Istanbul, Turkey – Tens of thousands of mourners wound through the heart of this ancient city Tuesday in the funeral procession for an ethnic Armenian journalist whose murder triggered soul-searching over national identity, freedom of expression and the historical ghosts that shadow Turkey.
Followed by the largely silent throng, a black hearse slowly bore the flower-strewn coffin of editor Hrant Dink to an Armenian Orthodox church, where he was eulogized as a voice of courage and conscience. A teenage nationalist reportedly has confessed to gunning down the 52- year-old journalist Friday outside his office.
The extraordinary display of public mourning shut down much of downtown Istanbul.
Onlookers, many dabbing their eyes, leaned from balconies and watched from doorways as the cortege passed by. Some applauded, in the traditional sign of respect for honored dead.
Dink, a Turkish citizen of Armenian extraction, was best known as an advocate for the rights of the country’s Armenian minority – including efforts to win official recognition by Turkey that the deaths of some 1.5 million Armenians in the final years of the Ottoman empire constituted the first genocide of the 20th century.
Turkey officially blames the deaths on fighting, cold and hunger rather than any systematic campaign of extermination, a stance that is widely viewed internationally as an obstacle to its aspirations to join the European Union.
Scores of Turkish academics, journalists and novelists, including Nobel Prize laureate Orhan Pamuk, have been prosecuted under a provision known as Article 301, which contains a wide- ranging ban on “insulting Turkishness.” Any public reference to an Armenian genocide, even in carefully couched language, can result in being hauled into court and jailed, as Dink was.
Even among those Turks who believe their country has been unfairly tarred with genocide allegations, the violent backlash by right-wing nationalists has prompted profound unease. Many were particularly disturbed by the young age of the alleged killer, identified by authorities as 17-year-old Ogun Samast, and the fact that he had apparently come under the sway of nationalist militants.
Although Turks reacted to the killing with a spontaneous outpouring of horror and revulsion, it remained to be seen whether the editor’s death would lead to a groundswell of support for amending or abolishing Article 301, or promote a social climate in which examination of Turkey’s past would become more acceptable.
