Times Online, UK
Jan 24 2007
"Orhan Pamuk, be smart, be smart!" he shouted.
Murder suspect threatens Turkey’s Nobel laureate
Times Online and AP in Istanbul
A man suspected of directing the murder of the prominent Turkish
Armenian journalist, Hrant Dink, today appeared to threaten the life
of Orhan Pamuk, a Nobel laureate and Turkey’s best-known novelist.
The Anatolia news agency reported that Yasin Hayal, a nationalist
militant jailed for bombing a McDonald’s restaurant in 2004, called
out the threat as he was led handcuffed into a courtroom in Istanbul.
"Orhan Pamuk, be smart, be smart!" he shouted.
Turkish police have said that Mr Hayal has confessed to recommending
the murder of Dink, who was shot several times outside the offices of
Agos, the leading Turkish-Armenian newspaper he edited last week. Mr
Hayal is also accused of providing a gun and money to Ogun Samast, a
17-year-old who has confessed to the shooting.
Dink’s murder prompted an enormous silent procession in Istanbul
yesterday. Around 100,000 people filed through the city, holding
photographs and placards reading: "We are all Hrant Dink" and "We are
all Armenian" in recognition of the journalist’s commitment to
writing about the mass killing of Armenians by Turks at the end of
the First World War.
Both Mr Hayal and Mr Samast were in court this morning. The private
news station, NTV, reported that Mr Hayal called Dink a traitor to
his country.
Mr Pamuk, whose books are sold all over the world, became the first
Turk to win the Nobel prize for literature last year for a career of
writing in which he has tackled Turkey’s tense ambivalence towards
the West and its own competing nationalist and Islamic identities.
Although he is Turkish, rather than ethnically Armenian, Mr Pamuk has
much in common with Dink, and like the murdered journalist is a
leading liberal intellectual who has been prosecuted under Article
301 of Turkey’s penal code, which forbids writers from "insulting
Turkish identity".
Like Dink, who received dozens of death threats before his eventual
murder, Mr Pamuk has also written about the 1915-1917 massacre of the
Armenians and been threatened as a result.
Dink’s family has asked Turkey to use the journalist’s death to
prompt a national moment of reflection about how such violent
feelings could arise. The country’s Interior Minister, Abdulkadir
Aksu, said the killing was ordered by "circles who do not want Turkey
to develop and reach the level of prosperous and modern countries".
The Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is expected to
visit Dink’s relatives later today.