Gulan: Trial in Istanbul and bomb in Beytüssebap

The text in Kurdish.

Thousands of people protested on the streets of the Turkish cities after the murder of Hrant Dink last January. He was the chief editor of the Armenian newspaper Agos. The shock united Turkish people for a while. There was mutual will to discuss the wounds of the past. But it lasted very short time.

Now, half a year later, eighteen people suspected of Dink's murder go to court in Istanbul. Their trial started last Monday, the second July. But Turkish media has lost interest on the murder case.

After Hrant Dink's murder there was in Turkey demands to abolish Article 301 of the Penal code. It is the biggest obstacle for freedom of speech in Turkey. But also these speeches have vanished in the ultra nationalist heat.

Once again it has happened same thing than so many times earlier, for example after the Semdinli bomb attack: when activities of the Deep State have become evident people have first demanded to find information. But case after case, public discussion has ended after some weeks. Also the Semdinli trial went just like this. For example the removal of prosecutor Ferhat Sarikaya just before the trial got very little attention both in Turkey and abroad.

The Semdinli trial ended to prison sentence of two JITEM agents. JITEM is the intelligence service of the gendarmerie. Amnesty International commented the decision that "Court convicted two, but questions remained unanswered". Here is in nutshell the key question also of the Hrant Dink's murder trial. It is not enough that seventeen years old Ogun Samast and other suspected persons are punished for their crime. Dink's lawyers assert that there was a big and organized group behind the eighteen suspects and they had links to members of the police and gendarmerie forces. It is the right of Turkish people that all this will be public.

There are frightening signs that Turkey is turning back to the dark times of early 1990s. One example is the bomb which was found in Beytüssebap before it exploded. Beytüssebap is in Sirnak province, forty kilometre from Iraqi boarder. Its mayor Faik Dursun is from the Kurdish DTP party. Like last decade, Sirnak province is now state of emergency region.

Early morning last Tuesday, the third July, someone called Faik Dursun to tell him that there was a suspicious package on the road. Dursun called the special prosecutor. A couple of police came, went onto the roof of a nearby house and shot into the package with their guns. This caused the package to explode, which made a big crater in the ground and broke the windows of several nearby houses. Faik Dursun says this was an assassination attempt against him because the bomb was located on the road which he uses every morning when going to work to the municipality house.

During 1990-04 sixty four Kurdish politicians from HEP and DEP parties were murdered in Turkey. After a period of democratic and peaceful development Turkish people should not accept the return of political murders and other atrocities. The first step to prevent it is to find out the truth of the past crimes. This must happen in the murder trial of Hrant Dink, in Beytüssebap and in many other places.