This is an excerpt from Turkey Briefing, Al-Monitor's weekly newsletter covering the big stories of the week in Turkey. To get Turkey Briefing in your inbox, sign up here.
The assassin of prominent Armenian news editor Hrant Dink was freed late Wednesday for “good conduct” in what critics charge is a further example of the politicization of Turkey’s judiciary under the country’s authoritarian president.
Ogun Samast was released on parole under the terms of an amnesty law passed in July (one that excludes terrorism cases) after spending 16 years and 10 months for the 2007 murder of Dink outside the office of his newspaper, Agos, in Istanbul.
Ozgur Ozel, the newly elected leader of the main opposition Republican People’s Party, blasted the move, saying Samast was “supposed to stay for life.” “We have no words. Any who talks about justice after this is truly heartless,” Ozel noted on X.
“This night is a very bad night. The worst night in recent years,” lamented Alin Ozinian, an Armenian-Turkish journalist. Dink had told Ozinian in an interview, the last prior to his death, “The deep state has put a target on me.”
Samast, who was 17 years old at the time of the murder, was widely believed to be acting in concert with rogue ultranationalists and their allies in the security forces. They viewed Dink as a threat because of his efforts to draw attention to the genocide of more than one million Armenians by the Ottomans in 1915, a taboo topic.
His murder struck a chord and more than 100,000 people, many of whom had not previously heard of Dink, marched at his funeral bearing placards that read “We are all Armenians.”
In truth, Samast was expected to be released earlier — in 2020 — and serve his remaining 1.5 years on parole. However, his discharge was postponed after he was given a separate five-year long sentence for striking a prison warden. The actual miscarriage of justice, legal experts say, stems from the fact that Samast was not prosecuted for Dink’s murder as part of an organized terror network and was sentenced instead for voluntary manslaughter and illegal possession of a weapon.
Erdal Dogan, one of several lawyers who represented the Dink family in the case, commented on the matter to Al-Monitor. “The Turkish justice system that penalizes even the slightest criticism of the government as ‘membership of a terrorist organization’ or ‘terrorist propaganda’ chose to treat the political murder of Hrant Dink that was planned by tens of people, including those serving in state institutions, as an ordinary crime,” he said.
Turkey’s justice system has been repeatedly condemned by international legal bodies, notably the European Court of Human Rights, whose rulings Ankara has considered binding since 1990. Yet in recent years Turkey has repeatedly flouted them, most notably with respect to the court’s demands that Turkish philanthropist Osman Kavala and Kurdish politician Selahattin Demirtas be immediately freed.
Kavala, a dogged proponent of Turkish-Armenian reconciliation, has been in jail since 2017, serving the most severe type of life sentence under Turkish law, on flimsily evidenced charges that he sought to overthrow the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as an alleged instigator of the mass Gezi protests that shook Turkey in 2013.
Demirtas has been convicted on a raft of similarly specious terror charges, with prosecutors demanding life in a case linked to the Kobani riots that erupted in 2014 in the mainly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir over the government’s perceived support for the Islamic State.
In a further twist, Turkey’s Court of Cassation filed a criminal complaint against the Constitutional Court, the highest court in the land, for having ruled in favor of freeing Can Atalay, a human rights activist jailed in the Gezi case, after he was elected to parliament from a left-wing opposition party in the May elections. Under Turkish law, members of parliament are immune to prosecution and Atalay’s continued detention is deemed unlawful under Article 14 of the Turkish constitution.
Erdogan waded into the debate, calling the Constitutional Court’s ruling “a mistake."
In a September interview with PBS’ “Newshour,” Erdogan called Kavala the “financier” of the Gezi protests and Demirtas “a terrorist who caused the death of more than 200 people.” He said that the original ruling was rightfully upheld. When anchor Amna Nawaz reminded him that the European Court of Human Rights disagreed with his assessment, Erdogan erupted. “You're not going to interrupt me. And respect me. And you are going to respect the judgment of the judiciary as well?” Erdogan fumed. Kavala and Demirtas deny all the charges.
'Dark corridors'
Coming only days before a conference on minority rights in Turkey to be hosted by the Hrant Dink Foundation on Nov. 17, Samast’s release has touched a raw nerve among Armenians worldwide.
Khatchig Mouradian is a professor at Columbia University in New York who was written extensively on the Armenian genocide. He told Al-Monitor, “Sunlight, they say, is the best disinfectant. When Ogun Samast walks free and Osman Kavala remains in prison in two cases that have for years been under global spotlight, one can’t even begin to imagine what happens in the darker corridors of Turkey’s justice system.”
Mouradian contended that Samast’s release is further proof of Ankara’s cavalier approach to purported normalization with neighboring Armenia, with which it has yet to establish diplomatic relations or open its land borders.
In 2020, Turkey played a pivotal role in helping Azerbaijan wrest back territories occupied by Armenia in a previous war and sat on its hands in September as Azerbaijan effectively expelled in less than two weeks nearly the entire Armenian population — more than 100,000 people — of the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, which was until then majority Armenian but formally part of Azerbaijan.
“Over the past three years, Ankara has not displayed a shred of concern for how its words and deeds may impact normalization. Why should it care now? It believes Yerevan has no choice but to stay the course,” Mouradian said.
The case of Gultan Kisanak, the former co-mayor of Diyarbakir who was ousted by the government and jailed in 2016 for her alleged role in the Kobani riots, among other supposed crimes, is one such travesty. She remains behind bars even though under Turkey’s penal code defendants who have not been convicted can only be held for a maximum of seven years. “This is, in essence, an automatic violation of my right to a fair trial. You are aware of this,” she told the presiding judge in a Nov. 12 hearing.
Borrow books or else
Such violations abound but are rarely noticed as most victims are not in the public eye. Take Mustafa Okcul, who was jailed and sentenced to death in 1993 for membership in the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) at the height of the rebels’ insurgency. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 1999 when Turkey scrapped the death penalty in line with its now moribund efforts to join the European Union. Okcul was due to be freed on good conduct six months ago. However, prosecutors deemed that he had not “borrowed enough books from the prison library” and was therefore not fit to “integrate with society.”
Bunyamin Seker, president of the Free Lawyers’ Association, an advocacy group based in Diyarbakir, is dealing with Okcul’s case along with a host of similar ones. He said that the prison set a cap on the number of books inmates are allowed to borrow and that Okcul’s family would send him books on a regular basis. “The claims are laughable,” Seker noted. “Mustafa had fulfilled all the criteria for good conduct. He had not engaged in any violence when he was arrested.”
From his private meetings with Turkish officials, Seker said he had concluded that “the real reason” Okcul was not being freed was because he refused to denounce the PKK and express contrition. Another of his clients, a university student who was jailed for six years for taking part in an anti-government demonstration, saw her release put off by a year. Authorities cited Emine Erol’s refusal to meet with a prison psychiatrist for the delay. She was finally released two weeks ago.
“The system is riddled with double standards,” Seker told Al-Monitor. “Some are more equal than others before the law.”
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