Protest out­side the court, plac­ards pro­claim “For Hrant, For Justice”

Hrant Dink’s murder was the cul­min­at­ing point of a per­se­cu­tion cam­paign that can be traced back to Feb­ru­ary 2004, when he pub­lished claims to the effect that Sabiha Gökçen, the adop­ted daugh­ter of Ata­türk and the first woman war pilot of the Turk­ish Repub­lic, was of Armenian des­cent. Dink’s claim pro­voked a pub­lic state­ment from the Chief of Staff, the highest ech­elon of the Turk­ish army. A few days later he was summoned to the Istan­bul Governor’s Office and “warned” by two people who were intro­duced to him as “friends” of the then Deputy Gov­ernor. Three and a half years after the assas­sin­a­tion, the Intel­li­gence Ser­vice admit­ted that these two people were its operatives.

Soon after the cov­ert threats in the Deputy Governor’s office, Dink was tried under the notori­ous Art­icle 301 of the Turk­ish Penal Code, on charges of “den­ig­rat­ing Turk­ish­ness”. The pro­ceed­ings took place in the midst of a smear cam­paign led by ultrana­tion­al­ist media. Inter­est­ingly, the charges were pressed not for his claims regard­ing Sabiha Gökçen –pre­sum­ably to avoid pub­lic debate on Gökçen’s eth­nic ori­gin–
but for a single sen­tence lif­ted out of a series of eleven art­icles entitled “On Armenian Iden­tity”, an elab­or­ate cri­tique of its dia­sporic for­mu­la­tion. The court chose to inter­pret the single sen­tence in isol­a­tion from its gen­eral con­text, which allowed for a sig­ni­fic­ant dis­tor­tion of its mean­ing, des­pite expert wit­nesses arguing the con­trary. Dink was con­victed for den­ig­rat­ing Turk­ish­ness. When he appealed the decision, the Supreme Court upheld his con­vic­tion, reveal­ing, at the very least, a severe read­ing com­pre­hen­sion prob­lem start­ing right at the top of the judiciary.

Dink’s tri­als were fre­quen­ted by a mob of fas­cists attempt­ing to attack him and his sup­port­ers. Among the mob was Veli Küçük, retired bri­gadier gen­eral, a dark fig­ure whose name has been crop­ping up in the media since the 1990s, in rela­tion to a wide range of crim­inal deeds, includ­ing extraju­di­cial exe­cu­tions in mid-​1990s of busi­ness­men sus­pec­ted of sup­port­ing Kur­d­ish rebels. Accord­ing to Hrant Dink’s bio­grapher, in the wake of the “friendly” warn­ing at the Governor’s office, Veli Küçük’s attend­ance at his trial made it clear to Dink what kind of forces were behind the pro­sec­u­tion, and indeed that his life was under threat. In his final art­icle, pub­lished on the very day of his assas­sin­a­tion, he blamed the unlikely out­come of the trial and his appeal on “deep forces”, and wrote of the dif­fi­culty of liv­ing in fear for one’s life, com­par­ing him­self to a pigeon, “equally obsessed by what goes-​on on my left and right, front and back, my head just as mobile and fast.” Tra­gic­ally, he con­cluded, “I may see myself as frightened as a pigeon but I know that in this coun­try people do not touch pigeons”.

In Turk­ish pop­u­lar par­lance, the “deep state” refers to powers oper­at­ing with impun­ity through and bey­ond the vis­ible power struc­ture. It is con­sidered to be a state within the state, a net­work of ille­git­im­ate alli­ances between mil­it­ary staff, mem­bers of the police force, bur­eau­crats, politi­cians, intel­li­gence agents, mafia organ­isa­tions, etc. The deep state lurks men­acingly behind the innu­mer­able assas­sin­a­tions, dis­ap­pear­ances, pro­voca­tions, threats, dis­in­form­a­tion cam­paigns, psy­cho­lo­gical oper­a­tions and dirty deals of the past few dec­ades. Though provid­ing much fod­der for what can be dis­missed as con­spir­acy the­or­ising, the very style and struc­ture of deep state plots render them almost imme­di­ately recog­nis­able to a pub­lic that has become all too famil­iar with them. Hrant Dink’s assas­sin­a­tion was instantly widely recog­nised as one such plot.

Cer­tain pieces of inform­a­tion that sur­faced dur­ing the trial cor­rob­or­ated this view. One of the defend­ants test­i­fied that in his capa­city as a police inform­ant, he had repeatedly warned the secur­ity forces of the plan to assas­sin­ate Dink in the months lead­ing to his death. Some doc­u­ment­ary evid­ence sup­por­ted the claim that the police was informed of the plan as early as eleven months before the assas­sin­a­tion. Key defend­ants were remark­ably smug dur­ing the hear­ings, occa­sion­ally sig­nalling, though never dis­clos­ing their deeper connections.

Sus­pi­cions of a deep state plot were con­firmed more sig­ni­fic­antly by what was not allowed to sur­face dur­ing the trial. First of all, there seemed to be an obstin­ate will to obscure evid­ence: key CCTV foot­age of the incid­ent was seized by the Istan­bul police and went miss­ing under their watch; the gunman’s com­mu­nic­a­tions on his mobile and over the inter­net imme­di­ately before and after the assas­sin­a­tion were never prop­erly dis­closed or invest­ig­ated; cer­tain sus­pect fig­ures caught by CCTV cam­eras at the time of the incid­ent were not traced. Fur­ther, invest­ig­at­ing pro­sec­utors iden­ti­fied a num­ber of officers within the Gen­darm­erie and the Police Force who could be held liable for neg­li­gence, abuse of office, des­troy­ing, obscur­ing and tam­per­ing with evid­ence relat­ing to the case, but the court refused to pro­ceed with their pro­sec­u­tion. Des­pite express demands by law­yers inter­ven­ing in the trial on behalf of Hrant Dink’s fam­ily, cer­tain high level offi­cials within the secur­ity and intel­li­gence ser­vices who were implic­ated at least in terms of neg­li­gence, were not even summoned to court as wit­nesses, let alone inter­rog­ated as sus­pects. The court’s writ­ten requests from offi­cial bod­ies such as the Intel­li­gence Ser­vice and the High Coun­cil for Tele­com­mu­nic­a­tions were either left unanswered, or respon­ded to with incom­plete, incor­rect or abso­lutely irrel­ev­ant information.

This is what Feth­iye Çetin, the law­yer rep­res­ent­ing the Dink fam­ily, meant when she spoke after the decision, refer­ring to the case as a com­edy: “They’ve been mock­ing us all along. And today, we saw that they saved the punch-​line for the end.” Indeed, the court’s scan­dal­ous rul­ing to the effect that there is no crim­inal organ­isa­tion behind the assas­sin­a­tion, unless over­turned in the appeals court, will prove an obstacle for the Dink fam­ily in their attempts to pur­sue a wider set of culp­ab­il­it­ies. There is a ver­it­able irony here for those who have been fol­low­ing Turkey’s con­tem­por­ary polit­ical tri­als. As any­one famil­iar with the details of the Ergenekon or KCK tri­als will know, in its cur­rent mode of oper­a­tion, the law of the Turk­ish state sees con­spir­acies every­where it looks, pro­cessing a stun­ning range of rela­tions and asso­ci­ations in terms of crim­inal organ­isa­tion, dis­cern­ing sin­is­ter plots wherever it turns. In this con­text its refusal to con­nect the obvi­ous dots and make the evid­ent links in the Dink trial is a denial that serves as a per­verse avowal to pro­tect its own. As Feth­iye Çetin puts it bluntly, the decision made it clear that the Turk­ish state was hell-​bent on “main­tain­ing its well-​established tra­di­tion of polit­ical assassinations”.

That some­thing is amiss in the offi­cial work­ings of justice was symp­tom­ized by the court lit­er­ally for­get­ting to deliver ver­dict on one of the 19 defend­ants in its final decision. In such a high-​profile trial that has been the focus of much inter­na­tional and domestic atten­tion, drag­ging on for years, such an omis­sion is a sig­ni­fic­ant lapsus memoriae, a slip of the memory that points to the con­flic­ted uncon­scious of the court. Some­thing is miss­ing, indeed.