Family Boycotts Retrial for Murder Of Turkish-Armenian Journalist
The family of Hrant Dink issues an open letter of indignation after an appeals court decision that his case be reviewed, six years after the murder.
It was an assassination that left an extraordinary mark on the Turkish judiciary, justice and public conscience. So did the tragedy it symbolized. With the case of Hrant Dink returned to ground zero six years after the murder, the victim’s family lost its patience in an open letter.
Hrant Dink, editor of the weekly Agos, the voice of Turkey’s Armenian community, was gunned down on Jan. 19, 2007, in a busy Istanbul street by a young man named Ogun Samast. The murder reverberated beyond Turkey’s borders in a matter of hours.
Dink was the 62nd journalist to be killed in Turkey since a libertarian constitution was introduced in 1908. Yet, because of his Armenian background and much-admired courage, along with the reform process Turkey was undergoing, his murder trial, which opened in July 2007, became the most significant litmus test for Turkish justice. Exasperated by a spate of murky political murders in the 1980s and 1990s, and encouraged by government statements, the Turkish public saw in the trial a “threshold of hope.”
The Dink family hoped that the judicial process would uncover the assailant’s links to “shady deep state” mechanisms — a “terrorist organization” structure — that they believed was behind the murder.
