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CPJ: Editor's Killing Still Haunts Turkey

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  • CPJ: Editor's Killing Still Haunts Turkey

    EDITOR'S KILLING STILL HAUNTS TURKEY
    Robert Mahoney

    http://www.cpj.org/blog/2011/07/editors-killing-still-haunts-turkey.php
    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.

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