International Herald Tribune, France
Jan 21 2007
Turkish police arrest teenager in killing of newspaper editor
By Susanne Fowler
Published: January 21, 2007
ISTANBUL: A 17-year-old suspect was being held Sunday under heavy
security in the shooting death of Hrant Dink, a Turkish journalist of
Armenian descent, a killing that has intensified the debate here on
the sensitive topics of national identity and freedom of expression
during an important election year.
The suspect, Ogun Samast, was captured Saturday night after his
father recognized him from a surveillance camera photo shown by the
media and alerted the authorities. Samast was arrested at the main
bus station in the Black Sea coast city of Samsun, apparently on his
way to his hometown of Trabzon. At least 12 other people were
reportedly detained in Trabzon, and several were brought to Istanbul
on Sunday for questioning, news reports said. Samast was being held
at the Istanbul Police Headquarters in the Aksaray neighborhood.
According to the state-run Anatolia news agency, the chief
prosecutor, Ahmet Cokcinar, said Sunday that Samast was caught in
possession of the gun used to kill Dink and had confessed to the
brazen daylight attack. Dink, 52, the editor of the weekly bilingual
newspaper Agos, was shot three times in the neck and head as he left
work on a busy commercial avenue Friday.
In his confession, according to the Dogan News Agency, Samast told
the police that he had been reading Dink’s columns via the Internet
from Trabzon and did not like what he was reading and so "decided to
kill him."
He reportedly had requested a meeting with Dink but was turned down.
"I would do it again," Samast was quoted as saying. "I have no
regrets."
Commentators on Sunday were speculating that because the suspect is a
minor, he might have been influenced by someone who knew that a teen
would face a lesser sentence if caught.
The killing shocked this mostly Muslim nation and sent thousands of
furious Turks into the streets during the weekend, waving placards
and chanting, "We are all Armenians!"
That statement is especially poignant in Turkey, where calling
someone an Armenian is often considered an insult.
Turkey and Armenia, which share a border but have no diplomatic ties,
are at odds over Turkey’s refusal to use the term "genocide" to
describe the deaths of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians beginning
in 1915. Turkey says the deaths resulted from war as the Ottoman
Empire was crumbling and that many Turks also were killed.
Some Turks have begun to feel betrayed by the European Union, which
recently froze sections of the accession talks over issues related to
Cyprus.
"This killing is an ultimate result of increasing nationalism,
isolationism and animosity toward minorities that the European Union
fueled in its handling of Turkey’s membership process," Can Baydarol,
a European Union expert said. "If the EU pushes Turkey even further
after this tragic incident, this would serve the interests of the
extremist circles that Mr. Dink was in constant struggle with."
Esra Uras, of the Liberal European Association, a pro-EU group, said
that while the violence could dent Turkey’s chances of eventual EU
membership, "the government had actually handled the situation after
the murder very well."
Uras was among the thousands of marchers in Taksim Square after the
killing.
"We were all on the street shouting that ‘We were all Dink’ and for
the first time the politicians showed leadership in such a crisis
situation by joining in and becoming part of the group."
"It must be clear," she said, "that Hrant Dink was someone who was
really criticized by both Turks and Armenians, but from the point of
view of freedom of speech and thought, this has sparked a new
solidarity."
There were others who said that Dink’s legacy might be one of
reconciliation between feuding Turks and Armenians.
Sevan Sarafian, 39, was one of about 30 Turkish-Armenians attending
the regular Sunday morning service at the Church of the Three Altars
next to central Istanbul’s fish bazaar and one of 41 Christian
Armenian churches serving the estimated 60,000 ethnic Armenians that
remain in Turkey.
"When Dink was killed, I was so upset because he was a symbol of out
community," said Sarafian, who runs a silver shop nearby. "Like any
philosopher, Dink said things that I agreed with and things that I
didn’t agree with. But when all those people turned out to march
after he was killed, I felt so happy to hear everyone say they were
Armenian."
"For Turkish Muslims to call themselves Armenians is really a major
change," he said. "I hope it continues to bring the two communities
much closer to work out their differences."
The capture of a suspect was good news, Sarafian said, but it was
just a beginning.
"I will be much happier if they catch the people who put him up to
it," he said. "I have many ideas about who that might be but I
wouldn’t like to say what those are."
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said at a news conference
Saturday that the investigators were checking whether Samast had any
ties to another Trabzon teenager who was convicted last year in the
shooting death of Andrea Santoro, a Catholic priest in that city.
Turkish media also reported that Samast was a friend of another young
man from Trabzon who served 11 months in prison for bombing a
McDonald’s restaurant there in 2004.
Dink had long been surrounded by controversy. He was in and out of
court for years, charged with insulting Turkishness, which is a crime
under Article 301 of the Turkish penal code.
He was convicted in 2005 and the conviction was upheld on appeals in
2006 but his six-month sentence was suspended.
The Nobel Prize winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk was charged
under the same law for his comments about Armenia but his case was
dropped. The Milliyet daily newspaper reported Sunday that Pamuk was
now under police protection.
Ilter Turan, a professor at Istanbul Bilgi University, said that the
killing would perhaps mark the start a new wave of democratic
reforms.
"The massive reactions against Dink’s killing tell us that people are
not proud of the extremism that prepared the grounds for this
unfortunate event," Turan said.
"At every level of the society, there is a desire to ease the
international consequences of this event, which could trigger another
wave of reforms in Turkey."
Meanwhile, the site of Dink’s killing has become a shrine, with
flowers and posters and visits by grieving friends and politicians in
this election year for Turkey.
Deniz Baykal, head of the opposition Republican People’s Party, known
in Turkey by the acronym CHP, and an Erdogan rival, paid a highly
publicized visit to the offices of Dink’s newspaper Saturday.
Later that night, Erdogan held a nationally broadcast news conference
to say how glad he was that the suspect had been caught prior to
Dink’s funeral on Tuesday.
But Erdogan also said that he would not attend the rites because of a
prior commitment to join the former EU president and current prime
minister of Italy, Romando Prodi, in the city of Bolu for the opening
ceremony for a Turkish- Italian tunnel construction project.
For Sarafian, the silver seller, the Turkish-Armenian conflict cuts
to the core of his own identity issues.
"When we are in Turkey, we are considered Armenians even though we
were born here," he said. "But when we travel outside of Turkey, we
use Turkish passports and we are not Armenians any more: We live our
lives between the two identities."
Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting for this article.