The Australian, Australia
Jan 24 2007
Silent salute to editor killed for ‘insulting Turks’
Suna Erdem, Istanbul
January 25, 2007
TENS of thousands of mourners marched in silence yesterday through
Istanbul behind the coffin of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant
Dink, who was shot dead by a teenager with suspected nationalist links.
Carrying black banners bearing the slogans "We are all Armenian" and
"We are all Hrant Dink", the 100,000- strong crowd of Turks, ethnic
Armenians and foreigners walked nearly 8km expressing their anger,
not with chanting but with their quiet presence, asrequested by Dink’s
widow, Rakel.
Marchers took time off from work and school to join the procession,
and thousands leaned out of their office windows to applaud, weep
and throw flowers as the hearse carrying Dink’s body passed.
The 52-year-old journalist’s daughter, Sera, carrying a framed portrait
of her father, wept as she walked in front of the coffin.
In a speech outside the offices of Agos, the Turkish-Armenian newspaper
where Dink, its editor, was shot on Friday, Rakel Dink urged the
mourners to work for an end to the hostile nationalistic environment
that still has many Turks in its grip despite recent liberal reforms.
"Do not be satisfied with this much; do not be satisfied with today,"
she cried out to the crowd. "The killer was a baby once. We cannot
achieve anything if we do not question the darkness that creates a
murderer out of a baby."
Dink, along with several other writers, including the Nobel laureate
Orhan Pamuk, had been prosecuted under the controversial Article 301
of the Turkish penal code for his views on the killing of Armenians by
Ottoman Turks in 1915. Turkey denies that this amounted to a genocide
and treats any departure from the official line with suspicion.
Liberal Turks, including Pamuk, say Article 301, which punishes
"insults to Turkish identity", is used to set people up as targets.
Authorities say Ogun Samast, 17, has confessed to the murder of Dink
for "insulting Turks".
Another man, Yasin Hayal, jailed recently for bombing a McDonald’s
restaurant, has admitted inciting him. A university student is being
held under suspicion of organising a cell that included Hayal and
commissioned the murder.
The killing of Dink, who had sought reconciliation between Muslim
Turks and Christian Armenians, harked back to the end of the 20th
century when dissenting journalists and other activists were felled
by militants with suspected links in the state intelligence apparatus.
Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan were conspicuously absent at the service in an Armenian church
by the Golden Horn waterway, but the public and international response
was overwhelming.
Ambassadors, Turkish ministers and MPs, members of the European
parliament and Armenian clerics from across the world crowded into
the church.
Armenian Patriarch Mesrob II called for expanded freedoms of speech
and more dialogue between Turks and Armenians.