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.

Posted January 26, 2007 © Eurasianet