Sunday, January 21, 2007

Who Killed Hrant Dink?

Good post from Pikkert:

"Hrant Dink was a Turkish-Armenian journalist. He was murdered yesterday.

Like many liberal Turkish writers, including Nobel winner Orhan Pamuk, he’d been to court charged with breaking the infamous “regulation 301”. It forbids anyone from insulting “Turkishness”. Hrant believed that Turks must be reconciled with their own history before genuine reconciliation can take place between Turks and Armenians.

In the past such murders were ascribed to “shadowy figures in the deep state”. Not any more. The nationalists, reacting in part to Western, particularly American, cultural and political ambitions in the Middle East, have created a monster which freely roams the streets. It kills Christian priests, fires guns and lobs Molotov cocktails at Protestant churches, and makes a mockery of Turkey’s claims at being a cross-roads of diversity and multi-culturalism.

The monster is a deliberate creation of nationalist politicians, newspaper men (and women), and film producers, notably the creators of the violent series Kurtlar Vadisi (Valley of the Wolves). A like-minded group of lawyers led by the infamous Mr. Kemal Kerincsiz hauls those who think slightly differently to court on the least excuse. If they cannot see you behind bars, they’ll blacken your name. You might even be killed… Like Hrant Dink.

Hrant is not the first, and won’t be the monster’s last victim. It will continue to devour until the Turks, en masse, are sickened by it. Only then will the politicians, newpapermen and women, and film producers change their tunes; they, after all, are merely driven by the vote and the bottom line.

Who killed Hrant Dink? Every nationalist voter."

No comments: