Die Folgen eines Mordes
Assassination of Hrant Dink

08:00 Min., ORF - weltjournal 7.2.2007

Hrant Dink, the Armenian-Turkish journalist and publisher of the weekly newspaper Agos, became a victim of an assassination in January 2007. The 53-year-old editor was shot on a street in Istanbul when leaving his office.

Last fall Hrant Dink spoke already during an interview not published before his death about threats. When the threats were directed also against his family, he went to the public prosecutor's office, but it did not happen anything. He complained of the indifference shown by Turkish authorities to provide him with personal security

Today we know, the police knew already since one year of the actual assassination plots. Dink spoke openly about the massacres on Armenians in the years 1915 and 1916 and used himself for a reconciliation of Armenians and Turks. He was therefore violently met with hostility by Turkish nationalists. They complained against him because of “insulting Turkishness”.

Many were accused under this paragraph, for example Orhan Pamuk distinguished recently with the Nobel Prize for literature; all were acquitted, but Hrant Dink was condemned last summer to six months detention on probation. This surely made him a target of fanatic nationalists.

On the funeral ten thousands declared solidarity with Hrant Dink: we all are Armenians stood on boards.

The Turkish media report in the meantime openly on black sheep under the security forces. The television channel TGRT broadcasted a video of the presumed Dink murderer Ogün Samast after his arrest. On the video Samast poses for a memory video between smiling security forces; he unfolds the Turkish flag and holds it before his chest.

Sabine Küper and Thomas Büsch spoke with the Dink friend and chairman of the foundation for Turkish history Halim Bulutoglu and the author and attorney Fethiye Çetin about the changing situation in Turkey after the murder of Hrant Dink.