Although Hrant Dink has long been buried, his trial for insulting Turkishness continues. In a scene that would not be amiss in Orhan Pamuk’s novel “Snow,” inside the courtroom were a posse of 14 ultranationalist lawyers including, according to newspaper reports, Kemal Keinçsiz. They were there representing the “injured parties” -- presumably in this case, the Turkish nation. These were the same group who staged rallies outside the trials which Mr. Dink was able to attend because he was still alive, as well as other Turkish journalists and writers. It was the ugly and intimidating nature of these demonstrations now widely credited with having created the atmosphere in which a teenager from a Black Sea town was able to confuse murder with patriotic obligation. In a blinding moment of common sense, the judge denied the 14 any right of intervention.It is hard to understand what motivated those people to troop down to the courtroom to stomp on a dead man’s grave. Even those who somehow felt offended by Hrant Dink’s outspokenness must surely have looked away in embarrassed silence. That, I suppose, is the reckoning of the prime minister, Tayyip Erdoğan, who appears to have calculated that those who claim to be the sole guardians of the public good may have trampled over the bounds of decency, let alone good taste.
In pronouncements these last few days, Mr. Erdoğan has launched attacks on the far right for luxuriating in a self-imposed sense of isolation. There was, he told his supporters, good nationalism and then there was Brand X -- or what he described as “negative nationalism,” something that was bigoted and racist. It was this bad nationalism that was the truly divisive force in Turkish society and which served to discredit the efforts of decent citizens. It was also the ethos of self-serving cliques hiding within state institutions who saw nothing wrong with manipulating common criminals to do their work. This was the “deep state” and he was determined to “throw a spoke” in the deep state’s wheels.
The prime minister’s remarks have already attracted criticism. He has, after all, been in charge of Turkey’s affairs for over four years and it might seem pious for him to be criticizing rogue state institutions outside of his control. Why has he waited until a tragedy to address what appears to be institutionalized racism inside of the police? Even so, it would be wrong to underestimate the importance of his remarks, particularly in what is now an election year.
The prime minister witnessed with the rest of Turkey the reaction to Mr. Dink’s assassination. In particular, he will have watched the spontaneous march of -- was it 100,000 people? -- in Istanbul alongside the funeral cortege, all of them determined to deny the Brand X nationalism any sense of triumph. There have been attempts by the far right to reclaim the public’s attention. Columnists in the newspapers are back to their old tricks of identifying enemies of the state, mobs at football matches proudly proclaim themselves to be politically incorrect and ultra-nationalist lawyers still turn up, uninvited, in court. However a far more astute political analyst than myself, namely Tayyip Erdogan, has clearly calculated that their political influence is on the wane. Accordingly he is moving his own party closer to the center.
This is not what I would have predicted even a month ago. Then, the government appeared to be flailing in the wind, stumbling not to be outflanked on issues dear to the ultra-nationalist cause like Kirkuk or the genocide resolution before the US Congress. Now the government appears to have found a cause on which it can stand its ground -- that those espousing an extreme version of the nationalist cause are doing so in a way that offends the general public’s sense of what is decent and what is right.
It appears to have scored a hit. Devlet Bahçeli, leader of the far-right Nationalist Movement Party has already accused the prime minister of being “pathologically ill” for attacking the sacred cow of Turkish nationalism and said that he belonged in the same box as Abdullah Öcalan, leader of the PKK. Mr. Bahçeli, also no political lightweight, is clearly dying to fight the coming election on who can wave the flag the most.
At least when the election comes, it will be the electorate, not the gunmen, who decide.
