I was one of the first to arrive at the court in Beşiktaş. Only a couple of lawyers who represent the Dink family were there, sipping tea and chatting. A colleague invited me over to a cafe nearby.“Look at her,” he said. A tiny blonde was sitting in the corner. “She is the one who wants to marry Ogün Samast,” he told me. I knew of her. She had told the family of the man accused of murdering my Armenian colleague, Hrant Dink, this was all she wanted.
Again, only a few representatives from the media were present. A handful of columnists, reporters on their routine beat and close journalist friends of Hrant like me.
The publishers and editors of the big media groups -- such as Doğan, so “keen” on the “media freedom” in this country and others -- ignored, as they have consistently ever since his funeral and the trial, and failed to show up in solidarity of their murdered colleague, a publisher and editor himself. Yet, this absence is not a surprise; “media freedom” can mean so many things, depending on your interests.
There was an air of despair at the court. I have not met anyone who felt that the process was going anywhere at all. “It is all left to rot,” mumbled a lawyer. “Everything depends on whether the link between the gendarmerie and the murderers is truly focused on.”
The extended chat seemed to confirm my theory: If the prosecutors of the increasingly complex Ergenekon trial had concentrated on the murder cases in Malatya (against Christian missionaries), Catholic priest Santoro in Trabzon and the Dink assassination more than any others, and pressed the local security, in particular the gendarmerie over its involvement, the light would have been shed on how the vast network reasons and operates.
A key witness testified at the trial, to bring urgency to the matter I mentioned. Veysel Şahin, a teacher linked with a local association in Malatya, was detained there for a long time because some hand grenades found in his flat were identified as being from the same “family” as those found in Ergenekon-related raids. Şahin, charged in that case, had already given interesting information about murders and “organized” terror attempts in the Kurdish southeast.
Witness Şahin first tried to make it clear he “had not come all the way from Malatya to lie.” He said that he was “cooperating with the gendarmerie” and had met Yasin Hayal (a young man charged with “organizing the Dink murder by persuading Samast to kill Dink”) at gendarmerie headquarters in Trabzon, which he visited for some “intelligence gathering.”
“The mayor there told me that [Hayal] was a ‘patriotic guy' and that they were ‘in contact' with him,” he said. He mentioned the names of some officers in the ranks of colonel, mayor, etc.
This was explosive stuff; but the judge did not bother to ask any questions at all.
Is this trial going anywhere? The answer would be “yes” for those who see the bigger picture where the cold-blooded, hatred-filled calculation of it was made, and a “no” for those who believe that the murderer(s) and their aides are already caught and it is only those who did it, without outside interference.
The latter risks falling into an illusion.
When another witness was describing our heroic colleague's last moments before the murder, she said that Samast screamed, “Die hard, you Armenian!” before pulling the trigger. At that moment, two of the suspects were laughing. At another moment, Dink's brother, Orhan complains to the judge that Samast told him, “Wait another five years, before we meet!”
What makes the suspects so cynical and arrogant; the threats so open and real? The question is haunting.
Therefore, the aura of suspicion and the discouragement of any real sense of justice overwhelm, for the moment, everything else.
