FEATURE-Murders spark soul-searching in sleepy Black Sea town
26 Jan 2007 09:32:34 GMT Source: Reuters
By Gareth Jones TRABZON, Turkey, Jan 26 (Reuters) - Mustafa Coskun fears his once sleepy Black Sea town has become a byword in Turkey for nationalist violence after a string of nasty incidents culminating in the murder of a Turkish-Armenian editor. "We are all brothers, we have always liked foreigners here. But now, when I go to other places in Turkey, they point and say 'Oh, he's from Trabzon, they are all crazy there'," said Coskun, 48, sipping tea at his market stall near the sea. Trabzon seems an unlikely place for controversy of any kind. Nearby, fishermen mend their nets. Seagulls skim the water, snow-capped hills loom up above the town. There is a smell of fish and pungent Russian tobacco -- a reminder that Russia and Georgia are just a few hundred km (miles) east and northeast. But this town of 300,000 people -- the fabled Trebizond which once captivated Silk Road explorers such as Marco Polo -- is now asking how it could have raised youngsters capable of murders that have shocked the world. An unemployed youth from Trabzon, Ogun Samast, 17, has been charged with killing Hrant Dink, an ethnic Armenian writer, in Istanbul last Friday. Dink's views on Ottoman Turkish massacres of Armenians in 1915 had angered Turkish nationalists. The murder has reignited debate about hardline nationalism in Turkey, which wants to join the European Union. A man who has confessed to inciting Samast, Yasin Hayal, is also from Trabzon. In 2004 he was behind the bombing of a restaurant in the town. Last year, a 16-year-old boy was jailed for shooting dead an Italian Catholic priest as he prayed in his church in Trabzon. Turkish media say the boy had fallen under the influence of Islamist, anti-Christian and ultra-nationalist ideas. ECONOMIC WOES Zeynep Erdugrul knows how dangerous it can be in Trabzon to challenge Turkey's status quo. She and four friends were almost lynched two years ago by a 2,000-strong crowd before police intervened. Handing out leaflets about leftists jailed in Turkey, they were mistaken for supporters of Kurdish rebel fighters. "But I do not think Trabzon is more nationalistic than other towns in Turkey. The problems are economic. There's no industry, agriculture is dying, young people turn to drugs," she said. Asked if she saw any connection between the spate of violent incidents, she said: "I think the state is responsible. It suits the state to have clashes, be they between Turks and Kurds or between secularists and Islamists." Police have dismissed such suggestions. Many in Trabzon say those who shot the priest and Dink were tools of outside forces, possibly with links to the "deep state" -- shorthand in Turkey for shadowy, fiercely nationalistic elements in the security forces and bureaucracy. "They can't have carried out these murders alone. They were manipulated, brainwashed," Israfil Babaoglu, 18, said in an Internet cafe similar to those used by the teenage gunmen. Like others, he would not speculate who the "brainwashers" were. For Trabzon's governor, Huseyin Yavuzdemir, the killings are a symptom of deeper social problems linked to fast urbanisation. People have been migrating from the country to the town over the past decade and both parents work to make ends meet, he said. "Parents leave their kids in Internet cafes while they go shopping. This is wrong. We have 250 such cafes here," he said. Yavuzdemir played down economic factors, saying Trabzon is more prosperous than many eastern provincial towns and its unemployment level of nine percent is near the national average. GUNS AND GREEKS But he cited factors specific to Trabzon that could have contributed to the violence, including a strong gun culture and the fiery character of the people, known in Turkey for a quickness to take offence. Yavuzdemir also mentioned the view of sociologists that Trabzon people try to assert their national identity more than many other Turks because their region traditionally contained large ethnic Greek and Armenian communities. Sociologist Adem Solak, of the Black Sea Technical University, said a big influx of criminals and prostitutes from Russia, Ukraine and Georgia after the Soviet Union's demise in 1991 had shocked the conservative local culture. "The struggle of values continues now, with the 'clash of civilisations', the Iraq war, the crisis over the cartoons (in published in Denmark depicting the Prophet Mohammad). All these have a negative effect on our young people," said Solak. "And the decline in the fortunes of (once successful local soccer team) Trabzonspor is also traumatic for the morale of young people in a soccer-mad city like this," he said.
