MISSING POLITICIANS, STATE'S ASSASSINS, AND RESPONSIBILITY

"A state always calls itself fatherland when it is ready for murder."
~ Friedrich Durenmatt.

Remember over the weekend, how everyone suddenly became brothers over Hrant Dink's murder? Well, I guess no one passed the word to any of Turkey's bigshot politicians, because not a single one of them bothered to show up at Dink's funeral yesterday. Take a look at TDN:

As tens of thousands of people in the streets and millions in their homes were bidding farewell to murdered journalist Hrant Dink, nearly all of the country's leading politicians were conspicuous only for their absence.

Who had better things to do? Turkish president Ahmet Necdet Sezer, who doesn't "do" funerals on some kind of principle known only to him. Besides, he had better things to do with the Polish president and the Parliament speaker of Turkish-occupied Cyprus. Who else was missing? Parliament speaker Bulent Arinc, Prime Minister Erdogan, and Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul. Apparently they did send the Interior Minister, and that must have served a two-fold purpose: to make sure no more Deep State assassins showed up to further damage Turkey's international image by blowing away a few more "undesirables," and to take notes on anyone displaying too much "brotherhood," so that they could receive a discreet warning later. . . like a bullet in the mail from a non-existent return address.

It's kind of odd, isn't it? In the US, the Department of the Interior is in charge of stuff like national parks, water resources, rocks, trees; while in Turkey, the Interior Ministry is in charge of stuff like the state's assassins. Does anyone remember Yesil aka Ahmet Demir aka Mahmut Yildirim or Abdullah Catli? They are (or were, in the case of Catli) notorious state assassins. Who was in charge of them? Well, at the time of Susurluk, when we came closest to getting a glimpse of where all the tentacles of the Deep State might lead, Mehmet Agar was in charge of them. He was the Interior Minister in Ciller's government.

Check out this headline: "Hrant's funeral brought Armenian and Turkish officials together". Then TNA goes on to mention absolutely nothing about any officials other than the Armenian Patriarch of Turkey. For that thoroughly deceptive headline, TNA gets the gold star for today's biggest media prevarication.

More from the Feeding-the-Monster Department: The Association of Literary Translators in Turkey has issued a statement on the question of responsibility of the murder of Hrant Dink:

The greatest share of responsibility rests on all institutions of state which still regard ideas and the expressions of ideas as “dangerous”, and which have long accustomed to exercising “violence” through judicial threats towards any writer, caricaturist, thinker, journalist, publisher, translator, NGO activist or whoever questions the state’s own “official” views on anything. The responsibility rests on the state’s legislative, executive and judiciary constituents and within its parliament and within its opposition. The very of act judging someone merely because he or she argued for or against an opinion is itself an act of violence that encourages some “civil” know-it-alls to exercise violence and literal “terror” on any intellectual saying something contrary to the received wisdom.

The second big responsibility lies within the mainstream media that does not fulfill its duty of monitoring the administrators of the state on behalf of the public or its duty of making visible the systematic pressures and violations of rights which hover above all freedoms in general and above the freedom of expression in particular, and thereby cautioning the public of these misdemeanors. Instead, this mainstream media has done everything to the best of its abilities in order to justify the pressure exerted on those using their inalienable rights, and now it is shedding crocodile tears. The media see the demands for freedom and rights merely as “impositions from the EU”. They fail to stress that freedoms as such are necessary to ensure our own right to live in decency regardless of EU membership. Responsibility also goes to any faction that readily labels anybody attempting to open up any kind of debate on the EU, or discuss issues concerning Kurds and Armenians as “sellout puppets”, “traitors”, “instruments of imperialists”, or “agents” and then terrorize them. All of them are responsible for the enormous psychological torture and threats to which Hrant Dink has recently been subjected to, and as a result of which he described his predicament as "the dove skittishness of my soul." Indeed, we are all responsible, for we were unable to support him sufficiently to help him speak freely without fearing for his life.

A brilliant piece of writing, especially since many translators have also been charged under Article 301. The ones that come to mind immediately on that score are Fatih Tas, his publishing house, Aram, along with a number of Aram's editors and translators. In particular is their work on Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent and John Tirman's Spoils of War, but these are not the only ones to find themselves charged with "insulting Turkishness" or some other Article 301-sanctioned stupidity.

A third suspect has been picked up in connection with the murder, a guy going by the name of Erhan T. Again from TDN:

Investigating a third layer of involvement in the Hrant Dink murder, a new brother, Elazığ-born Erhan T. was arrested in Trabzon two days ago and brought to Istanbul yesterday, daily Hürriyet reported. By snatching Erhan T. the police reached the third circle of the investigation, it was reported. Together with suspected murderer Ogün Samast and Yasin Hayal - the brother who had given the gun to Samast according to his police confession - Erhan T. is thought to be the third person of the link.

[ . . . ]

Police sources said that Erhan T. is also suspected to be behind the murder of Italian Priest Santoro in Trabzon in 2004. Police are investigating the similarities between the Dink case and the Santoro murder, they said.

According to TDN, Yasin Hayal was the snitch that led Turkish police to pick up Erhan T. Additionally, people are starting to notice that Hayal did less than a year's time for bombing a McDonald's in Trabzon a couple of years ago. On the surface it may look inconsistent that someone carrying out a terrorist act is given a sentence of less than a year by a state that prides itself on its gung-ho attitude to the global War on Terror, Inc., but this kind of thing is not a serious crime in Turkey, even if you do threaten to blow up a Russian embassy or few banks once you get out of the big house. A serious crime in Turkey consists of writing things like, oh, I don't know . . . "The Armenians were genocided," or "Kurds suffer repression."

In the same report, long-time Deep State murderer Veli Kucuk is turning a bit Erdogan-ish, by threatening to sue anyone--particularly Dink's lawyer, Erdal Dogan--who claims that Kucuk threatened Dink. How are we supposed to read that with a straight face when we know it's coming from the same guy who invented his own "state secrets' privilege," thereby disregarding the Susurluk trial altogether. If anyone else, in any other place but Turkey, decided to dis a court on so much as a traffic violation, they'd be held in contempt by the presiding judge, fined, and probably spend at least a few nights in jail. Not so in Turkey, at least not with the Deep State's murderers, that is.

Equally amusing and enlightening is what the lawyer, Dogan, says: "Dink had been receiving threats for two-and-a-half years. The name that worried him most was Veli Küçük. But this is not an an aspersion (misleading charge meant to harm his reputation)."

Geeeeeezzz . . . I didn't think it was possible to harm the reputation of a bastard like Kucuk. Maybe that's what Dogan meant.

Hehehe . . . funny how close in sound the name Küçük is to the word kûçik, but I'm not going to press that issue too much; it's an insult to dogs.