They’re Killing The Journalists

Hrant Dink founded the bi-lingual Agos newspaper in 1986 to tell the story of Armenians living in Turkey. He faced threats, trials and punishment for “offending Turkishness,” the crime of raising the subject of Armenian genocide nearly a century ago. He told a recent interviewer that his head swiveled “like a pigeon” as he walked through the streets, always alert to possible threats.

By Saturday Turkish police arrested a primary suspect, Ogun Samast, and three or six or eight others. A closed circuit television camera a short distance from the crime scene snapped a photo of a young man, fitting witness descriptions, stuffing something under his shirt, below his belt. Perhaps it was the weapon that had fired 2 or 3 or 4 bullets at close range into the head and neck of Hrant Dink. The young mans’ photo was shown on all national television channels and he was identified by his distraught father. The young man is 16 or 17 years old from the northern Turkey city Trabson. When captured on a bus a gun was in his possession. Live television showed paramilitary police examining the gun and dropping it in an evidence bag.

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Witnesses on that busy Istanbul street reported the young man said or shouted “I have killed the Armenian” or “I have killed the non-Muslim.” Police reported Sunday that Samast admitted the shooting.

“I read on the Internet that he said 'I am from Turkey but Turkish blood is dirty' and I decided to kill him ... I do not regret this,” he told interrogators, according to CNN Turk.

Media coverage in Turkey and Armenia eclipsed all else. Universally, Turkish media expressed shock. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan took to television saying, “The bullets aimed at Hrant Dink were shot into all of us."

“TV networks broadcast the clips from Istanbul street protests against the killing of the Armenian journalists,” said RFE/RL Yerevan bureau chief Harry Tamrazian in an email to ftm Friday night. “But this is just a first day and I imagine there will be protests also in Yerevan streets, as well as in the European capitals and US cities where there are large Armenian communities.”

Other recent high-profile murders of journalists include Anna Politkovskaya, shot to death in Moscow last October, Walid Hassan shot to death in Iraq in November and Roberto Marcos Garcia, shot to death in Mexico in November. All had the misfortune of investigating and reporting. The World Association of Newspapers (WAN) tally of media employees killed in 2006 shows 110 deaths, nearly a 100% increase over 2005.

Whether a teenager with a gun or a crazy with a cause, they’re killing the journalists.