Trials, Attacks, Murders : Writers Are Victimized by Hysteria in Turkey

Immediately upon receiving news that Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was shot and killed Friday, The Associated Press released a a timeline that shows that writers are the primary target of the state in Turkey today.

We see immediately when we review the past year's series of trials for such crimes as "insulting Turkishness" that Turkish citizens are being whipped up against Armenian-Turks -- especially against the intellectuals who defend civic and ethnic rights and who respect the 'facts of history'.

When Hrant Dink, editor of the Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos, was shot and killed last Friday, 19 January 2007 in Istanbul, it was the culmination of state sanctioned and courtroom orchestrated 'hate crimes', not an isolated murder.

See below as well. After I blog the timeline I link to another piece at Open Democracy's website, from one year ago., It was written when the trials became international news.

Hrant Dink was the judicial target. In 2006, novelist Orhan Pamuk went almost straight from his own show trial to Stockholm, Sweden to receive his Nobel Prize in Literature.
(Both the English and French versions of Pamuk's novel "Snow" are growing in popularity and are selling well in Montreal bookstores today.

In Turkey, a Year of Attacks and Trials

Jan 19th 2007
By The Associated Press

(AP) - _ Jan. 19, 2007
Hrant Dink, editor of the Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos, is slain by a gunman in Istanbul.

_ Dec. 19, 2006: Writer Ipek Calislar acquitted of insulting Turkey's founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, in a biography in which she said Ataturk dressed as a woman to escape an assassination attempt.

After the timeline lists other "show trials", the AP editor traces the victimisation of writers back over 12 months (almost to the exact date one year ago). The date was
"Jan. 23, 2006: when the Turkish court droped charges of "insulting Turkishness" against author Orhan Pamuk (on a technicality).

"Pamuk was charged after discussing the deaths of Armenians in Turkey with a Swiss newspaper. He won the Nobel Prize for literature later in the year."

Orhan Pamuk and Turkey’s future

Daria Vaisman
1 - 12 - 2006

The reception of Orhan Pamuk's Nobel award in Turkey is charged with the political tensions inside the country and in its relationship with Europe, says Daria Vaisman.

Pamuk himself is at the centre of the controversy. It was he who he told the Swiss newspaper Tages Anzeige in February 2005 that "30,000 Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares to talk about it" (comments which made Pamuk the most prominent target of the notorious "insult law" cases, in which individuals have been charged with "denigrating Turkishness"). Although Pamuk's case was eventually dismissed on a technicality, other writers - among them Hrant Dink, Elif Shafak, and Murat Belge - have since been tried under the same law.