Turkish-Armenian journalist murdered

By Francesca Lo Basso
Collegian Editor
January 24, 2007

Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was shot dead in broad daylight outside his newspaper’s office in Istanbul Jan. 19. Dink, who wrote extensively on the mass killings of Armenians in Turkey in 1915, was a well-known public figure.

Dink was given a six-month suspended sentence in October 2005 for insulting Turkish identity in an article in which he referred to the death of large numbers of Armenians as “genocide.” Turkish authorities believed Dink was calling Turkish blood “dirty” and found him guilty.

During World War I, as the Ottoman Turks fought Russian forces and attempted to keep their struggling empire in tact, some of the Armenian minority in eastern Anatolia sided with the Russians. In response, Turkey rounded up and killed hundreds of Armenian community leaders. Two to three million Armenians were forcefully deported from Turkey and marched from the Anatolian border towards Syria and what is now Iraq. One and a half million Armenians died as a result. Armenia says the deaths were a systematic massacre carried about by the Ottoman Turkish Empire. Turkey says that no genocide occurred and the deaths were a part of World War I.

According to BBC News, as Turkey continues to reform its penal code in accordance with EU membership guidelines, some of the code’s clauses are still constraining. Under the new code, any material published that can be considered “contrary to fundamental national interests” is a criminal offense. Dink was found guilty under section 301 of this code.

In a newspaper column written the week before his death, Dink admitted that he was receiving death threats from Turkish nationalists. He wrote that even though his computer was full of such threats, the Turkish authorities offered him no protection. After his murder, political leaders condemned his death, and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called it “an attack on national unity.”

Dink’s murderer was captured this past weekend at a bus station in the city of Samsun on his way back to his hometown of Trabzon. Ogun Samast, 16, was named earlier as the suspect as a result of security camera images from near the scene of the killing. When arrested, Samast was still carrying the gun allegedly used to shoot Dink.

Police informed reporters that six other suspects were being detained in Trabzon. One was named as Yasin Hayal, a friend of Ogun Samast, who has spent 11 months in jail for a 2004 bomb attack outside a McDonald’s restaurant in Trabzon.

Samast was arrested after being identified in the CCTV images by his father. When detained at Samsun, Samast confessed to the murder.

Turkish politicians and journalists are calling the murder a political assassination. The death of Dink is likely to increase political tensions in Turkey as politicians favored nationalist policies as they prepare for the presidential and parliamentary elections later this year.

lobassof1@lasalle.edu