EMRE USLU
e.uslu@todayszaman.com
The murder of Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink is the most scandalous, mysterious murder; it was committed during the term of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), and the assailants were apprehended. However, these assailants were being used at the time they committed the murder and are still being used.
Those who used them in the past to kill Dink, whom they saw as their enemy, are now using them to attack new enemies. One of the assailants hurled accusations at police officers as soon as he was released from prison. Those who gave him the gun to slay Dink have apparently given him a petition of complaint against several police officers and have sent him to the prosecutor.
There are odd details in the statement that the murderer gave to the prosecutor. For instance, he gave the prosecutor the badge numbers of five police officers, claiming that these police officers had looked up the telephone number of Yasin Hayal, who was allegedly involved in the murder of Dink, in the police department’s computer system five minutes after the murder. How he got these numbers is questionable, because he was in prison for the last few years.
Apparently his masters who sent him to attack Christian missionaries and Armenians — whom they stigmatized as enemies — are preparing to send him to attack their new enemy, the Hizmet movement. Or do you believe that a murderer who has been silent out of fear for many years in prison learned the badge numbers of five police officers in his dreams and decided to be an informant?
Let me tell you why this “convenient” murderer has been ordered to talk: The government seeks to curry favor with the leftists and liberals in the fight it has been waging against the Hizmet movement. If it can manage to put the blame for Dink’s murder on those police officers whom it portrays as being affiliated with the movement, the government will be able to criminalize the movement and alienate the liberals who support the movement…
I have reiterated this countless times. The ruling AKP, prosecutors and Nedim Şener, who wrote a book about Dink’s murder, were all unwilling to investigate the murder in depth and with the intention of finding out the mastermind behind the murder. Everything was being done to cover up the connection of the murder to the state.
If you really want to find the real perpetrators of Dink’s murder, you must focus on the powers that are behind the murderers and not on the murderers themselves. But you won’t do this because those powers don’t want you to do so. There is a single document the court must investigate if it is really willing to investigate Dink’s murder and the killing of several Christian missionaries in Malatya: the decisions taken during the National Security Council (MGK) meetings held in 2004 about the activities of Christian missionaries and the Armenian issue.
Why did the Religious Affairs Directorate decide to take action against the missionary activities and sponsor a book about them? Why did certain media outlets start to churn out news stories and TV programs as though Turkey was snowed under with Christian minorities?
I know you won’t search for the answer because you have always been the state’s prosecutor or judge. But let me write it down: 2005 was the 90th anniversary of the Armenian tragedy. The state took certain measures at home and abroad in connection with it.
The sponsorship of a book about Christian missionaries by the Religious Affairs Directorate was one of these measures. Under the same project, media outlets kicked off campaigns to engineer public opinion and several experts on the Armenian issue mushroomed out of nowhere to make appearances on several TV channels.
Şener’s book about Dink’s murder is also part of those measures, as it serves to cover up the mastermind behind the murder. One day, the truth will come out…
Dink was sacrificed as a result of those measures. An independent court would not waste time on the claims made by a convenient murderer, but instead investigate who gave the order to that murderer.
Some may say “Dink was murdered in 2006,” but I would like to draw attention to the killing of three Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) members in Paris in 2013. The state made a decision in 2012 to act against the PKK leaders. In the wake of the Uludere tragedy — in which 34 civilians were mistaken for terrorists and killed by military airstrikes in Şırnak’s Uludere district in 2011 due to false intelligence — the state adopted a new concept, but old “measures” were kept in force. The state initiated peace talks with the PKK, but at the same time, it also killed off the PKK leaders. This is what we get from the media reports that appeared in the wake of the Paris killings.
As a result of such measures, Murat Karayılan, the PKK military wing’s number one, was captured in Iran. A very high-ranking intelligence officer had said: “We cannot go and capture Karayılan using the intelligence from the US while the state was negotiating with the PKK. Therefore, we gave the information to the Iranians, who caught him.”
This is the way the state operates. It worked in the same manner in Dink’s murder and with the Paris killings. My intention is not to protect the police or military officers who should be held responsible for the murder. My suggestion is that all police and military officers who were in office at that time, politicians and those who took those decisions at the MGK should be tried by a real and independent court and not with fake investigations, fake indictments and fake courts. This could be the Constitutional Court or an international court, but it must be a real court to punish the real perpetrators. But Turkey cannot do this because everyone knows the real perpetrators. This murder cannot be resolved but is instead covered up by fake courts, fake indictments, expedient murderers and fake books.
Dink’s murder was one of the results of the measures the state took in 2005, i.e., on the 90th anniversary of the Armenian issue. 2015 is the 100th anniversary of this issue and Turkey is taking new measures. Perhaps, the first of these measures is to make that convenient murderer talk…