Many thousands rally in Istanbul to remember Hrant Dink

by Emil Sanamyan

Published: Thursday January 19, 2012

People march in Istanbul on Jan. 19. Uygar Gultekin / Photolure

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Remembering Hrant Dink: a year later

Washington - In scenes reminiscent to five years ago, images from Istanbul showed tens of thousands turning out on the anniversary of Hrant Dink's assassination on January 19. Marchers once again carried signs "We are all Hrants! We are all Armenians!" in both Armenian and Turkish, as they walked from the city's central Taksim square to the Agos newspaper office in Sisli neighborhood.

The commemoration came two days after an Istanbul court gave a life sentence to a single person for organizing the Agos editor's murder in 2007. A number of other suspects, including several state security officials, were either not charged or cleared on grounds of insufficient evidence.

Yasin Hayal, who was 25 at the time of the crime, was found guilty of recruiting a fellow Trabzon resident 17-year-old Ogun Samast to kill Dink and supplying him with a handgun and money. Samast was earlier sentenced to 23 years in prison, receiving a lighter sentence as a juvenile.

Hayal admitted the charges, but remained non-repentant making public threats against members of the Dink family and Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk.

Most Turkish media and opinion makers criticized the inquiry as insufficient and Dink's family issued a statement calling it a "cover-up."

Even the judge who issued the verdict told Vatan newspaper that he believed there was a wider conspiracy to assassinate Dink but defended his decision by citing lack of evidence presented in the state prosecutors' case.

Both Prime Minister Recep Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul acknowledged public dissatisfaction but claimed that an inquiry into Dink's death would not end with Hayal's sentencing.

"There is the appeals process and it may lead to an entirely different outcome," the RFE/RL Armenian service quoted Erdogan as telling Turkey's Kanal D.

Fethiye Cetin, a lawyer for Dink's family, told reporters that they would seek additional legal avenues to establish which other individuals and groups were involved in the assassination plot.

Dink was threatened by state officials and faced charges of "insulting Turkish identity" that stemmed from his writings on the Armenian Genocide and its consequences.  

Political context 

In recent years Turkish politics have been dominated by an active confrontation between the Islamist-leaning Erdogan government and the secular military establishment that had effectively run the country since the establishment of the republic.

The government-controlled police force has arrested hundreds of current and former military officers, including most recently a former armed forces chief of staff, on charges of plotting against the government and seeking to destabilize the country through attacks and assassinations involving ultra-nationalists and organized crime groups.

Most public suspicion has focused on links between this so-called "deep state" and Dink's assassination. But so far just two officers of the Gendarmerie (an internal security force that is part of the military) were convicted for dereliction of duty. In a ruling last July, a Trabzon court sentenced Col. Ali Oz and Capt. Metin Yildiz to six months in prison on charges they ignored intelligence about the plot to kill Dink.

In a diplomatic cable sent on the second anniversary of the assassination, and made public by Wikileaks, then U.S. Consul General in Istanbul Sharon Weiner commented that "there is little doubt that the security forces of Trabzon and Istanbul failed to protect Hrant Dink in light of the information they had received months prior to his murder. Without a unified case, however, it will be difficult to find those officers with prior information guilty of negligence or complicity.

"While a conviction of the accused murderers would be well-received, the [Dink] family and its lawyers seek to expose the involvement of the "deep state" - an objective that may take decades even assuming the "deep state" were involved."