Hrant Dink's Son Sentenced for "Denigrating Turkishness"

Arat Dink, the son of the Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink who was assassinated in January of this year, has been given a one-year suspended sentence for reprinting an interview his father in which he spoke of the Armenian genocide. A commentary by Aydin Engin

Had Hrant Dink, editor-in-chief of the newspaper Agos, not been gunned down, he would also have been given a prison sentence in this court case. The reason being that according to the Turkish Penal Code, if an article is printed in a newspaper without the name of the author or the journalist who wrote it, the executive editor of the newspaper, the owner of the newspaper or his/her deputy, and the editor responsible for the article can be brought to court.

Hrant Dink's assassination spared him this penalty. As the responsible editor and the representative of Agos Limited respectively, Arat Dink and Serkis Seropyan have to face the charges because they are still alive.

There is an old Turkish saying that can suitably be applied to the relevant paragraph in the Turkish Penal Code: "the blind man takes what he can get!"

Arat Dink and Serkis Seropyan will not be sent to prison; their sentence has been suspended. If, however, they commit the same "offence" again, they will have to serve their suspended sentence. What this means is that Arat Dink, Serkis Seropyan, and the authors who write for Agos will have to weigh their every word – a tightrope walk if ever there was one. But will this forced self-censure actually work?

Outlook

The sentence handed down on Arat Dink and Serkis Seropyan will be overturned by Turkey's High Court of Appeals and the two will be acquitted. Everyone knows this, even those who are not particularly well versed in legal matters, because the sentence refers to "statements that lead to an offence." This is a reference to something Hrant Dink said in an interview with Reuters:

"Of course I'm saying it's a genocide, because its consequences show it to be true and label it so. We see that people who had lived on this soil for 4,000 years were exterminated by these events."

The court considers the publication of this statement in Agos to be an offence, despite the fact that the very same statement had been published unchanged in both the visual and the printed media days before it was printed in Agos, namely in the daily newspapers Yeni Şafak, Radikal, Milliyet, Birgün, and Zaman and on the television channels CNN Türk, NTV, Kanal D, and Sky TV. It is worth noting that no charges have been brought against any of these newspapers or broadcasters.

In other words, what this sentence means is that while everyone is equal before the law, Armenian journalists are a little less equal than others. The High Court of Appeals will not subscribe to this kind of logic. This is not an idle hope, but a legal fact because the highest appellate court in the land has been known to reject this brand of logic in other similar cases in the past by overturning rulings made by courts of lower instance.

And that means…

Well, the fact that two journalists from the newspaper Agos have been convicted is not in itself all that important. In Turkey, this is only a small aspect of the "Armenian question", and, in my opinion, a very small one at that.

The roots of the problem go much deeper and are much more extensive.

Growing nationalism

Nationalism in Turkey is growing unchecked. This nationalism is being fed by frightening racist motives and bolstered by forces that have firmly ensconced themselves at state grass-roots level. A slogan that until now has been used by marginal fascist groups, is gradually becoming the mainstream opinion: "either you love this land or you leave it!"

The oldest peoples of Anatolia – the Armenians, the Kurds, the Jews, the Greeks, and the Syrian Christians – only have one choice: "either you love this land or you leave it!"

The car that brought Hrant Dink's murderer to court from his prison cell in October 2007 was smeared with the words "either you love this land or you leave it!"

A group of people who wanted to show their support for the murderer gathered in the court room and shouted "either you love this land or you leave it!"

Intellectuals and democrats who want to reappraise the events of 1915 in Turkey and put them in a historical context are accosted with the slogan "either you love this land or you leave it!"

The response to those who table proposals for peaceful solutions to the Cyprus question is terse and to the point: "either you love this land or you leave it!"

There is only one answer to those who say or write that it is impossible to solve the Kurdish question with guns and military measures: "either you love this land or you leave it!"

It has always been difficult to be a democrat in Turkey. Now it is even more difficult to stay a democrat …

Aydin Engin

Translated from the German by Aingeal Flanagan

Aydin Engin is a Turkish journalist and columnist for the Turkish-Armenian magazine Agos.

Qantara.de

Hrant Dink Murder Trial
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