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EurasiaNet, NY
Jan 26 2007
TAMING TURKISH NATIONALISM A CHALLENGE IN ACCUSED KILLER'S HOMETOWN
Nicholas Birch 1/26/07
The murder last week of Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink continues
to make waves in Turkey, with the country's powerful Turkish
Industrialists' and Businessmen's Association joining in national and
international calls for the immediate scrapping of a law that makes
it a crime "to belittle Turkishness." But the increasingly aggressive
nationalism that characterizes Trabzon, the port city that is home to
Dink's suspected killer, suggests that the campaign to overturn the
law could face an uphill struggle.
Article 301, as the law is called, "laid the groundwork for the
assassination," said Mustafa Koç, a member of the Turkish
Industrialists' and Businessmen's Association (TUSIAD) and the
chairman of the board of Koç Holding, Turkey's largest and most
influential business group. Those who support the law, he added,
speaking at the January 25 annual meeting of the TUSIAD high council,
"are trying to block transition . . . resist renewal . . . surrender
themselves to the current authoritarian atmosphere."
Taken to court by the same ultra-nationalists who targeted Nobel
Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, Dink, the editor-in-chief of Agos
newspaper, received a six-month suspended prison sentence under the
law in October 2005. In the last article he ever published, the
editor described the trial as a turning point in his life, writing
that the law had prompted "a significant segment of the population .
. . [to] view [me] as someone `insulting Turkishness.'"
Police have now detained five people in connection with Dink's
January 19 murder, including 17-year-old suspected gunman Ogun
Samast, and an ultra-nationalist university student thought to be the
mastermind behind the attack. [For details, see the Eurasia Insight
archive].
All five detainees are from Trabzon, a fact that has convinced many
inhabitants that this port town, seen as the unofficial capital of
Turkey's eastern Black Sea coastal region, is part of a sinister
plot.
For those locals less inclined to conspiracy theories, it is the
continuation of a nightmare that began in May 2005, when four young
left-wing students narrowly avoided being beaten to death in central
Trabzon by a lynch mob.
Like two smaller lynching attempts that followed it, that incident
hit Turkish headlines. Then, in February 2006, Trabzon gained
international notoriety after a 16-year old local boy shot and killed
the Italian priest who ran the local Catholic church.
"What has happened to Trabzon?" asked the headline in the Turkish
daily Radikal on January 22, a day after police, tipped off by
relatives, arrested gunman Ogun Samast on a bus that would have taken
him to Georgia.
Turkey was a nationalist country long before groups opposed to its
European Union accession process began pumping up xenophobia. Radical
nationalism of the sort that appears to have influenced Dink's
murderers has traditionally been strongest in the towns south of the
3,500-meter peaks dividing Trabzon from the bleak Anatolian interior.
But it's only recently that Trabzon has become a center for such
thinking, and locals say the phenomenon is spiraling out of control.
"What you have here is a headless monster, a nursery for potential
assassins," said Omer Faruk Altuntas, a lawyer and the local head of
the small, left-leaning Freedom and Democracy Party.
"You may not like its policies, but at least the MHP [Milliyetçi
Hareket Partisi - Nationalist Movement Party] controls its
followers," agreed town councilor Mehmet Akcelep, referring to
Turkey's biggest extremist nationalist party. "But Samast and
hundreds of others like him aren't party people. They're free
operators. In part, Trabzon's problems are Turkey's problems. In the
space of little more than a decade, the port city's population has
swollen from 150,000 to around 400,000 as farmers flee the economic
deprivation of the countryside. In Pelitli, the Trabzon suburb which
was home to Ogun Samast, youth unemployment is high, with only two
Internet cafes in which idle youngsters can wile the time away."
Local media also play a role. When General Hilmi Ozkok, then
commander-in-chief of Turkey's armed forces, termed two Kurdish
teenagers arrested for trying to burn the Turkish flag "so-called
citizens," the town's media outlets readily took up the accusation.
When leftist students began distributing leaflets about prison
conditions, two television stations told viewers they were
separatists. Within minutes, hundreds of shopkeepers were on the
street. The result was the May 2005 attempted lynching.
"Three or four times, [the local media has] pretty much invited
people to take out their guns and start shooting", said Gultekin
Yucesan, head of Trabzon's Human Rights Association (IHD).
In most Anatolian towns, where people often only read local
newspapers for the used car advertisements, that wouldn't matter. But
Trabzon's ten papers and television stations are influential, for the
simple reason that this is a city built around soccer.
Trabzonspor is the only non-Istanbul club ever to have won the
Turkish League. Its blue and purple colors drape the city. And while
everybody here supports it, some say its influence on the city is
increasingly negative.
"Trabzon football has become a semi-official conduit for
nationalism," said retired teacher Nuri Topal.
Locals say it's no surprise that Ogun Samast and Yasin Hayal, the man
believed to have given the teenager the gun that killed Dink, played
amateur soccer for Pelitlispor.
Rumors have long circulated about the club's links with a local mafia
that got rich controlling this crucial staging post in Black Sea
human trafficking networks. Just last year, the club's best player
was banned for conniving with match-fixing mafiosi.
IHD head Gultekin Yucesan describes an incident he saw at a
Trabzonspor match two days after Dink's murder.
After a couple of bad decisions by the referee, he said, one
supporter shouted "Do that again and I'll put a white hat on and blow
your head off." Samast was wearing a white hat when he shot Hrant
Dink.
"Trabzon must learn its lesson," proclaimed a headline in one local
paper on January 22. Though for now, it is far from clear that it
has.
Mehmet Samast, a distant relative of the teenager suspected of
killing Dink, tells a reporter how much he regrets what has happened,
how ashamed he feels. He appears to be sincere. But then, echoing the
rhetoric of several nationalist parties, he goes on to say that Ogun
Samast was the victim of an international plot.
"Trabzon is vital strategically," he explained. "This murder was the
work of the Americans, or the Armenian Diaspora. They didn't like
[Dink] either, you know."
Writing on January 22 in the local newspaper Ilkhaber, columnist
Temel Korkmaz was blunter. Since Europeans insist on calling the
Kurdish separatists who kill Turkish soldiers "guerrillas," he wrote,
"I'll call the man who killed Dink a guerrilla, too."
In her January 26 column, Ece Temelkuran, a liberal columnist who
writes for the national daily Milliyet, was pessimistic about
Turkey's future. Readers were evenly divided in their reactions to
her earlier comments on Hrant Dink's death, she wrote, with 50
percent supportive, 50 percent warning her to watch what she said.
But people who want to see a more open, more democratic Turkey "are
not 50 percent of this country," Temelkuran wrote. "We are in a tiny
minority. . . More than 200,000 people marched for Hrant Dink's
funeral. That's good. But don't forget that number is barely 1
percent of Istanbul's population."
Editor's Note: Nicholas Birch specializes in Turkey, Iran and the
Middle East.
Jan 26 2007
TAMING TURKISH NATIONALISM A CHALLENGE IN ACCUSED KILLER'S HOMETOWN
Nicholas Birch 1/26/07
The murder last week of Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink continues
to make waves in Turkey, with the country's powerful Turkish
Industrialists' and Businessmen's Association joining in national and
international calls for the immediate scrapping of a law that makes
it a crime "to belittle Turkishness." But the increasingly aggressive
nationalism that characterizes Trabzon, the port city that is home to
Dink's suspected killer, suggests that the campaign to overturn the
law could face an uphill struggle.
Article 301, as the law is called, "laid the groundwork for the
assassination," said Mustafa Koç, a member of the Turkish
Industrialists' and Businessmen's Association (TUSIAD) and the
chairman of the board of Koç Holding, Turkey's largest and most
influential business group. Those who support the law, he added,
speaking at the January 25 annual meeting of the TUSIAD high council,
"are trying to block transition . . . resist renewal . . . surrender
themselves to the current authoritarian atmosphere."
Taken to court by the same ultra-nationalists who targeted Nobel
Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, Dink, the editor-in-chief of Agos
newspaper, received a six-month suspended prison sentence under the
law in October 2005. In the last article he ever published, the
editor described the trial as a turning point in his life, writing
that the law had prompted "a significant segment of the population .
. . [to] view [me] as someone `insulting Turkishness.'"
Police have now detained five people in connection with Dink's
January 19 murder, including 17-year-old suspected gunman Ogun
Samast, and an ultra-nationalist university student thought to be the
mastermind behind the attack. [For details, see the Eurasia Insight
archive].
All five detainees are from Trabzon, a fact that has convinced many
inhabitants that this port town, seen as the unofficial capital of
Turkey's eastern Black Sea coastal region, is part of a sinister
plot.
For those locals less inclined to conspiracy theories, it is the
continuation of a nightmare that began in May 2005, when four young
left-wing students narrowly avoided being beaten to death in central
Trabzon by a lynch mob.
Like two smaller lynching attempts that followed it, that incident
hit Turkish headlines. Then, in February 2006, Trabzon gained
international notoriety after a 16-year old local boy shot and killed
the Italian priest who ran the local Catholic church.
"What has happened to Trabzon?" asked the headline in the Turkish
daily Radikal on January 22, a day after police, tipped off by
relatives, arrested gunman Ogun Samast on a bus that would have taken
him to Georgia.
Turkey was a nationalist country long before groups opposed to its
European Union accession process began pumping up xenophobia. Radical
nationalism of the sort that appears to have influenced Dink's
murderers has traditionally been strongest in the towns south of the
3,500-meter peaks dividing Trabzon from the bleak Anatolian interior.
But it's only recently that Trabzon has become a center for such
thinking, and locals say the phenomenon is spiraling out of control.
"What you have here is a headless monster, a nursery for potential
assassins," said Omer Faruk Altuntas, a lawyer and the local head of
the small, left-leaning Freedom and Democracy Party.
"You may not like its policies, but at least the MHP [Milliyetçi
Hareket Partisi - Nationalist Movement Party] controls its
followers," agreed town councilor Mehmet Akcelep, referring to
Turkey's biggest extremist nationalist party. "But Samast and
hundreds of others like him aren't party people. They're free
operators. In part, Trabzon's problems are Turkey's problems. In the
space of little more than a decade, the port city's population has
swollen from 150,000 to around 400,000 as farmers flee the economic
deprivation of the countryside. In Pelitli, the Trabzon suburb which
was home to Ogun Samast, youth unemployment is high, with only two
Internet cafes in which idle youngsters can wile the time away."
Local media also play a role. When General Hilmi Ozkok, then
commander-in-chief of Turkey's armed forces, termed two Kurdish
teenagers arrested for trying to burn the Turkish flag "so-called
citizens," the town's media outlets readily took up the accusation.
When leftist students began distributing leaflets about prison
conditions, two television stations told viewers they were
separatists. Within minutes, hundreds of shopkeepers were on the
street. The result was the May 2005 attempted lynching.
"Three or four times, [the local media has] pretty much invited
people to take out their guns and start shooting", said Gultekin
Yucesan, head of Trabzon's Human Rights Association (IHD).
In most Anatolian towns, where people often only read local
newspapers for the used car advertisements, that wouldn't matter. But
Trabzon's ten papers and television stations are influential, for the
simple reason that this is a city built around soccer.
Trabzonspor is the only non-Istanbul club ever to have won the
Turkish League. Its blue and purple colors drape the city. And while
everybody here supports it, some say its influence on the city is
increasingly negative.
"Trabzon football has become a semi-official conduit for
nationalism," said retired teacher Nuri Topal.
Locals say it's no surprise that Ogun Samast and Yasin Hayal, the man
believed to have given the teenager the gun that killed Dink, played
amateur soccer for Pelitlispor.
Rumors have long circulated about the club's links with a local mafia
that got rich controlling this crucial staging post in Black Sea
human trafficking networks. Just last year, the club's best player
was banned for conniving with match-fixing mafiosi.
IHD head Gultekin Yucesan describes an incident he saw at a
Trabzonspor match two days after Dink's murder.
After a couple of bad decisions by the referee, he said, one
supporter shouted "Do that again and I'll put a white hat on and blow
your head off." Samast was wearing a white hat when he shot Hrant
Dink.
"Trabzon must learn its lesson," proclaimed a headline in one local
paper on January 22. Though for now, it is far from clear that it
has.
Mehmet Samast, a distant relative of the teenager suspected of
killing Dink, tells a reporter how much he regrets what has happened,
how ashamed he feels. He appears to be sincere. But then, echoing the
rhetoric of several nationalist parties, he goes on to say that Ogun
Samast was the victim of an international plot.
"Trabzon is vital strategically," he explained. "This murder was the
work of the Americans, or the Armenian Diaspora. They didn't like
[Dink] either, you know."
Writing on January 22 in the local newspaper Ilkhaber, columnist
Temel Korkmaz was blunter. Since Europeans insist on calling the
Kurdish separatists who kill Turkish soldiers "guerrillas," he wrote,
"I'll call the man who killed Dink a guerrilla, too."
In her January 26 column, Ece Temelkuran, a liberal columnist who
writes for the national daily Milliyet, was pessimistic about
Turkey's future. Readers were evenly divided in their reactions to
her earlier comments on Hrant Dink's death, she wrote, with 50
percent supportive, 50 percent warning her to watch what she said.
But people who want to see a more open, more democratic Turkey "are
not 50 percent of this country," Temelkuran wrote. "We are in a tiny
minority. . . More than 200,000 people marched for Hrant Dink's
funeral. That's good. But don't forget that number is barely 1
percent of Istanbul's population."
Editor's Note: Nicholas Birch specializes in Turkey, Iran and the
Middle East.