How About the Deep State and State Terrorism in Turkey Mr. Erdogan?
On Tuesday June 1st, Turkey accused Israel of state-sponsored terrorism while describing Monday morning’s Israeli attack on a fleet of ships carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza.
“This action, totally contrary to the principles of international law, is inhumane state terrorism. No one should think we will keep quiet in the face of this,” Erdogan said. He added that this attack openly and in a clear way displayed that Israel does not want peace in the region.
A few days later, on June 3 2010, A Roman Catholic bishop was stabbed to death in southern Turkey, a day before he was scheduled to leave for Cyprus to meet with the pope, officials and reports said. Luigi Padovese, 63, the apostolic vicar in Anatolia, was attacked outside his home in the Mediterranean port of Iskenderun. The following day, on June 4 2010, Today's Zaman, one of two English-language dailies based in Turkey published the article mentioned below on death of Hakan Karadağ, the lawyer of Hrant Dink. Dink was a Turkish Armenian editor, journalist, columnist and editor-in-chief of the bilingual Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos. He was best known for advocating Turkish-Armenian reconciliation, human and minority rights in Turkey; and was critical of Turkey's denial of the Armenian Genocide. He was prosecuted three times for denigrating Turkishness, while receiving numerous death threats from Turkish nationalists. Dink was assassinated in Istanbul in January 2007, by Ogün Samast, a 17-year old Turkish nationalist.
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Dink family Lawyer Hakan Karadağ found dead in his apartment
A lawyer for the co-plaintiff in the trial over Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink's murder was found dead in his İstanbul apartment in an apparent suicide yesterday. No official report on the cause of death of Hakan Karadağ has yet been released.
Karadağ's body was taken from his house in Cihangir to the Council of Forensic Medicine (ATK) for an autopsy. Ogün Samast, an ultranationalist teenager and prime suspect in the Dink murder trial, had threatened Karadağ in the courtroom during one of the hearings. According to initial reports, Karadağ's girlfriend, with whom he shared the apartment, discovered the body when she walked into the apartment. Reports said she found Karadağ's body hanging from the ceiling. Police sent the body to the ATK morgue after conducting an investigation of the scene.
Relatives of Karadağ traveled to the ATK in the afternoon, and told press they were in a state of disbelief over the alleged suicide. Uncle Habip Karadağ told reporters: “I just saw him yesterday; he did not have any suicidal issues. He said he had a case that he had to attend to and left saying, ‘Hope to see you in the afternoon'.” Karadağ was the lawyer of a co-plaintiff in the Dink assassination trial.
Samast had said to Karadağ in the courtroom, “You’d better visit the prison one day,” his remark accompanied by a threatening hand gesture. Karadağ filed an official complaint with the judge to which Samast objected, saying he had no intention to threaten him and had only warned Karadağ not to insult him.
The first state official to make a statement on Karadağ’s death was Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç, who was notified of the news by journalists only minutes after Karadağ’s body was found. “It is a most saddening incident. The case’s relationship to Hrant Dink makes us all wonder. Sometimes such things occur when an important issue is on the agenda. Perhaps this was done ahead of the referendum with the intent of bringing such matters into the limelight or to increase concerns about terrorism. It should be viewed from all angles,” he said.
Dink was fatally shot by Samast outside the Agos weekly in 2007, but the masterminds of the assassination have still not been found. Three years after his death, Dink’s family and friends and rights organizations continue to voice anger that the mystery surrounding the the journalist’s murder has yet to be unraveled.
Lawyers representing the co-plaintiffs in the Dink trial have long alleged that the murder was the doing of Ergenekon, a clandestine gang charged with plotting to overthrow the government. Dink family lawyers have also petitioned the 14th High Criminal Court to contact the prosecutors investigating Ergenekon to request a copy of documents that describe the organization’s plots against religious minorities in Turkey. Such a document, called the Cage Operation Action Plan, was found last November during a police raid on the office of retired Maj. Levent Bektaş, a suspect in the Ergenekon investigation. This document speaks of Dink’s killing as an “operation.”
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Another Victim of the Turkish Hate Politics
Jun 3, 2010
Roman Catholic bishop stabbed to death in Turkey
By SUZAN FRASER
Associated Press Writer
ANKARA, Turkey (AP) -- A Roman Catholic bishop was stabbed to death in southern Turkey on Thursday, a day before he was scheduled to leave for Cyprus to meet with the pope, officials and reports said.
Luigi Padovese, 63, the apostolic vicar in Anatolia, was attacked outside his home in the Mediterranean port of Iskenderun. The killing was not believed to be politically motivated.
Dogan news agency video footage of the scene showed the bishop lying dead in front of a building.
Mehmet Celalettin Lekesiz, the governor for the province of Hatay, said police immediately caught the suspected killer. He said the man, identified only as Murat A., was Padovese's driver for the last four and a half years and was mentally unstable.
"The initial investigation shows that the incident is not politically motivated," Lekesiz said. "We have learned that the suspect had psychological problems and was receiving treatment."
Padovese, who is the equivalent of the bishop for the Anatolia region, was scheduled to leave for Cyprus on Friday to meet with the pope, who is visiting the island, and fellow bishops from around the region to prepare for a synod of Roman Catholic bishops in the Middle East. The synod is scheduled for October.
The Vatican-affiliated Asia News agency cited unnamed witnesses as saying the driver appeared to be "depressed, violent and threatening," in recent days.
No one answered phones at his church in Iskenderun.
The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, told The Associated Press in Rome that the Vatican felt "immense pain, consternation, (and) bewilderment" over the death and noted that it showed the "difficult conditions" of the Catholic community in the region.
He said the pope's upcoming visit to Cyprus and the upcoming synod of bishops on the Middle East showed "how the universal church is in solidarity with this community."
The killing is the latest in a string of attacks in recent years on Christians in Turkey, where Christians make up less than 1 percent of the 70 million population.
In 2007, a Roman Catholic priest in the western city of Izmir, Adriano Franchini, was stabbed and slightly wounded in the stomach by a 19-year-old man after Sunday Mass. The man was arrested.
The same year, a group of men entered a Bible-publishing house in the central Anatolian city of Malatya and killed three Christians, including a German national. The five alleged killers are now standing trial for murder.
The killings - in which the victims were tied up and had their throats slit - drew international condemnation and added to Western concerns about whether Turkey can protect its religious minorities.
In 2006, amid widespread anger in Islamic countries over the publication in European newspapers of caricatures of Islam's Prophet Muhammad, a 16-year-old boy shot dead a Catholic priest, Father Andrea Santoro, as he prayed in his church in the Black Sea city of Trabzon. The boy was convicted of murder and sentenced to 18 years in prison.
Padovese was appointed to his post in 2004.
Mustafa Sinanoglu, the mufti or top Muslim cleric for Hatay province, told the Anatolia news agency that he and Padovese had been working together toward establishing closer dialogue between their faiths.
"I have been deeply affected by the death of a colleague with whom I had been working together on projects for the region, Turkey and world peace," he said.
"These kinds of incidents are damaging our country's image," he added.
Asia News said the Bishop was also involved in work for the unity of the Christian church and to revive the tiny Christian community in Turkey.
Turkey's Culture Minister Ertugrul Gunay paid tribute to Padovese saying he had "made important contributions to the culture of tolerance through his services in Hatay."
The Foreign Ministry said the death of Padovese was an "important loss from a religious and scholarly point of view," adding that the Bishop had written extensively on Turkey.
In a 2006 telephone interview with the AP, following another knife attack that injured another priest, Padovese expressed concern over the safety of Catholics priests in Turkey.
"The climate has changed," he said. "It is the Catholic priests that are being targeted."