At the time of his death, Dink was already being hounded in the courts and in the streets. Before the shot was fired , he was the victim of what has become the best-known Turkish law in the world - article 301 which makes it offence to insult Turkishness. Turkish officialdom makes light of its own cowardice in refusing to repeal a piece of legislation it knows to be wrong. “No one is actually in jail as a result,” the argument runs. The law was used, however, to prosecute Hrant Dink and in so doing distort his words, expose him to public wrath and warn others to be silent.I first met him in this office several years ago at a time when the Turkish authorities were refusing to issue him a passport and I remember thinking that any sensible government would charter a plane to allow him to make his views known abroad. He was a true Turkish patriot and had no time for the grand gestures of foreign legislatures. To him, historical reconciliation was not the abstract project of political lobbies, nor a way of reinforcing the identity of an ethnic community abroad. Rather it was a practical way of being able to “love his neighbour”-the people in the street and in the apartment building next door. He believed that it was time that Moslem and Armenian Turk be able to look each other in the eye.
This was not the view of Ogün Samast, the teenager who shot him down, according to reports of his confession. “ I read on the internet news that he said ‘I’m a Turkish citizen not a Turk. And besides, Turkish blood is filthy.’ So I made up my mind to kill him…I’m not sorry. I’d do the same again.”
So, while I am able to grit my teeth, go to work in order to absorb the shock of loss of a life with and meaning, I feel strangely helpless reading about his assassin: the blind anger of a youth who said his Friday prayers then went off to kill. I flinch at the numb anguish of a father who recognised the closed-circuit photo of his son on the television news, then went to dial the police.
The implication of 17-year old Samast being tried in a juvenile court is that he is not fully responsible for his actions. And while he could still serve up to 19 years in jail, there are others quick to point the blame elsewhere. The rule of thumb appears to be that those who were quickest to question Hrant Dink’s patriotism while he was alive have been the fastest to attribute his death to some intricate foreign conspiracy designed to blacken Turkey’s name.
The prime minister too, has pointed to “dark hands” at work threatening Turkey’s democracy. And yet the simple truth is that Hrant Dink constantly battled for the most basic democratic right to speak his own mind. Much of the respect that has been lavished upon him by headline writers now was denied him while he was alive. He was prosecuted under a law designed to force his silence. And yet his former persecutors seem surprised that an impressionable youth, undereducated and under aged - arrested with only one lira and a few bullets in his pocket -- enforced that same silence in a more efficient way.
The one glimmer in all this is that there were others who “went to work” the moment Hrant Dink died. Not just journalists, but concerned citizens who gathered in front of his Agos newspaper first in their hundreds and then several thousands, insisting that the freedom to look your neighbour in the eye had to be kept alive.
