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Thousands of Turks mourn slain Armenian editorHuge crowds of mourners, including senior Turkish and Armenian officials joining for a rare display of unity, poured into the heart of Istanbul today to bid farewell to Hrant Dink, the Armenian-Turkish journalist who was shot and killed on the street in front of his newspaper’s offices last week.
With hundreds of police officers in riot gear on duty and traffic barred on major thoroughfares, the normally chaotic section of the city took on a somber atmosphere. Armenian music played from loudspeakers along Republic Avenue as Turks of various ethnicities stood shoulder to shoulder, many of them in tears. Others leaned out windows or over balcony railings to watch the procession.
Mr. Dink’s widow, Rakel, addressed the street gathering and said that she and Mr. Dink “will be reunited in heaven.”
Mr. Dink’s family had requested a silent vigil in front of the offices of Agos, the weekly bilingual newspaper that he edited. But the crowd instead broke out with spontaneous bouts of whistling or applause. The few chants that were heard called for solidarity with Turkey’s minority communities, including Kurds and Jews as well as Armenians.
An elderly woman of Armenian descent, crying on the street, said that it was “important to remember that Turkey became a republic with our blood, too.” She asked not to be identified, saying that was afraid that someone might shoot her as well.
Pigeons were released into the air, a reference to something Mr. Dink wrote in one of his last articles for Agos: He described himself as a pigeon, always nervously looking from side to side, fearful of threats against him and his family.
Another mourner, a high school student named Eren Yigit who is 17 — the same age as Ogun Samast, the suspected killer — said that he could not imagine committing such a crime. “It’s obvious that someone began brainwashing him at a younger age,” he said of Mr. Samast.
Basak Yilmaz, 27, was waiting to take the subway to her job in the marketing department of Finans Bank. “This is not all just because Dink was Armenian, or any other ethnicity,” she said. “It’s about humanity and freedom of speech.”
Many who gathered held red carnations distributed by the local mayor’s office, or waved circular black and white placards reading “We are all Hrant Dink” in Turkish on one side and in Armenian on the other.
Other signs in the crowd read “Abolish 301,” a reference to the article of the Turkish penal law making it a crime to insult the state or Turkishness. Scores of intellectuals, including Mr. Dink and the Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, have been prosecuted under the article because of lawsuits brought by nationalists.
Tugrul Eryilmaz, 60, the features editor of the daily newspaper Radikal, was moved by the emotion and sweep of the march.
“Someone should have done this long ago,” he said. “We should have all reacted like this to Article 301, and to the killing of that priest in Trabzon. Well, better now than never.”
At the start of the procession, Mr. Dink’s coffin, covered with white daisies, lay inside a black hearse parked outside his newspaper offices. The hearse then moved off slowly in the direction of Taksim Square in the city center, and then across the Golden Horn waterway to the site of the funeral mass. At least one Armenian religious leader rode in the front seat of the hearse as family members walked behind on foot.
At one point, the entourage passed a billboard several stories tall advertising blue jeans with the headline “Make History.”
Spiritual and political leaders from Armenia and from Armenian communities elsewhere did just that by accepting the Turkish government’s invitation to attend the funeral, held at the Holy Mother of God Armenian Patriarchal Church.
They included the archbishop of the Armenian Church of America, Khajag Barsamyan; Arman Kirakossian, the former Armenian ambassador to the United States, who is now the deputy foreign minister of Armenia; and Karen Mirzoyan, the Armenian representative to the Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation.
Representing the Turkish government were Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Ali Sahin and Interior Minister Abdulkadir Aksu. |
