Thousands of people have taken to the streets of Istanbul and Ankara to denounce the murder of Hrant Dink, a prominent Turkish-Armenian journalist, after he was shot dead outside his newspaper’s office.
Police have released [security camera] pictures of a the man that they suspect of shooting Hrant Dink on Friday, he appears to be in his late teens or early 20s.
An arrest has been made. Prosecutors say the suspect has confessed. No details on motive. Nothing conclusive published, yet.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister, has pledged to swiftly catch the perpetrators of what he called “an attack on freedom of thought”.
Dink, a well-known and respected journalist, angered the judiciary and Turkish nationalists with his remarks on the World War I mass killings of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire, which preceded the Turkish republic.
Dink’s conviction was the first under Article 301 of the new Turkish penal code, which deals with “insulting Turkishness” and has since been used to prosecute several other intellectuals.
We’ve been to this topic before — in Turkey. The history of indicting intellectuals, political activists, for sedition is nothing new. Everywhere.
Neither is the responsibility to oppose it.
And Turkey wants to become a member of the European union… ehm….. yeah, right.
I got to know quite a few Armenians in California — some who personally experienced the slaughter in Turkey and many who head the stories from their grandparents.
I have to ask — what the h*ck is wrong with the government of Turkey that they so absolutely refuse to admit this happened that they will JAIL anybody who claims otherwise. Something is very very wrong.
Well, in this case it appears that Dink was murdered because he angered an egocentric teenage asshole.
It should be noted that it was said asshole’s father who turned him in…
But, the Turkey is allied with US so the occassional journalist death, extramination of few Kurds, invasion of the peacefull country (Cyprus),… is all OK. One of such unreported “little things” is the overall best selling book in 2005 Turkey…
http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/006690.php
(Still doing well in 2006 too).
#1. there are verboten topics in probably every EU country. Sounds like Turkey’s ban on libeling the state will fit right in.
(“free-speech obsessed American”)
Turkey is just a picture of where America is heading, if the neo-cons have their way. State sanctioned speech will be enacted into law.
Before the fall of communism, freedom of speech in the USA was sacrosanct; we could always and immediately distinguish our actual public allowance of speech practices as different then the USSR.
Now that the cold war is over, we’ve turned inwards against ourself. All the things that once distinguished us as Americans seem to have been trampled underfoot in the name of:
National Security
Business Efficiency
Bushes Middle East modern Crusade
As a country, we now enforce by law many of the state tactics Stalin once used; for one, Stalin’s Siberian Gulag is our Gitmo
History will repeat itself, as our history moves past this current Bush initiated modern Crusade, I have no doubt we (by our elected officials) will clamp down even harder on our American freedoms of speech becoming more like those we hate. It’s already happening now.
#4 – Damn, that’s disturbing. “Hitler of blessed memory” – yeah, that’s the kind of ally the U.S. ought to be courting.
Weird thing is, I feel all soft-headed about it, conflicted by the cold hard world. It’s the old hypothetical dilemma right-wingers use to justify subverting American freedom: An enemy openly and unapologetically determined to destroy mom and apple pie, with the U.S. made vulnerable by the Bill of Rights. Our torture-advocating Attorney General openly questions habeas corpus and approves of hearsay testimony. But over there they refer to “Hitler of blessed memory”? And they’re as intolerant and evangelical as our own right-wing faux Christians. (Hitler was a Christian too. Do religious wingnuts ever read their own prophets?)
“We’ve seen the enemy and he is us,” said Pogo. Maybe not entirely. Gah. Glad I live safely south of the loony bin. At least, I don’t think Mexico has provoked a jihad against itself. Has it?