In his last newspaper column, Hrant Dink wrote that he was now
considered an enemy of the state and of the Turkish people. He had
but recently completed a six-month suspended sentence for the
charge of “insulting Turkish identity,” and he now faced two
additional charges. More ominously his email’s inbox, he said, was
crammed with death threats.
“My computer’s memory is loaded with sentences full of hatred
and threats,” Dink noted in his last column for Agos, the
Armenian language weekly of which he was editor-in-chief. “I do not
know how real these threats are, but what’s really unbearable is
the psychological torture that I’m living in….For me, 2007 is
likely to be a hard year. The trials will continue, new ones will
be started. Who knows what other injustices I will be up against.”
Even so, the editor believed he would survive the year.
He was wrong. Last Friday at 1 p.m., as Dink was leaving his
newspaper office, Ogun Samast, an unemployed 17-year-old Turk,
waited outside on the busy Istanbul street. He approached Dink and
fired four shots. Three of them hit the editor in the neck and
head. The assassin then shouted, “I shot the non-Muslim!” and fled
the scene.
Samast was a native of the Black Sea port town of Trabzon. It
was there that police, acting on a tip from Samast’s father,
arrested the gunman as he stepped off a bus. Once in custody he
proudly confessed to the murder.
Police also suspect Samast of last year’s murder of an Italian
Roman Catholic priest shot and killed in the courtyard of his
church in Trabzon. It seems likely that Fr. Andrea Santaro, 60, was
killed in connection with the uproar following publication of
cartoons of the prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper, cartoons
that many Muslims found insulting.
Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, an ardent supporter of article
301 of the Turkish criminal code that outlaws insulting Turkish
institutions or Turkish national identity, is also a shrewd
politician who seeks EU membership for Turkey. The prime minister
thus condemned Dink’s murder. “A bullet has been fired at democracy
and freedom of expression,” he said in a news conference. “I
condemn the traitorous hands behind this disgraceful murder.” This
must have puzzled the dozens of Turkish writers and intellectuals
charged under article 301, like publisher Abdullah Yilmaz who faces
jail time for issuing a Turkish edition of Greek writer Mara
Meimaridi’s novel The Witches of Smyrna. The novel
describes parts of the Turkish quarter of Izmir as “dirty.” A cynic
might say that Mr. Erdogan and his government have no business
talking about freedom of expression.
DINK, AN ETHNIC ARMENIAN, was given a six-month suspended sentence
in October 2005 after writing about the Armenian “genocide” of
1915. Last fall he was again charged with “insulting Turkish
identity” for using the word “genocide” in an interview with
Reuters. After his conviction at a trial that PEN, the
international association of writers, described as featuring the controversial courtroom
procedure of an “attempted lynching,” Dink began to think seriously
about emigrating. When he announced that, if the case against him
was not dropped, he would leave Turkey, Ankara charged him with
attempting to influence the judiciary, a crime punishable by 4 1/2
years in prison.
I suspect that Dink’s murder will finally force Ankara to
reconsider article 301. Similar charges against novelist Orhan
Pamuk for remarks he made about the Armenian genocide doubtless
contributed to his winning last year’s Nobel Prize for Literature.
Indeed, the award was seen as a slap in the face to Ankara and
Turkish nationalists. (The Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer
refused even to congratulate Pamuk.) Similarly Ankara’s demonizing
of Hrant Dink no doubt stirred up the jihadist in Ogun Samast and
is at least partially to blame for the editor’s murder.
After Dink’s 2005 conviction, Ankara said it had no intention of
lifting article 301. Perhaps now Ankara, fearful of losing out
completely in its EU membership bid, will think twice before it
throws journalists and novelists behind bars for telling the
unpleasant truth about the Armenian genocide. Perhaps then Hrant
Dink’s death will not have been in vain.
