50,000 join the funeral procession for murdered journalist
TENS of thousands of people marched through Istanbul yesterday in a funeral procession for Hrant Dink, a Turkish-Armenian journalist whose murder has sparked an outcry over rising nationalism in Turkey.
Up to 50,000 mourners gathered at the office of the Agos newspaper, where Mr Dink was shot dead last Friday. A 17-year-old school drop-out has been accused of shooting him.
“You have left your loved ones, your children and your grandchildren, but you did not leave your country,” his wife, Rakel, told the crowd before they set off on a five-mile walk to Meryem Ana Church.
“Whoever the killer was, I know he was once a baby,” she added, her voice breaking. “Unless we can question how this baby grew into a murderer, we cannot achieve anything.”
Mr Dink was being prosecuted for criticising the Turkish state’s refusal to discuss openly what happened to at least 600,000 Ottoman Armenians killed in 1915. Ogun Samast, who was arrested over Mr Dink’s death on Saturday, reportedly told interrogators that the journalist’s writings had provoked him to commit murder.
Although Mr Dink considered the events of 1915 genocide, he always said his aim was to help reconcile Armenians and Turks.
To an extent, he achieved that in death, as officials from Armenia were invited to join their Turkish counterparts for the funeral, despite the neighbouring countries having no diplomatic ties. Turkey’s government has also signalled its willingness to abolish article 301 of its criminal code, which makes “insulting Turkishness” a crime.
While ultra-nationalists have used the article against writers such as the Nobel prize-winner Orhan Pamuk, Mr Dink was the first Turkish citizen to be convicted under it. He received a six-month suspended sentence in 2005, in a court decision widely viewed as a travesty of justice.
In the last editorial he wrote, Mr Dink referred to that trial as a turning point in his life, saying that because of it “a significant segment of the population … view [me] as someone ‘insulting Turkishness’.”
The mood among the marchers, many of whom carried black placards reading “301 is the murderer”, was sombre. “If we can at least get the government to get rid of this law, that will be a start,” said Oktay Durukan, as the procession wound down through a road tunnel.
He looked up to where hundreds of onlookers, their faces featureless, stared down from a flyover. Only one was clapping in time with the marchers. “And I’d like to think the BBC was right this morning when it said Turkey was mourning Hrant Dink, but I’m not sure it’s true,” he added.
Waiting with her family for Mr Dink’s body to be transferred from the church to the shared Greek and Armenian graveyard at Balikli, on the Marmara sea, an elegant woman of about 50 said that only outside pressure would keep the momentum going. “We’ve been calling for change in this country for decades and almost nothing has happened,” she said, declining to give her name.
“I don’t know”, countered Ege Edemer, 29. “Can you remember the last time so many people gathered in support of freedom of expression?” CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE
TURKEY is home to 60,000 ethnic Armenians, most of whom live in Istanbul. Caught between the demands of the Armenian diaspora for Turkey to admit genocide 90 years ago and Turkey’s official denials, most prefer not to talk about the events.
The Muslim Seljuk and Ottoman Empires ruled Armenian regions from the 11th century until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. The territory which is modern Armenia then became part of the Soviet Union.
During the First World War, thousands of Armenians were marched towards Syria and Mesopotamia (now Iraq), and Armenians say some 1.5 million died either in massacres or from hunger and thirst in the desert. Turkey insists there was no systematic campaign to annihilate the Armenians.