Armenian Editor Is Slain in Turkey

[Erasmus]

Armenian Editor Is Slain in Turkey


By SEBNEM ARSU
Published: January 20, 2007
ISTANBUL, Jan. 19 —A prominent newspaper editor, columnist and voice for Turkey’s ethnic Armenians who was prosecuted for challenging the official Turkish version of the 1915 Armenian genocide, was shot dead as he left his office on a busy street in central Istanbul on Friday.


Television images showed the editor, Hrant Dink, lying on the crowded sidewalk covered with a white sheet outside the office of his bilingual Turkish-Armenian weekly, Agos. Officials said they detained three suspects. Investigators were monitoring surveillance tapes from nearby shops.
Mr. Dink, 52, a Turk of Armenian descent, often provoked widespread anger in Turkey for his comments on the genocide — which Turkey denies, saying the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Armenians resulted from hunger and other suffering in World War I. He also angered some ethnic Armenians for opposing their demand that Turkey recognize the genocide as a condition of entry to the European Union. He viewed entry into the Union as the clearest route to strengthening democracy in Turkey.
In recent articles, Mr. Dink (pronounced deenk) described increasing death threats against him. “I do not know how real these threats are,” he wrote, “but what’s really unbearable is the psychological torture that I’m living in, like a pigeon, turning my head up and down, left and right, my head quickly rotating.”
Reaction to the daylight shooting, both here and abroad, was swift and deep. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan condemned the shooting as a direct attack on Turkey’s peace and stability. “A bullet was fired at freedom of thought and democratic life in Turkey,” he said in a nationally broadcast news conference. “Once again, dark hands have chosen our country and spilled blood in Istanbul to achieve their dark goals.”
In an unusual show of anger and regret, the prime minister’s remarks were echoed by the head of the armed forces, the president and other officials. The Armenian patriarch in Istanbul, Archbishop Mesrob Mutafyan, declared 15 days of mourning for the small Armenian, Christian population of Turkey.
Several thousand people marched from Mr. Dink’s office to Taksim Square on Friday evening to protest the killing. People held pictures of Mr. Dink, decorated his office door with flowers, waved black flags and chanted, “Shoulder to shoulder against fascism,” and, “We are all Hrant; we are all Armenians.”
European officials and human rights groups also expressed horror and called on Turkey to do more to protect free expression.
Mr. Dink was one of a number of intellectuals convicted under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, which penalizes remarks against the state or the Turkish identity. It been harshly criticized by the European Union as a violation of freedom of expression, as Turkey moves toward membership.
Turkey has been changing some laws to try to meet the European Union’s membership criteria, but faced a setback last month when ministers in Brussels decided to freeze talks on 8 of 35 areas of discussion because of Turkey’s refusal to open its airports and seaports to Cyprus, a member of the Union.
Among the crowd that gathered Friday night, the common fear was that this assassination would be added to the list of unsolved murders. “This is an attack against our democracy,” said Ayhan Aydin, an international financial consultant, who worked on the same street on which Mr. Dink was shot.
“We’re here to show that sensible people wish this assassination to be clarified and want the perpetrators to be brought to justice,” Mr. Aydin said, standing in the crowd. “We all fear that this insane attack might be swept under the carpet once it gets too complicated to resolve, like other murders did.”
Turkey’s ambition to become a European Union member requires further democratization and a better functioning legal system. The group has been particularly critical of Article 301.
Derya Sazak of the Milliyet newspaper said of the law, “This legal system brings forward the culture of hatred and lynching, in which Hrant became an open target. The murderers always go after the moderate voices, which Turkey needs the most.”
Mr. Dink, a father of three, founded Agos in 1996. The bilingual community newspaper has a weekly circulation of 5,000.
Haluk Sahin, a columnist for the Radikal newspaper, a strong supporter of Mr. Dink’s legal struggles, said Turkey had been hit in the heart.
“Those who wanted to harm Turkey couldn’t have chosen a better target,” Mr. Sahin said. “As opposed to other killings in the past, Turkish public reaction against this murder will show us where Turkey stands in the world.”
Susanne Fowler contributed reporting from Paris.




Protesters rallied in Istanbul, some holding up signs of Hrant Dink, a newspaper editor and ethnic Armenian who was shot dead outside his office earlier in the day. Officials said they detained three suspects.

[Marcus Marulus]

A sad but not surprising event.

[Erasmus]

Turkish Police Arrest Teenage Suspect in Editor’s Killing



ISTANBUL, Jan. 20 — The Turkish police on Saturday arrested a 17-year-old suspect in the killing of a newspaper editor who championed Armenian rights, Turkish authorities said.
The editor, Hrant Dink, 52, a Turk of Armenian descent, was shot Friday afternoon outside the office of his newspaper, Agos. A gunman was recorded by a surveillance camera nearby, and the police appealed to the public for help in identifying him.
On Saturday night, Ogun Samast was captured in Samsun, a Black Sea port, after his father recognized his images from the surveillance video and notified the police in Trabzon, their hometown, said Muammer Guler, Istanbul’s governor, at a news conference just before midnight.
“The suspect was captured in Samsun on a passenger bus destined to Trabzon, together with all the evidence, including his gun and the white beret” seen in the video, Mr. Guler said.
Mr. Samast, an unemployed secondary school graduate who arrived in Istanbul a week ago, admitted killing Mr. Dink, the Samsun police said.
The police are also looking into possible links between Mr. Samast and the killing of a Catholic priest, Andrea Santaro, last February. The assailant was a 16-year-old who, like the priest and Mr. Samast, was from Trabzon.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan praised the efforts of the security forces Saturday and expressed satisfaction that an arrest had been made before Mr. Dink’s funeral on Tuesday. “We’re going to continue investigations with the same determination,” Mr. Erdogan told the reporters, assuring that the arrest was only the start.
Mr. Guler said at a news conference earlier Saturday that Mr. Samast had visited the Agos office on Friday. He apparently posed as a university student hoping to meet Mr. Dink, whose secretary told the young man he would need an appointment.
The secretary later saw him loitering outside the office before Mr. Dink was attacked, Mr. Guler said.
Kazim Kolcuoglu, head of the Istanbul Bar Association, noting that Mr. Samast and the killer of Mr. Santaro were under 18, said that minors in Turkey are used in slayings because they face lower penalties than an adult convicted of the same crime.
As a 17-year-old, Mr. Samast will be interrogated by a public prosecutor instead of the police, and will be tried at a minors’ court, which will lead to certain reductions on his possible jail term, Mr. Kolcuoglu said.
Mr. Dink’s murder has shocked Turkey. Mr. Erdogan condemned the shooting as a direct attack on Turkey’s stability, and analysts from diverse political backgrounds appeared to agree.
“If the trigger finger aimed at the air of stability and confidence in Turkey, it hit the bull’s eye,” wrote Mehmet Barlas, a columnist for the center-right newspaper Sabah.
Although analysts like Mr. Barlas saw the assassination as a politically motivated attack on Turkey’s progress toward membership in the European Union, others blamed a controversial law under which Mr. Dink had been convicted of insulting the Turkish identity.
Mr. Dink, who angered many in Turkey by challenging the official Turkish version of the 1915 Armenian genocide, was given a six-month, suspended sentence. But in the eyes of many radical nationalists, it made him a target.
Meanwhile, people continued to flock to the Agos office in Istanbul. Chants of “We are all Armenians, we are all Hrants,” filled the air.
“We’re here because we lost one of us,” said a 33-year-old woman. As a teacher, she declined to give her name because it is illegal in Turkey for public workers to make public comments. “I want to see the perpetrators be brought to justice and the plot behind this assassination clarified immediately,” she said.
Agos, the only bilingual Armenian-Turkish newspaper in Turkey, was founded and run by Mr. Dink since 1996.
“We lost the voice that spoke for us, but Turkey lost as much as we did,” said Nadya Ismezoglu, an Armenian woman standing outside the Agos office. “Our pain is indescribable.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/wo...th&oref=slogin

[Kernunnos]

I\'m not happy at all, since this killing will likely push the Erdogan government more towards the road of pro-european reforms. A nationalistic terrorism will only damage the turkish nationalist movement, helping actually the europeanization process. Beside being a sad loss this homicide will be likely a nice weapon that the freemasonic forces will possibly use to clamp down on anti-european forces. I obviously have no sympathies for such forces, be they islamists or nationalists it doesn\'t matter, obviously what matters for us is that they be prevalent in order to steer away Turkey from its european bid. If Turkey went islamist we would be safe, not only, this would destroy the multiculturalist myth of the possibility of the existence of laical states in moslem lands, shaking the grounds for multiculturalism themselves.