28
June 2007
2. "Two soldiers killed in Turkey's SE", two Turkish soldiers from the gendarmerie have been killed in separate mine attacks blamed on the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), security officials said on Tuesday.
3. "Turkey: The Political Process Experiences a Quiet Revolution", the edifices are designed to create the impression that only well-oiled machines can succeed in Turkish politics. But with just over four weeks to go until special parliamentary elections, established parties are facing an unexpected threat. Hundreds of independent candidates have joined the race, and a substantial number of them stands a good chance of infiltrating a political system that many believe to be critically ill.
4. "Turkey unhappy at EU talks delay", Turkey has said it is not satisfied with the EU's reasons for not opening membership talks in the area of economic and monetary policy.
5. "A Chronology: Hrant Dink's Murder", as the first hearing in the case of Hrant Dink's murder is approaching on 2 July, a chronology of events surrounding his murder is offered. Editor-in-chief of the Armenian-Turkish Agos newspaper, Dink was shot dead on January 19.
6. "European court rules Turkey must pay damages to son of murdered man", the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has ruled that Turkey must pay a 32-year-old man 80,000 euros (107,700 dollars) in compensation for the shooting to death of his father in 1996.
1. - AFP - "Turkish army chief insists on incursion into Iraq":
ANKARA / 27 June 2007
The head of the Turkish armed forces insisted Wednesday on the need for a military incursion into northern Iraq to hunt down Turkish Kurd rebels based there, but said he needed the government's green light to do so.
"I cannot say that we will go in and finish off the PKK (the Kurdistan Workers' Party), but a cross-border operation will deliver a big blow," against the rebel group, Chief of General Staff General Yasar Buyukanit told a televised news conference at a commando training camp in the southwestern town of Egirdir.
"It will be very useful," he said.
Buyukanit said the army needed a "political directive" and guidelines from the government for such an operation.
"All cross-border operations have a political target," Buyukanit said. "Military planning starts with a political directive."
"It is one thing to go into northern Iraq to fight PKK rebels or, for example, it is another thing to come under attack from local Kurds while doing that.
"If the political target is determined, the the armed forces would determine what kind of force it needs and seek formal approval," Buyukanit said.
Since April, Buyukanit has been calling for a strike against PKK rebels based in Kurdish-controlled, autonomous northern Iraq where, Ankara says, the PKK enjoys free movement and obtains weapons and explosives for cross-border attacks against Turkish targets.
More than 37,000 people have died since 1984 when the PKK, listed as a terrorist group by Ankara and much of the international community, took up arms for self-rule in Turkey's mainly Kurdish east and southeast.
Turkey also accuses local Kurdish leaders of tolerating and even supporting the PKK.
The head of the Turkish land forces, Ilker basbug, said Wednesday that there were some 5,000 PKK rebels in total, an estimated 2,800 to 3,100 of them based in northern Iraq.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has not ruled out an incursion, but said Ankara should focus on fighting the rebels inside Turkey and seek dialogue with Baghdad to resolve the issue.
Washington opposes Turkish military action in northern Iraq, wary that this could destabilise the relatively peaceful region of conflict-torn Iraq and further strain tense ties between Ankara and the Iraqi Kurds, staunch allies of the US.
Buyukanit, stressed that armed force was not the answer to eliminating the PKK and called on the government to introduce measures to deal with the "economic, social and psychological aspects of terrorism."
"You cannot expect the struggle against terrorism to suceed when it is reduced to only armed struggle," Buyukanit said.
He said the PKK has an extensive network of collaborators and sympathizers providing logistical support and said the rebels receive substantial political, financial and weapons support from abroad.
"There are some among our allies who provide direct or indirect support to the PKK. This negatively affects our struggle," Buyukanit said.
To combat the PKK more efficiently, Basbug said, the army will transform its six existing commando brigades into professional units from the end of 2009, putting an end to the practice of sending conscripts to those units.
The announcement followed a wave of public outrage over
the deaths in clashes with the PKK of several young conscripts, raising
questions on how well soldiers sent to the combat zone are trained.
2. - Reuters - "Two soldiers killed in Turkey's
SE":
DIYARBAKIR / 27 June 2007
Two Turkish soldiers from the gendarmerie have been killed in separate mine attacks blamed on the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), security officials said on Tuesday.
One member of the gendarme police force -- which fights the PKK in eastern Turkey alongside the army -- was killed when he stepped on a mine in the southeastern province of Sirnak late on Monday.
Another was killed in a similar blast in the eastern province of Agri early on Tuesday, the officials said.
Dozens of soldiers and paramilitaries have been killed this year in an escalation of violence between the PKK, which has been fighting for an ethnic homeland since 1984, and Turkish forces.
That has led to calls from the army for an operation into
northern Iraq to deal with the PKK based there but while the government
has said it agrees with the army and an operation could be launched,
it has not reconvened Parliament to approve such a move. At the weekend,
a PKK member hijacked an oil tanker truck and blew it up at a gendarme
post, killing himself and the truck's driver, but troops had fled in
time and escaped unscathed, security officials said.
3. - Eurasianet - "Turkey: The Political Process Experiences a Quiet Revolution":
27 June 2007 / by Nicholas Birch
There was much fanfare in early June when the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) moved into its new headquarters in Ankara district of Sogutozu. The building, 14 storeys of gleaming white marble, stands 400 meters from another occupied by the AKP’s main rival, the Republican People’s Party (CHP).
The edifices are designed to create the impression that only well-oiled machines can succeed in Turkish politics. But with just over four weeks to go until special parliamentary elections, established parties are facing an unexpected threat. Hundreds of independent candidates have joined the race, and a substantial number of them stands a good chance of infiltrating a political system that many believe to be critically ill.
“Turkey’s political system has never tolerated dissenting voices”, says Baskin Oran, a professor who is campaigning out of a tiny office in central Istanbul. “But it only takes one voice to turn everything upside down, and we will be more than one.” Most of the flaws in the system date back to 1982, when a military junta pushed through a new constitution cementing its political influence, and thereby hampering the smooth development of civil society.
But it was during the elections in 2002, when just two parties won the 10 percent of the vote needed to gain representation in parliament, that questions really began to be asked. Many analysts blame the comparatively high voter threshold for parliamentary representation for the current artificial polarization of the country into secular and religious wings. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive].
“The constitution talks about fair representation,” says Orhan Miroglu, a senior member of Turkey’s main Kurdish party, the Democratic Society Party, or DTP. “Parliament today represents barely half the votes cast.”
Miroglu’s party was one of the worst affected in 2002: it received 2 million votes – 6.2 percent Turkey-wide, and up to 70 percent in some majority-Kurdish districts – but that total did not translate into even one parliamentary seat. This time, DTP members are running as independents, and they expect to win at least 20 seats. A left-wing party and an ultra-nationalist party have followed DTP in taking the independent road. So have a series of candidates of the sort Turkey has never seen before.
There are miners, transvestites and religious-minded human rights campaigners. Last week, at a press conference outside Istanbul’s best-known brothel, two former state-employed prostitutes announced they were joining the race too, to draw attention to the appalling conditions in which their colleagues work.
“This could not have happened five years ago”, Baskin Oran says. “But with the passing of EU reforms, people who before were too frightened to speak out are beginning to make their voices heard.” [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive].
Others hope independents will also be an antidote to parties that political analyst Murat Yetkin compares to “feudal states.”
You only have to watch a few minutes of parliamentary coverage to see what he means. At party meetings, the only one talking is the leader, often for hours. MPs, meanwhile, applaud, and hope their names will be on the list for upcoming elections.
When many of them found they hadn’t been, they got little sympathy from the press. “They said nothing against their leaders’ tyranny, but rebelled when their names were crossed out,” said a commentary published by the daily Radikal.
“If MPs whose political futures are not trapped between their party leaders’ lips begin to speak up fearlessly, it can only be good for democracy”, the newspaper’s columnist Haluk Sahin argued.
It is too early to predict how successful independent candidates will be. But the signs indicate that the two major parties are nervous, particularly the DTP.
Bitterly divided over secularism, the AKP and CHP cooperated in May to change a constitutional article on independent candidates. On separate pieces in the past, independent candidates’ names are now on the same voting slip as party candidates.
It may sound sensible enough. But Esat Canan, a CHP deputy for the Kurdish district of Hakkari, who recently left the party in protest over its increasing nationalism, described the motivation behind the change as “pure cynicism.”
“Illiteracy is high in the southeast, particularly among women”, he explained. “When voters fill the forms in wrong, their votes can be cancelled.”
For Ayhan Bilgen – the former head of the conservative human rights group Mazlum-Der, and an independent candidate in the central Anatolian city of Konya – the most troubling aspect of the vote was the alacrity with which AKP participated, barely a week after the army had threatened to intervene against it. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive]. He thinks the legal change is likely to backfire on the parties that pushed it through. Already, he says, people in the southeast are working hard to make sure it doesn’t affect independent candidates’ chances.
“You never know, literacy levels might even rise as a result,” Canan says.
* Editor’s Note: Nicolas Birch specializes in
Turkey, Iran and the Middle East.
4. - BBC - "Turkey unhappy at EU talks delay":
26 June 2007
Turkey has said it is not satisfied with the EU's reasons for not opening membership talks in the area of economic and monetary policy.
The talks were delayed because France signalled objections, reflecting President Nicolas Sarkozy's opposition to Turkey joining the European Union.
But membership negotiations were started in two other areas on Tuesday.
Turkey's chief negotiator, Ali Babacan, said Ankara hoped the problems would be overcome in the next six months.
"We are not satisfied with the technical justifications that were given to us and we hope that there will be progress in this matter during the Portuguese presidency," he said.
Turkey and the euro
Germany, which will hand the EU presidency over to Portugal on 1 July, had hoped to make more progress with the negotiations during its six months in charge.
The BBC's Oana Lungescu in Brussels said France's decision to delay the talks on economic and monetary policy was intended to demonstrate that Mr Sarkozy was keeping an election promise to keep Turkey out of the EU.
A French diplomat said discussing monetary union with Turkey implied that Turkey could one day adopt the euro.
Croatian breakthrough
There are 35 policy chapters which must be successfully negotiated before a country can join the EU.
Turkey now has four chapters under way.
Croatia, which began membership talks at the same time as Turkey, opened six more chapters at Tuesday's talks, bringing its total to 12.
Croatia seems well on track to become the EU's 28th member by the end of the decade, our correspondent says, provided it continues reforms and tackles corruption. But Turkey's bid, she says, seems to go from crisis to crisis.
The EU suspended negotiations on eight chapters last year, after Turkey failed to open its ports and airports to traffic from EU-member Cyprus.
It has decided that chapters not linked to trade policy
can still be opened, but not closed until the Cyprus issue is resolved.
5. - Bianet - "A Chronology: Hrant Dink's Murder":
As the first hearing in the case of Hrant Dink's murder is approaching on 2 July, a chronology of events surrounding his murder is offered. Editor-in-chief of the Armenian-Turkish Agos newspaper, Dink was shot dead on January 19.
ISTANBUL / 27 June 2007
The murder of Agos newspaper's editor-in-chief Hrant Dink on 19 January 2007 in front of his newspaper's office in Sisli, central Istanbul, shocked both Turkey and the world. Hundreds of thousands of people showed their grief in Dink's funeral procession.
One day after the murder, a person was arrested as a suspect. The following investigation brought to light networks of connections. The first hearing of the case is on 2 July.
In order to remind our readers of the complicated series of events, we publish a chronology of the Dink murder prepared by journalist Mehmet Güc.
6 February 2004 The Agos newspaper publishes the account of Hripsime Gazalyan, an Armenian from Gaziantep (south-east Turkey), who says that Turkey's first woman pilot Sabiha Gökcen was an Armenian orphan who was adopted after the events of 1915.
24 February 2004 Editor-in-chief Hrant Dink is called to the Istanbul Governor's Office, where it is said that he was threatened by two people in the presence of the vice-governor.
25 February 2004 One day later, following the complaint of one Mehmet Soykan to the Sisli Public Prosecutor's Office, Hrant Dink is accused of "degrading Turkishness" (Article 301) in another of his articles.
26 February 2004 A group of people who identify themselves as members of the nationalist "hearth of ideals" (Ülkü Ocaklary) congregates in front of the Agos newspaper Office, shouting threatening slogans and holding placards, saying things such as "Be careful", "you will be held accountable" and "your hand will be broken".
2 February 2006 Together with his lawyer, Hrant Dink applies to the Sisli Public Prosecutor's Office for an investigation into a threatening letter he received from one Ahmet Demir, resident in Bursa, who said "your end has come, first we will kill your son and then you".
19 January 2007 Hrant Dink, journalist and writer, dies after he is attacked when leaving the office of his newspaper at around 3 pm. He is shot three times in his head and neck. Three empty bullet shells are found next to Dink's body. According to the autopsy report, two bullets hit Dink's head from behind. Eye witnesses say that the shooting was committed by a young managed 18-19, wearing jeans and a white beret.
20 January 2007 It is announced that the murder suspect
"O.S." was arrested at a bus station in Samsun (on the Black
Sea) at around 11 pm that day. Istanbul Governor Muammer Güler
states that the operation is conducted by both police and gendarmerie,
and that the murder weapon and the white beret were found on the suspect's
person. Later it is also claimed that a Turkish flag was found on O.S.'s
person. That night, O.S. is taken to the Samsun gendarmerie station,
and
three hours later, at around 2 am, to the Samsun police station. Towards
morning, the suspect is sent to Istanbul in a special plane.
20 January 2007 It is announced that a plastic bag containing a white beret, a jeans jacket, a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, all believed to belong to suspect O.S., has been found in a waiting underground carriage at the Sisli station of the Taksim-Levent line.
20 January 2007 A spokesman of the Yeni Pelitlispor football club which O.S. played for for a while, claimed that O.S. was not the type to carry out a murder but that he might have been manipulated.
20 January 2007 Muhsin Yazicioglu, general president of the Great Union Party (BBP), states that murder suspect O.S. had no relation to the party's youth branch, the Alperen Hearths, and that his party is being targeted unfairly.
21 January 2007 In his first statement at the gendarmerie station in Samsun, O.S. has claimed that he went to Istanbul and committed the murder single-handedly after reading Dink's articles on the internet, feeling offended and deciding to kill him.
In his first statement in Istanbul, however, he claims that with nine other young men, he went into the mountain pastures of Trabzon and did shooting practice, and that he was chosen because of his weapon skills and ability to run fast.
21 January 2007 According to several newspapers, including Hürriyet, the bus ticket that O.S. used for his escape to Trabzon was bought by an unidentified woman.
21 January 2007 Istanbul Police Chief Celalettin Cerrah announces that there is no political dimension or organisation behind the murder and that it was motivated by nationalist feelings.
21 January 2007 Retired General Kenan Evren, the leader of the 12 September 1980 military coup and the 7th President of Turkey, suggests that there must be an organisation behind the murder: "This murder is not the act of a child or his friends. There is someone in Trabzon. A 17-year-old was chosen on purpose".
22 January 2007 Istanbul Vali Muammer Güler states that it is up to the prosecution (and not the police chief) to decide whether the murder was organised. He does not add any further comments on the investigation.
22 January 2007 Abdülkadir Aksu, Minister of the Interior, states in a press release at the Istanbul Police Department: "As a nation, we are deeply saddened by the murder of journalist Hrant Dink. Our only consolation is that we have caught a considerable number of people behind the murder".
23 January 2007 A newspaper account based on police sources claims that O.S.'s father recognised his son from the television news and informed the police. Furthermore, O.S. bought his ticket in his own name and used an intercity bus with the number plate 34 JAZ 53. He was arrested in Samsun because the military informed the Samsun gendarmerie.
23 January 2007 Journalist Ertugrul Özkök writes: "After the murder, he did not throw away the two most important pieces of evidence, the gun and the white beret. Even the police is amazed. Have you asked yourself why he did not throw away the evidence? The answer is simple. He returns to Trabzon. There he will boast to his friends that he killed Hrant Dink. Most probably, his friends will not believe him and make fun of him. That is why he takes the evidence, just to convince his friends. And I am frightened of this state of mind. If it were an organisation, then the state's intelligence units, security forces, would destroy it. But how do you destroy this? A quarter or a city?"
23 January 2007 It is announced that Yasin Hayal has frequently met with a retired colonel living in Trabzon. Colonel H.M.B. has influence in a group in Trabzon and it is suggested that he has influenced Yasin Hayal in planning Dink's murder.
23 January 2007 The last sentence in O.S.'s 8-page statement to the prosecution is "I regret killing Hrant Dink". O.S. was questioned the day before after being examined by psychologists.
23 January 2007 According to Milliyet newspaper, the gendarmerie command of Pelitli district in Trabzon (where both O.S. and Yasin Hayal lived) have announce via municipality loudspeakers that nobody should give information to civilians.
23 January 2007 Erhan Tuncel, an arrested student of the Black Sea Technical University in Trabzon, who is said to have given orders to Yasin Hayal (who in turn incited O.S. to the murder), is said to have taken part in the organisation of BBP leader Muhsin Yazicioglu's Trabzon visits. In a photo taken at a press conference in Trabzon, Yazicioglu and Tuncel are in the same photo. Yazicioglu comments:
"I do not think that he is a member of the BBP, but he might have frequented the Hearth. Are we establishing a crime from every photo?"
23 January 2007 At a B-League football match, the Football Federation bans a placard saying "We are all Hrant Dink, we are all Armenian" [the text used on placards at his funeral to express solidarity] from being shown.
24 January 2007 After being questioned at the police station and being taken to Besiktas court in Istanbul, suspect Yasin Hayal shouts at the journalists:
"Orhan Pamuk had better be careful!" The same day, in their first confrontation, O.S. asks Hayal: "Why did you make me kill him?" O.S. claims that "Yasin Hayal said 'kill' and I killed him".
24 January 2007 Trabzon Mayor Hüseyin Yavuz comments on the murder by saying: " It was a murder carried out in an amateur manner. There is no ideological organisation. He was used by a person whose name we know and organised. He was encouraged".
24 January 2007 Istanbul Public Prosecutor Aykut Cengiz Engin announces that including O.S. and Yasin Hayal five persons have been arrested.
24 January 2007 The Ankara Bar President's Office demands
a discipline and punish investigation into the alleged threats to Hrant
Dink by the Istanbul
vice-governor and two other persons.
25 January 2007 Mete Cagdas, a columnist of a local newspaper in Sinop (western Black Sea), brings charges against the organising committee and participants in Hrant Dink's funeral procession for saying "We are all Armenian", claiming that this is contrary to Article 301.
26 January 2007 On the demand of the Istanbul Public Prosecution's Office, five suspects in the Hrant Dink murder are not charged with founding a terrorist organisation. This is to the advantage of the suspects.
28 January 2007 In a match between Kayserispor and Trabzonspor, and in another match on the same day, placards reading "We are all Turkish", "We are all from Trabzon", "We are all Mustafa Kemal" are displayed.
30 January 2007 It is claimed that based on information by "key name" Erhan Tuncel, the Trabzon police informed the Istanbul police of a possible murder 11 months ago. Student Tuncel states that he worked as a police informant and informed the police of the murder plan.
1 February 2007 According to ANKA news agency, an officer from the Trabzon police said that telephone calls by the Dink murder suspects were listened to from Augst to October 2006. The police allegedly applied for a new court decision in October to continue listening, but that was not granted. Because the suspect Yasin Hayal and his group lived in a gendarmerie zone, the police did not have sufficient authority to continue listening in on their calls.
2 February 2007 Pictures of murder suspect O.S. appear in the media. The pictures were taken after his capture in Samsun, and he is posing in front of a Turkish flag with an Atatürk quote. It later turns out that the Province Police Chief Mustafa Ilhan and the gendarmerie commander on duty, Captain Murat Bayrak, as well as a prosecutor were present when the photos were taken. Police and gendarmerie officers also made video recordings together with O.S. at the Samsun police headquarters. O.S. is obviously treated as a hero. Some others have taken pictures on digital and other cameras and on their mobile phones.
2 February 2007 The Turkish Left magazine, which had nominated Hrant Dink in 6th place for the "fascists of the year" in 2006, continues to publish, although the campaign is subject of a court case. The same magazine continues to publish articles which show that it is not disturbed by the murder. In an article by Gökce Firat, entitled "Turkey Has Lost an Enemy", it says:
"Dink does not become a martyr of the press or of democracy because he was murdered. When he was alive, he was an enemy of Turks and Turkey who defended the Armenian theses against this country".
4 February 2007 The "police informant" Erhan Tuncel is said to have been involved in the bombing of a McDonalds' branch in Trabzon in 2004. Milliyet newspaper finds out that although it was demanded that he be brought before court by the police after the bombing, he was never present at any hearings and virtually ignored. Although the court wanted Tuncel's telephone calls to be monitored, there was no application made later.
4 February 2007 At a football match in Afyonkarahisar (central Anatolia), fans on the tribunes shouted "We are all Ogün" [the name of the young murder suspect] and wore white berets in his support.
6 February 2007 It becomes clear that Erhan Tuncel, the student police informant, was among those planning Dink's assassination. He informed the police in February 2006 that Yasin Hayal would kill Hrant Dink, and the Trabzon Police Headquarters informed Police Headquarters in Ankara and in Istanbul. Around 5 months later, gendarmerie officials were also informed. According to Milliyet newspaper, Yasin Hayal's aunt's husband Coskun Igci was arrested in Trabzon on 31 January and questioned at the Istanbul Police Department for Terrorism. Igci said that he had been working as an informant for the gendarmerie since 2004 and that he had informed the gendarmerie intelligence officers of Hayal's murder plan in July 2006.
12 February 2007 Trabzon Public Prosecutor Fatih Genc twice visits the young assasin O.A., who killed the priest Andrea Santoro in Trabzon in February 2006. Genc asks O.A. if he was incited to the murder. O.A. however says that he was not.
15 February 2007 Because both Santoro and Dink murders were not classified as "terrorism", the Communication Monitoring Regulations do not allow for the monitoring of the criminal organisation.
22 March 2007 It turns out that the "big brother" Erhan Tuncel, who has been arrested for inciting the Hrant Dink murder, talked to a police officer called M.Z. from the Trabzon intelligence department after the murder. M.Z. asks questions such as: "Has your group committed the murder? Did it happen like you told me? Did Yasin shoot?"
27 March 2007 The BBP leader in Trabzon Province, Yasar Cihan, is arrested in the Dink case and says in his statement that in Trabzon everyone knew that Erhan Tuncel and Yasin Hayal were planning to kill Dink. He claims to have tried to make them give up the plan but not to have been able to reach them. The son of Cihan says that he knew Erhan Tuncel at university and that Yasin Hayal was a neighbourhood friend. "I became close to them both at the Alperen Hearths. I have no connection to the Dink murder. I have not seen either of them for a year. I believe that Erhan Tuncel has been used by others."
27 March 2007 Hrant Dink's son Arat and brother Orhan Dink, with their lawyer Arzu Becerik, meet with one of the prosecutors responsible for the investigation, Fikret Secen. This is the second time they meet with the prosecution. The family has expressed its worries at the efficacy of the investigation.
28 March 2007 It emerges that the key person Erhan Tuncel was arrested in Trabzon, and that he was then read the statements of the other suspects and then let go. His flatmate Tuncay Uzundal says that Tuncel told him: "Last night they read me the statements of the people they had arrested. They asked my opinion and then let me go". Uzundal also explained some of the relations which Tuncel had with MIT (National Intelligence Service), the police and the gendarmerie.
Uzundal says that he heard of Yasin Hayal's arrest on television and that Tuncel did not come home until late that night.
20 April 2007 After the website of the Pelitlispor football club in Trabzon had published messages supporting the murders of Hrant Dink and priest Santoro, support for the murder of three Christians in Malatya on 18 April 2007 becomes apparent at a Malatyaspor website. The Pelitlispor internet site also speaks of the killers in Malatya as the "Malatya knights".
10 May 2007 In the course of the investigation it turns out that the Presidency of the Police Intelligence Department has destroyed a 48-page report on Erhan Tuncel. Apparently the Chief Public Prosecutor's Office had asked the Presidency of the Police Intelligence Department (PID) for information and documents in a letter on 29 January. A file sent by PID president and former Trabzon Police Chief Ramazan Akyürek on 6 February contains the report.
However, it is specified in the accompanying letter that the report contains vital information that must on no account be transcribed, and that all the attached files must be destroyed after having been read. In the same letter it is noted that the relevant file is also found in the archives and can always be obtained again. Thus the prosecution destroys the report.
Police officer M.Z., who was the contact person for Erhan Tuncel, says that Tuncel had told them that Yasin Hayal wanted to kill Hrant Dink. "We took it seriously and began to look around. We monitored Yasin's telephone. When we realised it was serious, we twice sent a report to the Presidency of the PID, and I used Tuncel to try and get Hayal to give up the plan."
19 May 2007 Armenian schools in Istanbul are sent unsigned threatening letters which read "Last warning and alert". According to newspaper reports, the letters also say "Some Armenians are involved in activities which damage the unity of Turkey". The letters were sent to the Esayan, Getronagan and Tibrevank high schools, and Yesilköy, Topkapi Levon Vartuhyan, Bakirköy Dadyan, Tarkmancats and Karagözyan primary schools.
1 June 2007 Four auditors researching whether there was
neglect on behalf of the Trabzon Province Gendarmerie Command in preventing
the murder of Hrant Dink cannot come to a unanimous decision. Two auditors
demand permission to question four privates employed in the gendarmerie
intelligence, while the two others do not see the need.
6. - DPA - "European court rules Turkey must pay
damages to son of murdered man":
STRASBOURG / 27 June 2007
The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has ruled
that Turkey must pay a 32-year-old man 80,000 euros (107,700 dollars)
in compensation for the shooting to death of his father in 1996.
The father, a 43-year-old businessman, was arrested in 1996 by the Turkish
military in an area of eastern Turkey mainly populated by Kurds. His
bound body with fatal gunshot wounds was found on a street a few weeks
later.
Three suspects were acquitted in court for his murder.
In its ruling, the European human rights court said credible witnesses had testified that the man was arrested by the military and that the Turkish authorities had never given a plausible explanation for his violent death.
This meant that the state had failed in its duty to protect
his life. Justice in this case had also not been properly administered,
the court added.