Kamil Pasha

On Saturday January 19th, just minutes before 3pm, about eight thousand people had gathered before the Agos newspaper office in downtown Istanbul to remember the time and place where a year earlier the Armenian Turkish journalist Hrant Dink had been shot and killed by an ultranationalist youth from the Black Sea town of Trabzon. He had traveled all the way to Istanbul to commit this murder because he said he had heard Dink had called Turkish blood poisonous. This was a garbled misreading of one of Dink’s news articles about the massacres of Armenians in the early twentieth century. Dink’s writings called for recognition of this tragedy, but also for reconciliation between ethnic Armenians and ethnic Turks. The killer was encouraged in his action by Dink’s conviction under a Turkish law that makes “insulting Turkishness” a criminal offense. Orhan Pamuk and many other writers and publishers have been caught up in this judicial dragnet, then, even if their cases were dropped, convicted by ultranationalists on the street. I had met Hrant Dink once in his office. He was a tall, hearty man with a beaming smile, bounding with energy and enthusiasm. He was respected and loved by people of all religions and backgrounds in Turkey and abroad. A hundred thousand people joined in his funeral procession last year holding up signs in several languages, including Armenian and Kurdish, that said “We are all Armenian” and “We are all Hrant”.

I wanted to attend his memorial and set out that morning through the brisk sunshine, joining a stream of people of all ages, some carrying bouquets of flowers, pictures of Hrant Dink pinned to their chests. I saw no one wearing a headscarf, that is, representing the devout majority or the ruling AK Party. This surprised me, as Dink’s death is an issue that resonates with the AKP’s efforts to give Turkey’s Christians broader rights and protections. Why would the AKP and its pious supporters, as well as other religious groups like the Fethullah Gulen movement – all of whom trumpet their interest in ecumenical dialogue – stay away from a commemoration of one of the most grievous lacerations of that in recent Turkish history?

The sign says: We are all hybrids.

I was fairly near the Agos office and enveloped on all sides by a great crowd that stretched from Taksim to Harbiye. Speeches were made, mournful music played. Hrant’s widow made an impassioned appeal for justice in trying his murderer (or murderers – there are signs of a conspiracy and evidence files and videos have disappeared). The speeches were interrupted occasionally by groups of young men chanting for justice. When they began to taunt the sea of police standing ready in full riot gear, gasmasks in hand, the crowd tried to shame them into silence. To their credit, the police didn’t respond to the verbal taunts. In the past, the police have been known to violently break up even peaceful demonstrations. Only much later in Beyoglu did a scuffle break out as protesters on their way home stoned an ultranationalist party office. (By that time I was sipping a latte in a distant cafe.)

Kamil Pasha too faces these distinctions between different security forces, each with its own way of operating. Kamil can call on the para-military gendarmerie force under Captain Arif with his gleaming Peabody-Martini rifle and well-trained troops – or on Chief Omar Loutfi’s police force in Fatih who live at the edge of legality, wield brutality as just another law enforcement tool, but also have an intimate knowledge of local culture. Chief Omar’s methods sometimes bring results and he has won Kamil’s grudging respect. The riots that broke out in front of the Aya Sofya in The Abyssinian Proof ended in a number of deaths, but the wily police chief stopped a riot from breaking out in a Balat square simply by playing on the psychology of the men involved.

What is justice? Is it something based on cultural belonging, on insider status? Or is it a principle applied equally to all, whether you like them or agree with them or not?

Tags: Culture, Deep state/Ergenekon, Fiction, Politics, Rights //