSULTING TURKEY’
BBC News, UK
Oct 11 2007
The son of murdered Turkish-Armenian writer Hrant Dink has been found
guilty of insulting "Turkishness", along with another newspaper editor.
Arat Dink and Serkis Seropyan were convicted after printing Dink’s
claims that the killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks from 1915
was genocide.
The verdict came a day after a US congressional committee backed a
bill labelling the killings as genocide.
Turkish leaders reacted angrily, but the decision was welcomed by
Armenians.
The non-binding US vote, passed by 27 to 21 votes by members of the
congressional House Foreign Affairs Committee, is the first step
towards holding a vote in the House of Representatives.
Outspoken
Arat Dink and Mr Seropyan, who both work as editors at Agos, a leading
bilingual Turkish and Armenian weekly newspaper, were given one-year
suspended sentences for printing comments made by Hrant Dink during
an interview.
Dink, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper, was one of Turkey’s most
prominent Armenian voices.
Hrant Dink was one of Turkey’s most prominent Armenian voices
He was shot dead outside his Istanbul office in January 2007.
At the time he was appealing against a prior conviction for the same
offence – insulting the Turkish identity under Article 301 of the
country’s penal code.
Turkey faces ongoing international pressure to scrap the offence,
under which dozens of writers who have been charged, often for articles
dealing with killings of Kurds or Ottoman Armenians.
Hundreds of thousands of Armenians died in 1915 and the following
years at the hands of Ottoman Turks.
Armenians have campaigned for the killings to be described
internationally as genocide. More than a dozen countries, various
international bodies and many Western historians have done so.
Turkey admits that many Armenians were killed but it denies any
genocide, saying the deaths were a part of World War I.
Turkey and neighbouring Armenia still have no official relations.
171.stm