TURKEY ‘IGNORED’ ASSASSINATION PLOT OF HRANT DINK
by Thomas Seibert
The National
Jan 10 2012
UAE
ISTANBUL // Long before one of Turkey’s most famous journalists was
shot three times in the head by a 17-year-old Turkish nationalist, he
was already in the crosshairs of the security and intelligence forces.
A top European court and critics in Turkey say members of the police
force knew of the plot to kill the journalist, Hrant Dink – an ethnic
Armenian who was gunned down in Istanbul on January 19, 2007 – but
took no action to prevent the crime.
Turkish authorities are still blocking a thorough investigation into
the involvement of state officials in the conspiracy, critics say.
Last July, Ogun Samast, a young nationalist, was convicted by a
juvenile court of killing Mr Dink in downtown Istanbul, but the
trial against his alleged accomplices has been dragging on amid
accusations that the authorities are reluctant to shed light on the
role of security forces in the plot to kill the journalist.
Istanbul’s High Criminal Court is scheduled to convene today for the
24th hearing in the trial.
“It was like a chronicle of a death foretold,” said Banu Guven, a
Turkish journalist and a member of Friends of Hrant, a group calling
for a full investigation against policemen, military officers and
members of the intelligence services.
“Officers knew this group was going to kill Hrant, they even knew
the type of weapon that was going to be used,” Ms Guven said this week.
Turkish nationalists hated Mr Dink because he openly said the killing
of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in the final years of the
Ottoman Empire amounted to genocide, a term Turkey rejects.
Suspicions that there was support or at least sympathy within the
security forces for the perpetrators arose after Samast’s arrest on
January 20, 2007, when policemen posed for souvenir pictures with Mr
Dink’s murderer.
In 2010, the European Court of Human Rights in France ruled Turkey
was guilty of failing to protect Mr Dink’s life.
Police in Istanbul and the north-east city of Trabzon, the home
of the suspected killers, “had been informed of the likelihood of
an assassination attempt and even of the identity of the suspected
instigators”, the court said.
After the crime, authorities refused to allow investigations against
high-ranking officers of the security forces, the judges said.
The verdict has not changed the situation in court in Istanbul,
critics said.
“The people who would conduct the investigation are the very ones
who should be investigated,” Ms Guven said.
Friends of Hrant, campaigning under the slogan “This trial must not
end this way”, has called on its supporters to gather in front of the
court in Istanbul today to protest against what it sees as attempts
at a cover-up.
Samast, who was 17 when he killed Mr Dink outside the offices of Mr
Dink’s Armenian newspaper, Agos, was sentenced to almost 23 years
in prison. According to Turkish rules on prison terms, he is to be
released in about 10 years.
In the separate trial against Samast’s suspected accomplices before
Istanbul’s High Criminal Court, the prosecution has demanded life
sentences for Yasin Hayal, a member of the militant nationalist scene
in Trabzon, and Erhat Tuncel, a former police informer from the Black
Sea city.
Summing up its case last September, the prosecution said the murder
was the work of a local cell of Ergenekon, a suspected network of
nationalists accused by prosecutors in another ongoing trial of
plotting to overthrow the government by provoking a military coup
with the help of assassinations and other terrorist acts.
But prosecutors did not go into details of the Ergenekon connection.
Critics accused the prosecution of trying to end the trial prematurely.
“We have always said that the slowness with which this trial was
proceeding was unbearable, but hastily concluding the prosecution
case will not help the truth to emerge,” Reporters Without Borders,
an international group campaigning for media freedom, said last year.
Friends of Hrant have said the state involvement in the murder was
obvious.
“It is clear that the ones responsible for Hrant’s death and for an
organised effort to hide the truth are state officials,” the group
said on its website.
Ms Guven said court proceedings, which started in February 2008,
showed clear signs of reluctance by the state to get to the bottom
of the case.
“The trial has been dragging on for so long because there are problems
with gathering evidence,” she said. “Sometimes authorities do not
want to supply the court with evidence.”
One example, cited by Ms Guven and other critics, is that Turkey’s
telecommunication authorities refused for months to give the court
mobile phone records from the time and place where Mr Dink was shot.
The records were sent to the court last year only after several
demands by the judge.
Other evidence that Mr Tuncel and Mr Hayal, the men accused of
organising the murder with Samast, worked with members of the security
apparatus, has also not been examined properly, critics say.
Mr Hayal’s father, Bahattin Hayal, said last November that an unnamed
official had congratulated him on his son after the murder and told
him that Yasin worked for the state.
There have been signs that the suspects are confident of their early
release.
In one court hearing, Samast said he would get even with Mr Dink’s
family after the trial.
“Just wait, I’ll see you in five years,” he told family members in
the courtroom.
Ms Guven said she was concerned the trial would end without shedding
light on the true dimension of the conspiracy behind Mr Dink’s death.
“The people on trial now will go to prison for a few years and may
even expect a hero’s welcome after their release,” she said.
The militant nationalist mentality that led to Mr Dink’s death was
still alive in Turkey five years after the murder, she added.
“As long as we do not see the whole picture and as long as that
mentality is not clearly condemned, there is a danger that things
like that could happen again,” she said.