Thoughts on Hrant Dink’s assassination
On Friday afternoon, the Turkish-Armenian writer, intellectual, and journalist Hrant Dink was assasinated. Thanks to an extensive network of public cameras the suspect’s identity was quickly identified. Yesterday, the suspect’s father identified his son from the multitude of TV screens showing the footage extensively and provided his name to the security forces. The 17-year-old suspect is an unemployed secondary school graduate from the Black Sea city of Trabzon. He was captured in another Black Sea city, Samsun, on his way to his native city. He was flown with a private airplane to Istanbul for interrogation. Hence, he was captured after 32 hours of the murder. Details of his motives, links and political orientation are unclear.
Tuesday there will be a big public ceremony for his funeral. Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to take part in the ceremony in Istanbul. Turkey continues to be shocked with the news of such a prominent intellectual’s death. During the last four years we thought Turkey had finally opened up, became a transparent country, and was on its way to consolidate the democratic gains it achieved. The murder of Hrant reminded all of us of the turbulent days in the 1970s – an era we all thought was left behind.
There are some who interpret the murder as possibly derailing Turkey’s EU ambitions, others believe that we may see similar incidents to destabilize the country and oust the Muslim Democrat AKP. Who knows, but it is not too much of the realm that similar incidents may take place in the run-up to the presidential election.
If any good may come out of this, if one can put it this way, is the widespread solidarity and determination with which to counter such an atrocious act. Leftists, rightisits, secularists, Islamists, moderates or not, all corners of the Turkish media, government, opposition, and public condemned the murder in the strongest terms. I hope this incident will also finally provide the pressure to abolish Article 301 of the penal code, which provided the basis for this frenzy to develop in the first place.
All in all, we are all saddened and impoverished by what happened. This is a very sad day for Turks and Turkey. We are simply at a loss over what to say and how to explain what happened. My only hope is that his murder will remind all of us how urgent it is to further reform, democratize, and anchor Turkey into the West.
May Hrant’s soul rest in peace.