.Ep ="justify">A teenager, according to the full forensic report and according to that same teenagers own testimony. It was “The murderer state,” according to left-wing fanatics and Dink, who betrayed the lands where “he was fed,” himself, according to right-wing fanatics.  

  The secularist state establishment, according to the Islamists. The Islamist government, according to secularists. The “deep state,” according to deep state-connoisseurs. Foreign secret services, according to conspiracy-connoisseurs.   “The blood-thirsty Turks - the descendants of genocide-makers,” according to the Turk-hating Armenians. The Armenians, according to Armenian-hating Turks. Xenophobic Turks, according to the separatist Kurds. Separatist Kurds, according to xenophobic Turks. Article 301 and the jurists who convicted Dink of insulting Turkishness, according to the liberals. The list of potential culprits, as newspapers read, can be widened endlessly.   During the near-civil war of the 1970s various groups of ultra-nationalist and Islamist Turks literally slaughtered each other on the streets (when they did not slaughter the common enemy that was the communists); the ultra-nationalists killed Islamists because they highlighted their Muslimness before their Turkishness, and, likewise, Islamists killed the ultra-nationalists because they highlighted their Turkishness before their Muslimness.

  About a year ago, in this column I wrote: “…This is where I see danger, ultra-nationalists becoming Islamists and Islamists becoming ultra-nationalists. … These usually split groups may in the future get mixed together and comprise a huge anti-Western bloc…”   Ogün Samast who pulled the trigger is no different than his mentor who had bombed a McDonald's restaurant because the eatery was “a symbol of American imperialism;” or Alpaslan Arslan who less than a year ago shot up a chamber of supreme judges because they had banned the Islamic headscarf; or the teenager who killed a Catholic priest because the man was “an enemy of Islam;” or even anyone who belonged to the crowd of a few thousand people who wanted to lynch a handful of youths because they protested prison conditions. Samast is only an example of a dare-devil/loser among a bunch of nearly four million similar young Turkish men ages 15-19 whose cultural tradition is no richer than the book “Those Crazy Turks” and the film “Valley of the Wolves.”   It's a matter of demographics. Turkey, in the last few decades, has “produced” too many young people (nearly eight million are in the 15-19 age group) than it could afford to healthily take care of i.e. educate, employ and provide social security. Inevitably, an alarmingly large part of these young men and women have “gone astray.” Some have joined the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK); some have joined one or another of the mushrooming sects of Islam to become soldiers of Islam; some have gone to fight the “infidels” in lands as far away as Pakistan and Afghanistan, some went to Iraq or Chechnya; some have become petty criminals and some, as in the case of Samast, have preferred to “defend the honor of Turkishness.”  

  In fact, they are the same thing although they ostensibly represent opposite or different political doctrines - it's only a matter of where and how they grow up. The PKK  man who kills in the name of an “independent Kurdistan” is the same man who kills a priest or a judge in the name of “Islam” or the man who killed Dink in the name of “Turkishness” or the man who robs your house, steals your car, rapes tourists or snatches bags on posh streets. He is the same man who goes to the local Internet café for child porn, violent computer games or to read the daily brainwashing political material from his favorite radical Web site.  

  I wonder if the boring clichéd commentators on the Dink murder could answer any of the following questions:   Can a whole nation be held responsible for one (or a few) heinous act(s) of a fanatic(s)? If yes, are the Dutch a “murderer nation” because Volkert van der Graaff, a non-Muslim Dutchman, for example, murdered Pim Fortuyn? Did any Turk hold Turkey's Armenians responsible for the murders by ASALA of scores of Turkish diplomats?   Dink's conviction of “insulting Turkishness” was approved by the Court of Appeals. Does that mean Dink had really insulted “Turkishness?” Legally speaking, Dink was a man who did so. Where, then, is the thin line between what is legal and what is fair in this country? What other legal but unfair convictions/acquittals have come out of the Turkish legal system?   A clear majority of Turks have behaved in a way that deserves praise since Dink was murdered - all of the government, the opposition and the public. But hadn't they behaved this way before? Should one be murdered so that he is judged fairly? Do Turks and Greeks always need a terribly punishing earthquake to understand that they have been, are and will be neighbors? Do Turks and Armenians need a shocking murder to remember that they lived together peacefully for four centuries?   Fine, the government is to be blamed for Article 301. But did the European Union not give its consent to that piece of legislation it later criticized so much? Did Brussels not say Turkey, with its Article 301 in effect, was fit for opening membership talks with? Did the EU make a “strategic” assessment of Turkish candidacy over a “fair” one?   No answer to these questions will bring back the pigeon who thought “in this country people don't harm pigeons.” Unfortunately, they do.