By ORHAN KEMAL CENGİZ,
After Hrant Dink was murdered, gendarmerie and police officers took turns taking photos with his murderer, Ogün Samast, at the offices of Samsun’s counterterrorism unit. They took these photos in front of a calendar on which Atatürk’s words, “The homeland cannot be abandoned,” appeared on a Turkish flag.
When Samast was taken into Bayrampaşa Prison after he was arrested, there was a very warm welcome for him. According to eyewitnesses, gendarmerie officers and prison guards lined up in the hall and they all applauded Samast.
After Samast was arrested, all of a sudden some young football fans started to wear white berets to show their sympathy with the murderer, who was wearing a white beret when he killed Hrant.
On Jan. 19, 2014, when the last commemoration of the Dink murder took place, some police officers were wearing white berets on the streets as the procession passed by even though the weather was 18 degrees Celsius.
Do you know who Turkey’s first ombudsman was? He was a member of the chamber of the criminal court that approved Hrant Dink’s sentence of insulting Turkishness, under Article 301 of the Constitution. I assume you can recall how Hrant was convicted. Some of his words were cherry-picked from a long series of articles he wrote mainly for diaspora Armenians. And these carefully tweezed words were represented as insults to Turkey. It was so obvious that his remarks had nothing to do with Turks; he was addressing Armenians.
Dink called on Armenians to get rid of their hatred towards Turks, and so on. Even though legal experts and even some prosecutors pointed out that his words said nothing to insult Turks, the appeals court “misunderstood” them.
When Hrant’s murderer was caught, he referred to these “misunderstood” words and said he had punished Hrant for insulting Turkishness.
Do you know who brought this case against Hrant? The complaint was made by a very famous lawyer who was conducting a psychological lynching campaign against religious minorities and intellectuals. Lawyer Kemal Kerinçsiz was later on arrested for his connection to the Ergenekon organization. However, he is free now, like all the Ergenekon suspects.
Before Hrant was killed, intelligence reports arrived at the İstanbul Police Department stating that Samast had traveled from Trabzon to İstanbul with the intention of killing Hrant. None of the officers acted on this intelligence.
You see, when we talk about Hrant Dink’s murder we are talking about a huge subject. There are hit men, provocateurs, people who aided and abetted murderers, officers who did nothing to prevent a murder they knew was coming and so on. At the same time, there is a culture and atmosphere of hatred towards Armenians that is fed by the denial of past atrocities.
Today, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) wants us to believe that they will solve this murder by arresting a few police officers, and somehow these police officers are said to be associated with the Gülen movement, with which this government has been in a huge war for quite some time.
They are the ones who chose this ombudsman, who freed the Ergenekon suspects and who promoted the former governor of İstanbul to the post of interior minister. And they are the ones who continue to deny what happened to Armenians in 1915.
And they want us to believe that they will solve this murder by making a few apologies!