[Marxism] Hrant Dink assassinated

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(Hrant Dink was featured prominently in the documentary "Screamers" that I 
reviewed here: 
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2006/11/09/insulting-turkishness/)

NY Times, January 19, 2007
Editor of Turkey?s Armenian Paper Is Killed
By SEBNEM ARSU

ISTANBUL, Jan. 19 ? The editor of Turkey?s only Armenian-language newspaper 
was assassinated today on an Istanbul street.

The editor, Hrant Dink, 53, was convicted last year of insulting the 
Turkish state and identity because of comments he made about the mass 
deaths of ethnic Armenians before World War I in what is now Turkey ? 
events that Armenians and many foreign historians say was genocide by the 
Ottoman army, but the Turkish government denies took place.

Mr. Dink also criticized ethnic Armenians abroad for trying to make 
official Turkish recognition of those events a precondition for Turkish 
entry into the European Union, but that stance attracted less attention.

Mr. Dink was leaving the office of his newspaper, Agos, in the Sisli 
district of Istanbul early in the afternoon when he was gunned down in 
front of the building by one or more assailants, the semiofficial Anatolian 
News Agency reported today.

Nuran Agan, 47, a colleague of Mr. Dink?s at Agos, sounded shaken as she 
described an ordinary day before he left the office. ?I heard three 
gunshots after he left, but never associated it with him,? Ms. Agan said.

When she rushed downstairs to find out what had happened, she saw Mr. Dink 
lying in a pool of blood on the ground with a bullet wound in the back of 
his head.

?He received lots of threats, and had requested protection.? Ms. Agan said.

Television images broadcast live from the scene of the incident showed 
large crowds gathered nearby behind police cordons, and Mr. Dink?s body 
lying on the ground, awaiting the arrival of ambulances delayed by the 
traffic clogging the busy commercial district around the office.

The Turkish Foreign Ministry issued a written statement condemning the 
attack. Later in the day, the Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said in 
a broadcast news conference that the killing was a direct attack on 
Turkey?s peace and stability.

?A bullet was fired at freedom of thought and democratic life in Turkey,? 
Mr. Erdogan said.

Witnesses told the police that they saw a young man in a white cap running 
away immediately after the shots were fired, according to a news report on 
NTV television. The police said they had detained two suspects in central 
Istanbul in connection with the attack.

Mr. Dink was prosecuted late last year under Article 301 of the Turkish 
penal code, a controversial provision that makes negative remarks about 
Turkishness or the Turkish state a crime. It has been used to try several 
prominent intellectuals in recent years, and has been criticized by the 
European Union as an infringement on free speech.

An Istanbul court interpreted several comments Mr. Dink made as an insult 
to the Turkish identity. It sentenced him to six months in jail and then 
suspended the sentence.

In a recent article in Agos, Mr. Dink complained that extreme nationalists 
opponents were casting him as an enemy of Turks, and said the increasing 
threats against him were weighing on him.

?I do not know how real these threats are, but what?s really unbearable is 
the psychological torture that I?m living in,? he wrote. ?Like a pigeon, 
turning my head up and down, left and right, my head quickly rotating.?

Haluk Sahin, a columnist for Radikal, a newspaper that has strongly 
supported Mr. Dink?s legal struggle as an intellectual, said that Turkey 
had been hit right in the heart by his murder.

?Those who wanted to harm Turkey couldn?t have chosen a better target,? Mr. 
Sahin said. ?As opposed to other killings in the past, Turkish public 
reaction against this murder will show us where Turkey stands in the world.?

Shortly after the shooting, crowds gathered in front of Mr. Dink?s office 
and chanted ?Shoulder to shoulder against fascism? and ?We are all Hrant, 
we are all Armenians.?

NTV reported that the police are reviewing surveillance-camera videotapes 
from retail shops in the block in the hope that they recorded images of the 
suspects described by witnesses.

--

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