A LEADING Turkish journalist faces up to 28 years in jail today for exposing apparent police complicity in the 2007 murder of the Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink, eight years more than prosecutors are demanding for Dink’s suspected murderer.
Nedim Sener's book Intelligence Liescharts the close relations police had with members of the teenage gang now on trial for Dink's murder, their failure to act on months of intelligence that his life was in danger, and their subsequent attempts to mislead magistrates investigating his murder.
Shortly after publication this January, four policemen mentioned in it, including one national police intelligence chief promoted after Dink’s murder, accused Sener of “obtaining classified documents and insulting government officials”.
An investigative journalist known for his work on corruption, Sener says he has been taken to court "more than 50 times" in his 20-year-career. He nonetheless expresses surprise at the latest case. "I think the plaintiffs are surprised too", he says, sitting in the newsroom of the daily Milliyet, where he works. "Twenty-eight years? You may want to hit a man, but not so hard that he falls over, hits his head and dies."
Sener expects to be acquitted, if only because the charges are absurd: his book is based entirely on government reports in the public domain and “documents you can find on Google”.
But Milliyetcolleagues who turned out to support him at a preliminary hearing at an Istanbul courthouse on June 10th remain concerned. "He's going to get a sentence", the investigative journalist Belma Akcura whispered as a prosecutor summed up the half-hour hearing and listed the charges he said justified handing proceedings over to the court which is due to meet today.
Author of a book about Turkish political murders, Akcura received a six-month suspended sentence in 2007 after a mafioso she had not even mentioned charged her with libel. “It’s a way of shutting you up,” she says.
Turkey’s shaky press freedom has been an issue since the EU recognised Turkey’s candidate status in 1999. More than 200 journalists were put on trial in 2008. Sener’s case in particular has sparked criticism from the West.
On June 18th, the Vienna-based Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe called for the trial to be dropped.
Elsewhere in Istanbul, meanwhile, the trial of the gang of teenagers suspected of killing Dink hovered close to farce.
The state turned down repeated demands by the Dink family’s lawyers for members of the security forces to take the witness stand. The judge stood by as the suspects and their lawyers openly insulted Dink’s family in court.
But things may slowly be beginning to change. A recent report written by a government inspector empowered by Turkey’s prime minister criticised security forces’ handling of the case.
Last December two military police petty-officers charged with negligence told a court that they had testified under duress, adding that their commanding officer had ignored their repeated warnings that murder was afoot. A captain backed them up.
Nedim Sener sees the charges against him as evidence of a change in the air.
“If [the police] felt secure, they would accuse me of libel, because I basically said they were lying”, he says.