50,000 Turks mourn slain Armenian editor
ISTANBUL, Jan 23 (Reuters) Some 50,000 people filed silently through Istanbul today behind the coffin of Turkish Armenian editor Hrant Dink, whose murder has stirred debate about the influence of hardline nationalism in Turkey.
From early morning, tearful mourners, many holding identical black-and-white signs reading ''We are all Hrant Dink'' and ''We are all Armenians'', gathered outside the Agos newspaper office where Dink was shot three times in broad daylight last Friday.
White doves were released into the air as sombre music played.
Much of downtown Istanbul, a sprawling city of city some 12 million set on the Bosphorus waterway, was closed to traffic.
Ogun Samast, 17, has confessed to killing Dink for ''insulting'' Turks. A nationalist militant friend of Samast has admitted to police he incited Samast to kill Dink, who had worked for reconciliation between Christian Armenians and Muslim Turks.
''We are seeing off our brother with a silent walk, without slogans and without asking how a baby became a murderer,'' Dink's widow Rakel, surrounded by her three children, told mourners.
Turkey has become a more open, liberal country in recent years, helped by a swathe of reforms driven by the country's campaign to join the European Union. But the murder has highlighted the continued influence of ultra-nationalism.
Amid tight security, thousands of people followed the black hearse with the coffin on its 8-km journey across Istanbul and the Golden Horn waterway to an Armenian church.
Ministers, foreign diplomats, Armenian government officials and members of both Turkey's 60,000-strong Armenian community and the global Armenian diaspora joined the service.
''We still hope that (Turks)...will accept that the Armenians are Turkish citizens that have been living on this land for thousands of years and are not foreigners or potential enemies,'' Armenian Patriarch Mesrob II told the mourners.
Dink will be buried at the Balikli Armenian Cemetery.
MASSACRES Dink, like dozens of other intellectuals including Nobel Literature Laureate Orhan Pamuk, had been prosecuted for his views on the massacres of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915 -- a very sensitive issue in Turkey.
Turkish nationalists, including some senior politicians, regard the intellectuals' calls for Turkey to own up to its role in the massacres as a threat to national security and honour.
''This (murder) is not an exceptional case but the result of a poisonous nationalist atmosphere. Turkey's credibility abroad has hit rock bottom,'' said Vural Oger, a leading Turkish-German businessman and politician.
Turks are taught from early childhood to revere their country, its flag and its founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk -- but this heavy emphasis on the nation can lead to intolerance for outsiders and has fueled various militant groups over the decades ready to use violence against perceived threats.
Kurdish insurgency in the southeast, for instance, has raised hardline warnings of a national disintegration that had threatened before Ataturk founded the republic in 1923.
Turkey denies claims that 1.5 million Armenians died in a systematic genocide at Turkish hands, saying large numbers of both Christian Armenians and Muslim Turks perished during the messy breakup of the Ottoman Empire.
But, to Ankara's dismay, many foreign parliaments have passed laws recognising the massacres as genocide.
Dink's murder has increased pressure on the pro-EU government to scrap a controversial law, article 301, used against Dink and others to curb freedom of expression. Many mourners carried signs today saying ''301 -- murderer''.
REUTERS
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