Yesterday in an unusually snowy night that covered the city with a white carpet, I walked into a same hall, to witness the end of the legal process, with much less hope than all the previous sittings I had attended.
The usual crowd had shrunk to a smaller group and only three of the accused (the total is 20) stood at the stand. The rest -- not arrested or later released -- were absent. As Erhan Tuncel, the last person to speak, took the floor for a final plea, it was easy see on the faces of the attendants that the last thing this trial would serve was justice.
In July 2011, the murderer, Ogün Samast was sentenced to 22 years of imprisonment, in a court for the underaged, after judges confirmed he was 17 when he pulled the trigger. Two main figures were left in the trial: Yasin Hayal, who the lawyers of the Dink family have charged as the person who “prepared” and “pushed” Samast to commit the murder, and Tuncel, an informant for local intelligence, who reported to the police and the National Intelligence Organization (MİT). It was important to see what these two would say, in order to properly understand the vast and complicated network that is strongly suspected to have been behind the heinous crime. “Strongly suspected” is the polite, frequently used description here.
Trial after trial we witnessed a watering-down of the essence of the case, which yesterday was reduced to these two men, who both felt that they had been used as scapegoats by all the others, who apparently knew of their activities, encouraged them, and stood by when the murder was committed. So yesterday one point became clear: in his long plea, filled with a gibberish that was at times reminiscent of the Mehmet Ali Ağca case, Tuncel accused Hayal of being part of a secret network -- meaning Ergenekon or another network linked to it -- and defended himself and his superiors in the police force.
We have already known of Hayal’s connections with the local military (gendarmerie); Tuncel helped confirm that the apparent cover-up of the important details in the Dink murder case was a result of a huge struggle between the military and the police, with a lot of loose ends left deliberately unaddressed. This also confirmed how politically sensitive the case has been, judging also by the fact that the upper echelons have managed to divide journalists to “cover” only one side of the story (we have many books on the murder; books that “fight” one another) and ignore the other side.
Most of us in the media who have covered similar political crimes are now fully convinced that the Dink trial turned into a process where all the shadowy power networks, also known as the deep state, were not only left undiscovered, but protected. The evidence in the files and the clues that were not scrutinized will never convict those three people. Historically, we have a machinery of murder that has operated with an ideology causing a deadly blend of ideas that undermine democratization, target non-Muslims, spread terror and invite the military to reaffirm its iron-fisted control over the society.
The successful attempt to limit the scope of the trial will shed light on the persistent pattern within the “deep state” to protect itself, and the choice of political authorities to “go along with it” can only explain the limitations of the power of the judiciary today. “Sacrificing justice” before a bureaucracy which protects criminal cells within, because the victim was Armenian is a great shame for Turkey.
What the “justice” left us with, at the end of this trial, was massive amount of acquittals of 16 people; practically releasing Erhan Tuncel from prison by a “punishment” that has nothing to do with the murder (disconnecting him from the Dink case altogether) and leaving the scene only with two people chosen as scapegoats.
The case may be technically over, but it will fail to satisfy consciences around the world. It only fuels the pursuit of justice.
