An outspoken journalist who repeatedly clashed with Turkish authorities here over recognition of the early 20th Century slaughter of Armenians was shot to death in broad daylight Friday on a busy downtown street.
Hrant Dink, who as editor of a Turkish-Armenian newspaper was the leading voice for his ethnic community, died a week after he wrote about threats from unknown forces who he said regarded him “an enemy of the Turks.”
Hundreds of people marched Friday evening from Istanbul’s central Taksim Square to the offices of Dink’s Agos weekly newspaper, near the spot on a sidewalk where he was shot in the head. They held candles and posters of him; a somber silence was interrupted periodically with applause and chants for “the brotherhood of peoples.”
Istanbul Gov. Muammer Guler said late Friday that three people were detained in connection with the shooting, but no additional details were released.
The slaying is likely to further darken Turkey’s reputation for repressing critics of the government or of the country’s tight control on how its turbulent past is portrayed.
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Dink, 52, was part of an elite group of writers and thinkers, including Nobel Literature laureate Orhan Pamuk and novelist Elif Safak, who have been tried on charges of insulting their country’s “Turkishness” under an ambiguous law promoted by hard-line nationalists.
While most, including Pamuk, were cleared, Dink was convicted in 2005 for writing articles that criticized the law and explored questions of Turkish and Armenian identity. He was sentenced to a 6-month term, which was suspended.
Last year, an Istanbul court opened a new case against him after he told a foreign news agency that the World War I-era slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Armenians by Ottoman Turks was genocide.
“Of course I say it was genocide,” Dink had said. “With these events you see the disappearance of a people who lived on these lands for 4,000 years.”
Dink helped promote a conference of academics in 2005 who gathered here to examine the era’s mass killings. The government attempted to block the conference, and the justice minister accused participants of “stabbing Turkey in the back.”
On Friday, however, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was among the first to condemn Dink’s “traitorous” and “disgraceful” murder.
“Bullets have been fired at free thought and our democratic life,” Erdogan said at a news conference. He urged calm.