Gulan 29th January: Is Turkey turning back to the 1990s?

http://www.gulan-media.com/h620/g31.pdf

Last December European Union put on ice the membership negotiations withTurkey. This is an important turning point in the political development in Turkey. Is the country moving towards democracy and co-operation or nationalism and isolation?
The murder of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was a shock and a worrying sign how the future might be in Turkey. Is Turkey turning back tothe athmosphere of early 1990s when political murders and disappearances of activists were every day life?
Public reaction against the murder of Hrant Dink was strong in Turkey. Everybody condemned it. This is good sign. Despite the majority of Turkish people are not actively working for the abrogation of the militaristic system they neither want to return back to the dark period of last decade. During those days many journalists, especially Kurdish ones, were murdered. Their murderers were never found.

Police caught quikly the shooter of Hrant Dink. This is different than the murders of journalists fifteen years ago. The shooting of Hrant Dink has similar characters than some honour killings where police has caught the murderer in Turkey. Often they have turned out to be boys who are under eighteen and get only a small penalty because of their age.
The big test for Turkey is whether the real forces behind the seventeen years old shooter of Hrant Dink will be found. In Susurluk accident and Semdinli bomb attack there was no in-depth survey about the real forces involved in the scandals. Who had protected Abdullah Catli? Who planned a serie of bomb attacks in Hakkari province in autumn 2005?
We do not know. First Turkish mass media covered eagerly the cases but little by little public discussion about these topics died away. It is easy to predict that the same will happen again. Picture of Dink's murder will remain unclear and the real criminals behind the act will not be in the court.

Still I am hopeful that Turkey will not return back to the dark days of early 1990s. Maybe the Republic of Turkey has not changed from those days but the world around it is different. Also the Kurdish and Armenian communities in Turkey are now much stronger than fifteen years ago. They have lots of contacts abroad. World is following how Turkish police and court solve this murder case. And more than that: how the freedom of expression develops in Turkey. The situation is alarming as long as police stations and courts are places where the limits of journalism are counted. If this is not changing Turkey can say bye-bye to dreams about European Union.