By PHK
Last week, a seventeen year old unemployed Turkish youth named Ogun Samast murdered Hrant Dink, the 52 year old popular but controversial founder and editor-in-chief of Agos, the bilingual Turkish-Armenian weekly, published in Istanbul.
Before his arrest, Samast took little care to hide his identity. This allowed the Turkish police to apprehend the young Trabzon resident who had been identified by his father from a videotape of the killing, in record time. It has also led to the arrest of five others from the same ultranationalist group of young men from the same poor neighborhood in the hills overlooking the city’s airport. Trabzon, an economically troubled city on the Black Sea - with a population under 500,000, is the largest Turkish city nearest the Georgian border.
Yasin Hayal, a 26 year old militant ultra-nationalist and Samast’s neighbor who had served ten months in prison for the 2004 bombing of a McDonald’s, confessed to inciting Samast to murder Dink. Hayal also provided Samast with the money, gun and weapons training to do so.
According to the Turkish mass circulation newspaper Hurriyet, the police, in investigating Dink’s murder, “have also apparently stumbled upon important clues” to the murder of the Roman Catholic priest Andrea Santoro by a 16 year old high school drop out in Trabzon in February 2006. In addition, growing militant nationalism in the city almost resulted “in the deaths of four students distributing leaflets about prison conditions . . . at the hands of a 2,000-strong lynch mob” incited by spurious local television accounts of the students’ activities just the year before.
The charges and promise of continuing investigation
Samast will be tried on various charges that include premeditated murder, membership in an armed organization and having taken “actions in anathema to the Armed Weapons Code 6136,” according to Hurriyet on January 25. The others arrested will be tried on related charges.
In a private visit to the family last week, Turkish prime minister Tayyip Erdogan promised Rakel, Dink’s widow, that “the investigations of Dink’s murder would ‘go even further than what’” had already been discovered. But how much further can the investigation go?
Over the weekend, the Turkish government replaced both the governor and police chief of Trabzon where local media is blamed even more than the authorities for provoking militant Turkish nationalism among the population. And representatives from the Trabzon Mothers' Association had traveled all the way to Istanbul to express their condolences to Rakel Dink and "denounce the consequences of poverty and ignorance."
Whether Hayal himself was the instigator or whether he was primarily a go-between for more powerful ultra-nationalists lurking in the shadows is one of several elephants-under-the-table complicating resolution of the case.
According to Turkish news reports, Dink “had said that he was being threatened by elements of the ‘deep state,’ a term for the shadowy network inside the Turkish military, intelligence and political circles that is believed to use clandestine methods to defend the state against perceived threats.” But whether police can establish a relationship between Dink’s murder and the shadowy network which he feared remains to be seen.
An added complexity is the influence of local mafia groups “enriched by Trabzon’s key position in Black Sea human-trafficking networks” and their proximity to the city’s football club which is characterized as “not only a central part of the city’s identity but also a “semi-official channel for nationalist thought,” according to local human rights activist Gultekin Yucasan in an interview by Nicholas Birch in The Washington Times.
Tens of thousands of mourners
The fact, however, that tens of thousands of mourners turned into Istanbul’s streets for Dink’s funeral procession with placards reading “We’re all Hrant Dink” and “We are all Armenians” was an unprecedented show of support for a remarkable and beloved individual as well as a reaction against powerful forces behind a narrow brand of dangerous outmoded ultra-nationalism. In a related event in Ankara about 2,000 people gathered that Wednesday “to commemorate the slaying fourteen years ago of Ugur Mumcu, a pro-secular investigative journalist, by Islamic militants,” a murder case that took far longer to solve.
Sure, the nationalist party in the Mediterranean port city of Antalya reportedly ran a banner claiming “We are all Turks” to emphasize its contrasting view of a mono-ethnic, mono-religious Turkish state which, in reality, does not exist. And football club fans in Trabzon did the same at a match Monday night.
Certainly, Turkey is a nation of over 70 million people most of whom are ethnic Turks and many of whom live in the hinterlands and do not see their country through the eyes of the far smaller secular, cosmopolitan urban multi-ethnic elite. Yet in comparison to the estimated 100,000 mourners for Dink, ultra-nationalists – despite earlier boasts of far more - could only turn out 20,000 for a protest in Istanbul prior to the pope’s visit last December.
A different Turkey?
This suggests, as columnist Huseyin Bagci wrote on January 23 in The New Anatolian, “Turkey isn’t the country it was ten years ago and the (Turkish) public is more aware of what is going on inside and abroad.”
Turkey is far from the endangered country that Ataturk forged out of the remains of the multiethnic, multi religious Ottoman Empire in 1923. Yet the country remains haunted by unresolved battles that delve deep into that troubled history. They cut to the core of the state’s soul and the very meaning of Turkish identity.
Turkey’s difficulties with Armenians – particularly Armenian diaspora groups over the still disputed characterization of the massacre and mass displacement of Armenians from Asia Minor between 1915 and 1917 - remain a cause célèbre for Armenians intent on keeping the inflammatory issue alive. This includes in both the French parliament and the U.S. Congress. In contrast, Turkish nationalists have succeeded in keeping the discussion of this painful episode in Ottoman history out of the Turkish discourse. The veil of silence, however, is being lifted by the Turkish secular intelligentsia of which Dink was a part.
Dink was respected in Turkey as “a sincere activist for Turkish-Armenian reconciliation and for free speech” (who) “denounced Armenian radicalism and most recently, branded as ‘idiocy’ a French bill making the denial of an Armenian “genocide” a jailable offence” as the Turkish newspaper Today’s Zaman wrote on January 23.
Article 301: The battleground
The battleground between Turkish secularists and ultranationalists over recognition and characterization of this historically rooted problem is the controversial Article 301 of Turkey’s penal code. This article – only recently snuck into law - inhibits free speech and violates EU rules by making it a crime “to insult Turkishness.” From the standpoint of Turkey’s ultra nationalist right, this includes reference to the killings of as many as 1.5 million Armenians during World War I. The characterization for the Turkish ultranationalists of those killings as genocide is anathema.
Kemal Kerincsiz, the ultranationalist lawyer and “leader of a rightist group opposed to EU membership for Turkey,” according to Susanne Fowler of the International Herald Tribune on September 14, 2006, has filed over 60 cases against Turkish writers and artists for violation of Article 301. Kerincsiz’ legal actions have included cases not only against Hrant Dink but also the 2007 Nobel Prize winner for literature Orhan Pamuk and novelist Elif Shafak, an assistant professor at Arizona State University.
Kerincsiz is the only lawyer to file such charges, and almost all of his cases have been thrown out by the courts for one reason or another. No one has yet to serve time. Dink was the most vulnerable. He had been accused by Kerincsiz multiple times, convicted only once and given a suspended sentence. Before his murder, he had appealed that conviction to the European Court of Human Rights.
Yet rhetoric taken out of context and broadcast nationally may well have been enough to provoke a suggestible, under-educated provincial youth with a violent side and little future to murder Dink.
A fitting memorial
Last fall the Turkish government told the EU it would amend the offending code to conform to EU standards - much to the displeasure of ultranationalists. Such an amendment alone - as suggested by Dink’s friends in the Turkish media, the German Greens co-chair, and the co-chair of the Turkey-EU Joint Parliamentary Commission and more recently the Economist - could be the most fitting memorial to his memory possible.
But how likely is this to happen and when?
Turkish Daily News columnist Cengiz Candar points out “since Turkey has presidential and parliamentary elections this year, and as long as ultranationalists pose the main challenge to Erdogan’s ruling party, it seems in no mood to persist in the reform process.”
Yet Turkish policy towards Greece turned on a dime when then Greek Foreign Minister George Papandreou reached out a hand and offered help to Turkish earthquake victims in 1999. Couldn’t something just as remarkable - and timely - happen again?
BBC Excerpts from Hrant Dink's final column published in Agos January 19, the day he was murdered.