ERDOGAN CALLED MINISTER A ‘SUSPECT’ IN DINK MURDER
TODAY’S ZAMAN
20 May 2011, Friday
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoðan referred to his former justice
minister, Cemil Cicek, who is currently a deputy prime minister, as a
“suspect” in the murder of Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in
2007, the slain journalist’s son has claimed.
Arat Dink, the son of Hrant Dink, who was assassinated outside the
office of his Agos newspaper in broad daylight on Jan. 17, 2007,
wrote an opinion column in the Taraf daily in which he shared the
above anecdote about the prime minister’s take on Cicek, who was the
justice minister at the time. Arat Dink wrote that in a conversation
he had with the prime minister a few days after the assassination, he
criticized the government’s role in turning Hrant Dink into a target
for nationalist groups, accusing it of being supportive of Justice
Minister Cicek, whose stance on the Armenians had encouraged Hrant
Dink’s murderers, and who on many occasions has attempted to associate
Turkey’s Armenian community with the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party
(PKK) and once called the participants in a conference on Armenian
genocide “backstabbers.” During that conversation, Arat Dink said,
“Shall we call him [Cicek] our ‘blood feud enemy’?” to which Erdoðan
allegedly replied, “Perhaps not that, but your ‘suspect’.”
In his lengthy opinion column, Arat Dink wrote in detail about a
strange invitation Hrant Dink had received from the governor’s office.
Dink had in fact written about this in Agos, saying that he was
summoned to the governor’s office, where two National Intelligence
Organization (MÝT) agents warned him to be “more careful” about
what he wrote. This was a week after Hrant Dink had suggested
that Sabiha Gokcen, an adopted daughter of the nation’s founder,
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, was of Armenian descent. Arat Dink said the
deputy governor, who was also present in the room during the meeting,
initially introduced the two MÝT officials as “his relatives.” During
the conversation, the deputy governor and the two MÝT officials,
whose real identity Hrant Dink would find out later, threatened Hrant
Dink, although they used expressions like “We know who you are, but
society may not,” or “We are concerned that society might not be able
to understand things like this.”
The Hrant Dink murder case has been fraught with controversy — as well
as some solid evidence — suggesting that many state officials, from
gendarmerie and police chiefs to bureaucrats, were either negligent
in their duties and ignored all the signs that an assassination plot
to kill the journalist was in the works, or, according to Dink family
lawyers’ claims, were in the know about the plot and did nothing,
either because they agreed with it or were part of it or did not
care. Other incidents and evidence that came up during the trial also
indicate that there were attempts to cover up the investigation. A
number of ultranationalist young men are currently standing trial as
suspects, including the hitman who was 17, legally a minor, at the
time of the murder. However, the masterminds of the assassination plot
remain unknown. Arat Dink’s opinion article provided detailed examples
pointing out the unwillingness and/or the ineptitude to prevent the
murder despite sound intelligence that it was in the offing, as well as
hints that the Erdoðan government was protective of the individuals who
seem to have, directly or indirectly, contributed to the murder and the
apparent attempts to obscure evidence in the case during the trial. In
addition to his allegations against Cicek, Arat Dink accused former
Ýstanbul Governor Muammer Guler of trivializing the murder and the
ensuing investigation, including a large number of quotes from Guler’s
testimony to a parliamentary commission investigating the Dink murder.
Arat Dink expressed both criticism and resentment at the government
for their support for Cicek, who is currently a state minister, and
Guler, who is currently running as a Justice and Development Party
(AK Party) first-place candidate in Mardin.
However, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoðan released a message denying
that he ever referred to Cicek as a suspect, adding that he strongly
condemned Arat Dink and the Taraf daily for the opinion article,
which he said was untruthful
From: A. Papazian