Hrant Dink Memorial, Liberty Square, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2007

Following on from yesterday’s huge procession that took over Istanbul during the funeral of Hrant Dink, EurasiaNet has an interesting article about the rise of Turkish ultra-nationalism. Indeed, how Turkey now responds to Dink’s murder and the increasing popularity right wing and ultra-religious groups is now the main test facing the country. It is also the main obstacle which might frustrate its EU aspirations.

The murder of a prominent and outspoken ethnic Armenian journalist has sent shock waves throughout Turkey, raising questions about whether a recent nationalist upsurge has taken a violent turn. The killing threatens to pose a serious challenge to the government’s already embattled democratization and political reform efforts.

[…]

The editor was shot three times in broad daylight near the entrance to the newspaper’s offices in Istanbul on January 19. A teenage suspect from the Black Sea city of Trabzon, Ogun Samast, has confessed to the shooting, police have announced. Samast is not known to have links to any militant organizations, according to officials.

“Those who created nationalist sentiment in Turkey have fed such a monster that there are many youngsters on the streets who do not find the … state nationalist enough and are ready to take the law into their own hands,” columnist Ismet Berkan wrote on January 20 in Radikal, one of Turkey’s main dailies, about the murder.

The last few years have seen Turkey engaged in a deep internal struggle. On the one hand, the country’s drive towards European Union membership has resulted in significant political reforms, particularly regarding democratization and human rights, and the freeing up of the debate on what had previously been taboo subjects, such as the 1915 killing of ethnic Armenians.

On the other hand, the EU-related reforms have been met with a strong nationalist backlash. Nationalist lawyers and prosecutors, for example, have been able to use a law, known as article 301, to charge writers and journalists like Dink and Nobel Prize for Literature laureate Orhan Pamuk with the crime of insulting the state as a way of stifling the emerging debates and putting the brakes on Turkey’s EU bid.

[…]

“By Turkish standards, [Dink] was playing in a way that the nationalists were not used to. In a way, he took too many risks, he underestimated his opponents,” said Rifat Bali, an independent Istanbul-based researcher who studies Turkey’s minority communities. “The message of the murder is ‘You shut up, know your limits as an Armenian or a non-Muslim and do not go public often and repeatedly, otherwise it will turn out bad for you.’”

“Some of the ultranationalist core of Turkey has not changed,” Bali continued. “It is a militant core that is ready, if necessary, to murder its ideological opponents.”

It will be a fitting tribute to Dink if Turkey removes Article 301 from its Constitution, and if genuine overtures for normalizing relations between Armenia and Turkey are now made from Ankara. What I hope won’t happen, however, is that Dink’s murder in Istanbul at the hands of nationalists will be exploited by nationalists in Armenia to achieve the same objectives.

Time will tell.

Hrant Dink Memorial, Liberty Square, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2007