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RsF / RwB: Judicial Authorities Urged To Press Ahead With Hrant Dink

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  • RsF / RwB: Judicial Authorities Urged To Press Ahead With Hrant Dink

    JUDICIAL AUTHORITIES URGED TO PRESS AHEAD WITH HRANT DINK MURDER CASE

    Reporters without borders
    Jan 23 2015

    Published on Friday 23 January 2015.

    This week saw the eighth anniversary of Turkish-Armenian newspaper
    editor Hrant Dink's murder, while the trial of his accused killers
    continues today in Istanbul. Reporters Without Borders hails the recent
    progress in the judicial investigation and urges the authorities to
    press on to the end without letting politics influence the outcome.

    The founder and editor of the weekly Agos and a leading civil society
    figure, Hrant Dink was gunned down in broad daylight in central
    Istanbul on 19 January 2007. A tireless campaigner for democratization
    and for reconciliation between Turks and Armenians, he was the victim
    of a media and judicial lynching in the run-up to his murder.

    His death was a turning point for Turkish society, which began to
    ignore the taboo about discussing the Armenian genocide and to debate
    the fate of Turkey's minorities more freely. Will light finally be shed
    on a crime whose shock waves are still being felt eight years later?

    At the end of a half-hearted trial concerned above all with protecting
    the state, a court ruled in January 2012 that Ogun Samast, the
    ultra-nationalist youth from the northeastern city of Trabzon who
    shot Dink, did so at the behest of a single instigator, Yasin Hayal.

    The Court of Cassation overturned this ruling in May 2013, opening the
    way for a more thorough investigation into the suspected instigators
    and those within the state who are suspected of being accomplices or
    providing protection. More than a year went by before the judges in
    charge of the case acted on this ruling, but the judicial investigation
    is finally making progress.

    "Now that the judicial system has at last removed its blinkers after
    a very long wait, the testimony of police and intelligence officers
    is starting to shed light on the organized nature of Dink's murder
    and the involvement of state officials, something that was obvious
    from the start," said Johann Bihr, the head of the Reporters Without
    Borders Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk.

    "It remains to be seen whether it is not too late to shed light on all
    aspects of this murder or whether the case will again be manipulated
    for political ends. Time is running out if justice is to be rendered
    to Hrant Dink."

    Prolonged injustice

    Investigative journalists such as Nedim Sener, Kemal Goktas and Adem
    Yavuz Arslan had revealed that members of the police and gendarmerie
    in Istanbul and Trabzon and members of the MIT intelligence agency
    received information about the plan to kill Dink and did nothing to
    prevent it.

    The European Court of Human Rights reached a similar conclusion and
    issued a ruling against Turkey in 2010. And after examining the case,
    the offices of the president and prime minister also criticized the
    police and intelligence services.

    Nonetheless, the Turkish judges responsible for the various aspects
    of the case continued for a long time to refuse to take account of
    these facts. Obstructive manoeuvres by the police and state agencies,
    combined with judicial foot-dragging, contributed to the fiasco of
    the first trial and its verdicts, which Reporters Without Borders
    condemned as "outrageous."

    What little progress was made at that time was due to the tireless
    efforts of the Dink family's lawyers, who conducted investigative
    work that the investigating judges refused to do. It was therefore
    with immense relief that Reporters Without Borders hailed the Court
    of Cassation decision recognizing that Dink's murder was a "criminal
    enterprise" and not just the work of a small group of fanatics.

    The appeal trial opened in September 2013 but it was not until the
    end of October 2014 that the court decided to incorporate the Court
    of Cassation's findings. Since then, it has been accepted that the
    police and intelligence services had a role in the murder.

    Police finally treated as suspects

    Most of the various components of the case were then merged into one -
    an indispensible step for a better understanding. Until then, they
    had been handled by different courts, which helped complicate the
    case unnecessarily and led to delays, a lack of cooperation between
    judges and overall lack of effectiveness.

    When Reporters Without Borders visited Trabzon in September 2013,
    it pointed out that it was much harder for the city's judges to
    question the behaviour of the local police because of the close
    relations within the provincial elite.

    The main investigations into the Istanbul and Trabzon police were
    finally merged on 7 November 2014. The case of the hit-man, Ogun
    Samast, who was 17 at the time of the shooting and who was originally
    tried before a court for minors, was also attached to the main case.

    Sentenced to 23 years in prison on a charge pre-meditated homicide
    in 2012, Samast is now additionally charged with "membership of a
    terrorist organization."

    The Istanbul prosecutor-general for terrorism and organized crime
    has been questioning nine senior police and intelligence officials
    as suspects since November 2014. They include former Istanbul police
    chief Celalettin Cerrah, former Istanbul prefect Ergun Gungor, former
    Istanbul police intelligence directors Ahmet Ilhan Guler and Ali Fuat
    Yilmazer, and the former head of the intelligence department of the
    General Directorate for Security, Ramazan Akyurek.

    As a result of the initial hearings, two Trabzon police officers,
    Muhittin Zenit and Ozkan Mumcu, were placed in pre-trial detention on
    13 January on charges of negligence and abuse of authority for doing
    nothing to prevent Dink's murder. Phone calls reportedly established
    that Zenit had been told of the murder plans.

    Ercan Demir, who was recently appointed police chief of the
    southeastern district of Cizre and who was working in Trabzon police
    intelligence at the time of the murder, was also arrested on 19
    January.

    Caution

    Nonetheless, problems remain. The case of Retired Colonel Ali Oz,
    who headed the Trabzon gendarmerie at the time and who is being tried
    before a Trabzon court on a negligence charge, has yet to be combined
    with the main Istanbul trial. No progress has been registered in this
    aspect of the case for the past three years, despite repeated requests
    by the Dink family's lawyers pending a Court of Cassation decision.

    The recent sudden progress in the case has come at a time of extreme
    tension in Turkey. The judicial system has emerged as one of the
    chief bones of contention in the rivalry between the government and
    its former allies in the Gulen Movement, which President Recep Tayyip
    Erdogan now regards as public enemy No. 1.

    A major anti-corruption investigation targeting senior government
    officials that was launched last December was regarded by the
    government as a Gulen Movement "conspiracy." The investigation was
    suppressed and hundreds of police officers, inspectors, judges and
    prosecutors have been fired in the past few months.

    These purges have made it possible to question the police, but they
    do not necessarily make it more likely that the truth will emerge. In
    fact, the government could again exploit the trial of Dink's killers
    for political ends, as it did already in its battle with former
    officials who espouse the secularist views of the Turkish Republic's
    founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

    http://en.rsf.org/judicial-authorities-urged-to-23-01-2015,47536.html

    http://en.rsf.org/judicial-authorities-urged-to-23-01-2015,47536.html

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