EDITOR’S KILLING STILL HAUNTS TURKEY
Robert Mahoney
July 29, 2011
There’s a policeman on duty these days in the lobby of the elegant
apartment building that houses Agos and a receptionist behind security
glass buzzes you in to the newspaper’s cluttered offices. That’s about
the only indication that the outspoken Turkish-Armenian editor whom
I interviewed here in Istanbul in 2006 was assassinated outside the
front door a year later.
Hrant Dink’s murder by a provincial teenaged gunman was a watershed for
Turkish journalism. Many journalists had been killed in the Kurdish
conflict in the 1990s in the south and southeast of the country. But
Dink’s shooting in broad daylight on a fashionable boulevard in the
heart of the nation’s media capital shocked and angered the liberal
and media establishment.
That outrage has not impelled prosecutors to bring the Dink family
full justice. Many journalists and colleagues of Dink believe the
investigation into his January 19, 2007, murder has netted only the
small fry. The masterminds, whom they believe to be ultranationalists
in the military and security services, are still free.
“We know there is evidence that a lot of police and soldiers are
involved in the assassination,” said Rober KoptaÅ~_, a soft-spoken
former Agos reporter who became editor-in-chief of the weekly last
year.
KoptaÅ~_ linked the killing to “Ergenekon,” an alleged underground
network of military officers and bureaucrats unmasked in April 2007
and accused of plotting to overthrow the moderate Islamist government
of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whom they see as a threat
to a secular Turkey. More than 500 people have been detained in some
18 waves of arrests since then, and the affair has come to dominate
Turkish political life.
KoptaÅ~_ 33, believes Ergenekon conspirators prepared the ground
for eliminating Dink by building popular sentiment against him
through sympathizers in the media years before the murder. Dink was
a controversial figure in any case because he challenged Turkey’s
historical narrative about the mass killings and expulsion of Armenians
in World War I, and angered ultranationalists with some of his writing
about their icon, modern Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. He
received torrents of hate mail and death threats, and on several
occasions protesters blocked the entrance to the Agos office.
He was the frequent target of nationalist prosecutors who brought
cases against him under Turkey’s arcane defamation statutes, including
three prosecutions for “denigrating Turkishness.”
“Somewhere in the state, some officers, some people, came together
and planned to kill him…before killing him they opened some cases,
denigrating Turkishness, etc., and they forced some columnists to
report against him,” KoptaÅ~_ said.
“We are getting nowhere,” KoptaÅ~_ said of the quest for justice.
“Because the trial is only limited to those three or four, let’s
say, children, youngsters, from Trabzon and there is no any real
investigation about state officers whether civilian or military.”
KoptaÅ~_ was speaking shortly before a juvenile court sentenced Ogun
Samast to 22 years and 10 months in prison for pre-meditated murder.
Samast, a native of the Black Sea city of Trabzon, was barely 17
years old when he shot Dink. Two others suspected of involvement
in the murder plot, Yasin Hayal and Erhan Tuncel are being tried in
adult criminal court.
The day after the July 25 sentence was handed down, a lawyer for the
Dink family echoed KoptaÅ~_’s frustration with the investigation’s
failure to arrest the masterminds. “Hrant Dink was watched very
closely by the state and he was killed by persons who again were very
closely watched by the state,” Fethiye Cetin told a press conference
in Istanbul. “Everything is pointing to state institutions. It is
blatantly obvious,” she added.
The advocacy group Friends of Hrant Dink calls the answers it has
received from the government about the lack of progress in the murder
inquiry “not serious.” Turkish President Abdullah Gul has, however,
ordered the State Supervisory Council to investigate the killing.
“Yes, there is a presidential committee looking into this,” KoptaÅ~_
acknowledges. “But we are not hopeful… Four and half years later and
we saw nothing. There is no progress. And even we have a decision of
the European Court of Human Rights punishing Turkey about that but
nothing changed.”
Dink’s colleagues accuse the authorities, particularly in Istanbul,
of failing to heed warnings from intelligence services of a credible
threat to Dink’s life. They also point to numerous shortcomings in the
investigation. Last month, however, a Trabzon court convicted six of
eight officials accused of negligence over the prevention of the murder
and sentenced Trabzon army commander Col. Ali Oz and army intelligence
unit director Capt. Metin Yıldız to six months in prison.
They are appealing the conviction.
Asked why the murder probe was not making more progress, KoptaÅ~_
gave two reasons. First he believed investigators were now primarily
interested in the Ergenekon coup plot itself rather than the Dink
assassination that preceded it. Second, he claimed that some senior
police officials who might be implicated in the Dink case were helping
with the Ergenekon inquiry and so were not being pursued.
KoptaÅ~_ said Agos, which has a circulation of 5,000, is pressing
on with Dink’s work and serving Istanbul’s 60,000 Armenians. He
says prosecutors have left the paper in peace since the murder and
it now prints the controversial term “genocide” to describe the
Armenian killings–something that would have definitely resulted in
a prosecution previously. Dink used to receive about five threatening
or hateful emails a day. Now the paper gets about five a year, he said.
Despite the paper’s success the lack of justice hangs over it
like a cloud. KoptaÅ~_ fears that the case could fade from public
consciousness, eclipsed by Ergenekon.
“The assassination is like fading away because it’s not important,”
he said. “The important thing is Ergenekon, the important thing is
the political struggle…the case is not touching the mind or heart
because the victim is Armenian. It is a pity for all of us for Turks
and Armenians.”
Robert Mahoney is CPJ’s deputy director. He has worked as a reporter,
editor, and bureau chief for Reuters throughout the world. Mahoney has
led CPJ missions to global hot spots from Iraq to Sri Lanka. Follow
him on Twitter @RobMahoney_CPJ.
http://www.cpj.org/blog/2011/07/editors-killing-still-haunts-turkey.php