Outspoken Editor Is Slain in Turkey
Voice for Armenians Was Put on Trial

By Benjamin Harvey
Associated Press
Saturday, January 20, 2007

ISTANBUL, Jan. 19 -- Hrant Dink, the most prominent voice of Turkey's shrinking Armenian community, a man who stood trial for speaking out against the mass killings of Armenians by Turks, was shot and killed in broad daylight Friday at the entrance to his newspaper's offices.

Just hours after a gunman shot the journalist twice in the head, thousands marched down the bustling street where he was slain, carrying posters of Dink and shouting slogans in favor of free expression.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan twice addressed the country to condemn the killing and vowed to capture those responsible. Late Friday, Istanbul's governor announced that three people had been arrested, CNN-Turk TV reported, without giving further details.

Many Turks assumed that the shooting was politically motivated, a reaction to Dink's public statements that the mass killings of Armenians during and after World War I constituted genocide. Nationalists see such statements as insults to the honor of Turks and as threats to national unity.

In Turkey, people speak freely at their own peril despite generations of Western-looking reformers. The Committee to Protect Journalists said that in the past 15 years, "18 Turkish journalists have been killed for their work, many of them murdered, making it the eighth deadliest country in the world for journalists."

Dink, 52, was one of dozens of journalists, writers and academics who have been tried for expressing themselves, most under Article 301 of the penal code, which criminalizes insults to Turkey, its government or the national character.

In a rare conviction, Dink was found guilty in October 2005 of trying to influence the judiciary after his newspaper ran stories criticizing Article 301. He was given a six-month suspended sentence.

Dink, a Turkish citizen of Armenian descent who edited the bilingual Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos, apparently sensed his life was in danger.

"My computer's memory is loaded with sentences full of anger and threats," Dink wrote Jan. 10 in his last newspaper column. "I am just like a pigeon. . . . I look around to my left and right, in front and behind me as much as it does. My head is just as active."

Dink, who is survived by his wife, Rakel, and their three children, was charming, soft-spoken and eloquent. He was respected and beloved by many Turks who disagreed with his views but admired his courage in stating them.

He was hated by just as many.

In the past few years, Turks had come to know Dink well, mostly because of the highly publicized legal cases opened against him, in which he faced jail time for talking of genocide.

In late 2005, Turks saw Dink lose his composure, crying on national television as he discussed his latest court case and what it was like to live among people who hated him and what he stood for.

"I'm living together with Turks in this country," he said in an October interview as he contemplated his trial. "I don't think I could live with an identity of having insulted them in this country. . . . If I am unable to come up with a positive result, it will be honorable for me to leave this country."

Turkey's relationship with its Armenian community has long been fraught with tension, controversy and painful memories of a brutal past. Much of Turkey's once-sizable Armenian population was killed or driven out beginning around 1915 in what an increasing number of countries are recognizing as the first genocide of the 20th century.

Turks vehemently deny that their ancestors committed genocide, however, and saying so is deemed tantamount to treason. In the 1970s and '80s, tensions were further inflamed as Armenians seeking revenge killed dozens of Turkish diplomats .

Turkey, which is 99 percent Muslim, and Armenia, which claims to be the first country to have officially adopted Christianity, share a border. But it is closed, and the two countries have no formal diplomatic relations.

The Washington-based Armenian Assembly of America issued a statement Friday calling Dink "one of the most prominent Armenian voices in Turkey."

"Hrant Dink was a man of principle, convictions and courage, and the Armenian community mourns him worldwide as a loss for humanity," the group's executive director, Bryan Ardouny, said in an interview.

Ardouny, who had met Dink in October when he addressed the Armenian-American Bar Association, described the slain journalist as an "outspoken activist who was a living bridge between Armenians and Turks in Turkey, a country where 70,000 Armenians still live and remain vulnerable and unprotected even 92 years after the Armenian genocide."

Washington Post correspondent Nora Boustany in Washington contributed to this report.