The recent rise of racism in Turkey claimed its most prominent victim last week, with the murder of a well-known Turkish-Armenian journalist. Gareth Evans reports from Istanbul Last Friday Hrant Dink, the 52 year-old editor of the bilingual newspaper Agos, was shot and killed on the street outside the building where he worked. In recent years Dink had become a figure of hate for Turkey's ultranationalist right. His attempts to build bridges, both inside Turkey and between Turks and the citizens of the Republic of Armenia, had frequently brought him into conflict with the Turkish state and Turkish nationalists, particularly over the ethnic cleansing of the Armenians who were under Ottoman rule during the First World War. At least 600,000 -- and probably many more -- Armenians died; some in organised massacres, and others from hunger and disease after being driven into the Syrian desert without food or water. Most of the international community already recognises what happened as the first genocide of the 20th century. But, despite a wealth of documentary, photographic and eyewitness- evidence, the Turkish state not only denies that a genocide occurred, but frequently prosecutes anyone who suggests that it happened under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, which makes it a crime to "insult Turkishness". Armenians, both in the Republic of Armenia and amongst the diaspora in Europe and the US, have long argued that Turkey must recognise the genocide, before they can establish any form of dialogue. In the 1970s and 1980s, a groups calling itself the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA) killed dozens of Turkish diplomats in an attempt to force Turkey to acknowledge what happened. In February 2004, Dink wrote a series of articles in Agos calling for dialogue without any preconditions. He insisted that Armenians should "cleanse their blood of the poison of the genocide' and sit down and talk with Turks. His comments triggered a furious reaction from many in the Armenian diaspora, almost all of whom are descended from survivors of the massacres and deportations. But in Turkey, the mere mention of the word genocide led to Dink being prosecuted under Article 301. In October 2005, an Istanbul court sentenced Dink to a six months suspended jail sentence. In July last year, the conviction was upheld by an appeals court. At the time of his death, Dink was also facing charges of trying to influence the judiciary, because of the public comments he made about his trial. "If a defendant cannot influence the judiciary, then who can?" he asked in an article he wrote in Agos. Although many Turks have also been prosecuted under Article 301, few have been convicted; and none have been murdered. Over the last two years, there has been a rapid rise in racist nationalism in Turkey, which has frequently boiled over into violence both against Kurds and against members of Turkey's dwindling non-Muslim minorities. The violence has been fuelled by racist websites, inflammatory articles in the nationalist press, and popular television series such as Valley of the Wolves. The latter not only preaches chauvinistic nationalism, but advocates lynching and extrajudicial violence, in order to defend what is termed "national honour". When a cinema version of Valley of the Wolves was released early last year, it swiftly broke all box office records. The film was bankrolled by Hurriyet newspaper, Turkey's biggest selling daily which, under its masthead, carries the message "Turkey for the Turks." No one in Turkey ever refers to members of the country's non-Muslim minorities as "Turks". While they are in theory equal before they law, in practice suffer considerable discrimination. Such minorities are actually regarded as resident aliens, rather than fully- fledged citizens. Over the past two years there has also been a marked increase in the attacks and threats launched against non-Muslim minorities. In September 2005, a photographic exhibition marking the 50th anniversary of a government-instigated pogrom against the Greeks of Istanbul in 1955 was stormed and trashed by Turkish ultranationalists. Nor has the violence been confined to Turkish citizens. In February 2006, an ultranationalist youth stabbed to death an Italian Catholic priest in the eastern Black Sea port of Trabzon. In his article in Agos, which was published on the day of his death, Dink recorded how the threats against his life had recently intensified and become more specific. He said that that he had reported them to the Public Prosecutor in Istanbul, but nothing had been done. "I'm making a note of that here," he wrote, "just in case." Dink was shot three times in the back of the head at 3 pm on Friday afternoon, as he returned to his newspaper after a visit to the bank. His body lay on the sidewalk for two hours while police forensic teams collected evidence. Standing on a first floor balcony above the corpse of her father, his daughter Sera screamed at the crowd below: "They have killed my father. Is his blood any cleaner now?" On Friday evening, around 8,000 Turks and Armenians staged a candlelit procession in Istanbul to protest Dink's killing. But the ultranationalists were already trying to shift the blame, inventing improbable conspiracies theories and claiming that Dink had probably been killed by Armenians. Even Prime Minster Tayyip Erdogan spoke of "dark hands" being behind the murder, in an attempt to destabilise the country. The truth became clear on Saturday when police released footage from a nearby security camera, showing a youth running away from the scene of the killing. He was soon identified as Ogun Samast, an unemployed, poorly-educated 17 year-old from Trabzon. Later, on Saturday, he was arrested on an overnight bus from Istanbul to Trabzon. He still had the murder weapon in a bag by his side. It later emerged that he had been a member of an ultranationalist gang in Trabzon. The suspicion is that he had been chosen to carry out the killing because as a minor, under Turkish law, he can only receive a light jail sentence. When he was taken into custody, Samast showed no remorse, and proudly confessed to the murder. "I couldn't stomach what he was saying and writing about Turks," he told the police. "I don't regret it. I would do the same again." Dink's murder sent a shock wave across the country. No one doubts that the killing has dealt another blow to Turkey's already battered international reputation, and that it will make it even more difficult for the country to realise its ambitions of joining the EU. But most Turks are still in denial about the environment of racist hatred and intolerance which, if it has not actually pulled the trigger, has fed the prejudices of those responsible for Dink's death. In the daily Radikal, one of the few Turkish newspapers to acknowledge the seriousness of the problem, editor Ismet Berkan wrote: "Don't let anybody imagine that it was just a 17 year-old-boy who killed him. Who was it who created this atmosphere?" He angrily dismissed the conspiracy theories and attempts to shift the blame and place responsibility for Dink's murder on anything else but a murderous racism. "Dink was killed because he was an Armenian," Berkan asserted.
