In early 2007, the Armenian-Turkish writer and publisher Hrant Dink was assassinated in Istanbul. A few days later, local police arrested the teenager Ogün Samast, hinting that the crime was purely criminal in nature. That was all the “state” did in fulfillment of its public duty.
Later, for more than fifteen years, the threads of the crime unraveled one after another. Each clue demonstrated that the event was not merely a “reckless criminal act,” but rather the direct result of what was being promoted and entrenched in Turkey’s public sphere: the hatred of Armenian citizens. They were depicted as enemies and conspirators, and their intentions, future aspirations, and stance toward the Turkish entity were perpetually questioned. This climate was sustainably fueled and maintained by state institutions, security apparatuses, political party discourses, and public opinion leaders. Their goal was to keep it a burning, ever-present issue in the public text, drowning public opinion in an arsenal of illusions about Armenians—and others—as communal groups or political and cultural entities. Furthermore, for years, all these institutions and political entities worked in a collaborative manner to provide coverage, sponsorship, and protection for everyone directly involved in acts of violence resulting from these feelings of hatred.
Hrant Dink was not the only victim of these characteristics and mechanisms in the country; all of Turkey’s Armenians were exposed to sustained violations of their rights and presence, feeling less secure, worthy, and protected than other Turkish citizens. These events were uncovered by the Lebanese-Armenian writer and historian Vicken Cheterian in his historical and analytical book on this phenomenon, Open Wounds: Armenians and Turks a Century after the Genocide. Like the Armenians, various members of “non-centric” groups in Turkey—such as Kurds, Arabs, Alawites, Laz, Syriacs, and Greeks—experienced a constant erosion of their sense of security by the rest of the public sphere, the centrists.
Present-day Syria does not seem far from this reality, even if it is only in the early stages of establishing a legal, institutional, media, security, financial, and primarily ideological-discursive foundation to construct an exact replica of it. The new regime wants the national, religious, and sectarian minorities in Syrian society to occupy the position of the “sinners” in the eyes of the social bases loyal to and linked with this authority. The latter is expected to be in a state of psychological, political, and even organizational readiness to engage in sweeping confrontations against them on behalf of the core of authority and its implicit will—even if unannounced and unclear legally and criminally, yet highly spectacular politically and practically.
During the past months, Syria has witnessed preliminary introductions to this. Videos showing what occurred in the coastal regions, and similarly in As-Suwayda governorate—and before that, the assaults on Kurdish civilians in the Afrin and Shahba regions north of Aleppo, alongside many other localized events in other areas—offered ample proof. UN investigative reports have revealed many significant links pointing to solidarity networks and lines of communication between the perpetrators and the general will, the hard core of authority, and the surrounding political “elites,” discourses, and tendencies. These are mechanisms that will undoubtedly develop in the future to become more effective, organized, and productive once this type of authority consolidates its pillars, creates self-absorbed institutions closely linked to political organizations and the hard core of power, and legislates a set of protective laws and apparatuses for the perpetrators, after stabilizing the foundations of governance and acquiring the financial capital to sponsor such actions.
In Syria today, and most likely in the foreseeable future as long as this type of authority persists, such crimes and acts can never be individual, self-decided, or spontaneously executed. When the Turkish authorities hinted at something of the sort during the initial days of the crime, Faik Ogün, the uncle of the perpetrator Samast, appeared on Turkish opposition media to say: “My nephew does not even know the streets of Istanbul, so how could he commit this entire crime on his own when he is only 17 years old?”
The same applies to every detail of what occurred in Syria. Clans, factions, and individuals are not independent political entities, and their organizations are built on bonds of solidarity, not motives of political action or planned executive practice. They cannot engage in any field effort outside their smallest areas of presence except through directives and sponsorship from higher authorities possessing a political vision, aspirations, and goals for the act. Throughout the past months, the authority hinted at much of this by claiming neutrality, ignorance, and intervening to separate the warring Syrians. However, these claims were dismantled by the facts on the ground, which revealed the existence of an organizational structure that desired and managed what happened, according to a context yielding a political return for the organizers.
Sometime after the assassination of the Armenian writer Hrant Dink, Turkish authorities arrested Yasin Hayal and Erhan Tuncel on charges of participating in the crime. The former was accused of attempting to bomb a McDonald’s restaurant in the Black Sea city of Trabzon, while the latter was a student at Karadeniz Technical University and a prominent member of a youth organization affiliated with the extremist Nationalist Movement Party.
Hayal confessed to inciting the teenage perpetrator, while the second admitted to handing over the weapon. The party denied any connection to the process of incitement or direct guidance of its member Tuncel, but it offered no explanation for the thousands of death threats that reached Dink on a near-daily basis, as well as every member of the high elite among Turkey’s Armenians. By no coincidence, the threateners were members of the same party or organizations ideologically identical to it.
Similarly, the party offered no review of its internal discourses, which are packed with values and rhetoric of hatred against non-centrists, because it actually considers them “normal acts”—or rather, boasts of them and classifies them as a spiritual, ideological, and organizational preparation to defend the “Turkish nation.” Most striking were the investigative media reports revealed by investigative journalism in Turkey much later, proving that Tuncel was a secret informant for the police in the city of Trabzon, located in northern Turkey and classified as a “fortress of nationalists.”
A few months later, the prosecutor in the case, Ahmet Şükçınar, revealed that the perpetrator, Ogün Samast, confessed to killing Hrant Dink, but for personal reasons, without any organizational background, adding that the perpetrator felt no remorse for what he had done. Explaining what he considered a personal act, Samast said he did it because Hrant Dink “insulted the Turks!” But how could that teenager, who had dropped out of school years prior and had been addicted to drugs during a phase of his life, read and follow what an elite writer and researcher like Hrant Dink wrote? And what mechanisms could he use to determine what is considered an “insult to the Turks,” despite the Armenian writer’s complete care to avoid any confrontational discourse with Turkish national consciousness, and his permanent call to build a healthy and constructive relationship between Turks and Armenians in the present and future?
In mid-2007, Turkish security apparatuses exposed the existence of a secret network within the state organs—ultranationalist in terms of ideology, and military/security in terms of organization. The network, named “Ergenekon,” had its documents revealed consecutively throughout the remaining months of the year, proving how a secret entity controlled many of the country’s files and issues, specifically those that the network’s leaders believed the state, with its official institutions and legitimate apparatuses, was incapable of executing. More importantly, that network was not entirely secret; it was known to many leaders of the security, judicial, and political apparatuses, with mutual cooperation and collusion between them, evidenced by the fact that most of its leaders were former military, security, and political officers with influence and roles in Turkey’s political and military files.
The investigations revealed a connection between the Ergenekon organization and the assassination of the Armenian writer and researcher Hrant Dink. The contents of the network’s documents showed how every member of Hrant Dink’s family was targeted by the organization, to the extent that a senior officer from the organization attempted to bribe a soldier with 300,000 Turkish liras ($200,000) to do so, but the soldier refused and filed a report against the officer. However, and always by no coincidence, the destruction of “Tuncel’s file” was reported in October 2007 by the security apparatuses for what was alleged to be a “state secret,” and the security authorities refused to hand over his file to the judiciary—and Tuncel was believed to be the link between the network and the perpetrator of the crime.
Everything else in the course of the investigations demonstrated that dimension of solidarity, guidance, and protection from the state toward the perpetrators. A senior intelligence official ordered the sudden deletion of 48 pages of investigation testimonies without providing any justification. When the family’s lawyers requested the phone call records in the area of the crime, telecom companies denied the existence of transmission stations in the area, despite almost all residents of the area possessing mobile phones! The officers who took “souvenir photos” with the perpetrator upon his arrival at the detention center—some of them were later promoted to high ranking positions. Six years later, a secret witness came forward with information indicating that the Turkish Gendarmerie Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism unit (JİTEM) participated in the crime, but no action was taken. After 2014, allegations surfaced regarding the involvement of the Fethullah Gülen movement in the crime, but this occurred a few months after the political clash between President Erdoğan and the movement in late 2013, and only after individuals close to the movement exposed a major corruption scandal involving the son of President Erdoğan (who was prime minister at the time) and members of his ministerial team. Four prosecutors were suspended and dismissed from their posts, and two police officials belonging to the group were accused of involvement in the crime due to their knowledge of the crime’s plot and their failure to disclose the information they possessed. In 2020, a former intelligence officer who was a witness in the case was killed. The European Court of Human Rights summarized the case, issuing a ruling in 2010 stating that the Turkish authorities violated citizen Hrant Dink’s right to life by failing to take measures to prevent the crime and by failing to hold the police accountable for their negligence.
Is there anything in all of this that contradicts the Syrian events of the past months?
Ostensibly, the Turkish state performed its full public duty—arrest, investigation, and trial—but in reality, it was the fertile ground in which sprouted all chapters of marginalization, hatred, and violence practiced against the non-centrists in the country. The incident of the writer Hrant Dink was merely an indicator and a revelation of what had been constructed over many decades, whether objectively, stemming from the structure of state institutions, their charters, and functions, or through subjective realities carried out by members of the ruling and influential elites within the structure of governance, in media, the military, education, and official ideology.
Moreover, these dynamics had a functional dimension; they were present in the consciousness of those in charge of the state, who were themselves authorized with the function of “protecting the entity.” These individuals, like countless global models, believed that implying and promoting the existence of an “internal lurking enemy” would help increase the levels of cohesion among social, regional, and ideological classes in the country, thereby creating a central national bond.
In Syria today, and most likely even in its foreseeable future, there will be much of this, as shown by the new rulers and the “elites” and supporters surrounding them, and as dictated by the type of ideology, discourse, and political and social consciousness around which they center themselves and export to the public.
The largest and most important steps toward this will be through establishing “institutions of compliance,” particularly in the sectors of education, judiciary, media, and security. Something similar to what the Nazis did in their early days, who merged and controlled various professional associations, justice institutions, the police system, military ideology, and media discourse into what they called “National Socialist leagues,” to be compliant and non-contradictory to the requirements, functions, and aspirations of the Nazi regime and everyone revolving in its orbit. The compliance of institutions was the threshold for facilitating hatred and violence against the German Jewish communal group, because it removed every obstacle before it, thereby facilitating the execution of their extermination process, to the point that it became a matter of national duty and pride. It did not sweep ordinary people on the basis of fanaticism alone, but also swept German philosophers and intellectuals of the weight of Martin Heidegger, Ernst Jünger, Alfred Rosenberg, Heinrich Lihne, and Carl Schmitt. It was not strange that the latter’s saying, “Politics is above all the ability to identify the enemy,” became the supreme slogan of Nazi society and state.
Syria today, and most likely throughout the foreseeable future, will not be far from that logic. The compliance of institutions and their construction according to functional requirements will not occur due to the sectarian political doctrine of the rulers alone—even if that is a fundamental factor—but also due to the need of this type of regime for institutions of this sort, which facilitate and forgive the acts it commits to serve the structure of the regime it is building, whether directly or through those revolving in its orbit.
The new Syrian political regime, for instance, is incapable of obtaining direct democratic legitimacy, because it requires a set of rules and values within the structure of the state and the public order—things like equality between men and women, freedom of the press, and civil liberties, which are contrary to the core of its doctrines, regardless of how much it denies them. Furthermore, democracy would transform the rulers into “relative rulers,” alongside whom a group of currents, parties, and even regions would contest their rule, sovereignty, and wealth, formally and publicly. Likewise, this regime will not be able to achieve “economic legitimacy,” as the “elite” surrounding it eagerly desires to promote it; because Syria is not an economically rentier state, and explosive development in the post-war phase requires a collective and satisfactory national contract for everyone, which they will never be able to achieve. Even the small amount of legitimacy derived from the “achievement” of their overthrow of the Assad regime has begun to dissipate over time, due to the vast difference between overthrowing an authoritarian regime and the possibility of constructing a system opposite to it.
This differs from any traditional sectarian structure upon which any political system might be based, such as the previous Syrian regime, for example. The latter was incapable of constructing mechanisms of hatred and violence against other communal groups, perhaps due to the minority dimension of the group it relied upon, or perhaps due to its realization of the impossibility of “owning the state,” which is entirely different from “dominating authority.” The Syrian state remained, in essence, a “Sunni state” in the final analysis.
Accordingly, this regime will take a path based on constructing an internal hard core for governance, a communal group with guaranteed loyalty and subordination, relying for the strength of its rule on its primary communal fanaticism. This requires granting it an aura of symbolic superiority over others, by giving its members the exclusive and sole right to access the real structure of power and governance, to the exclusion of others, which grants them a sense of authoritative superiority over others. Likewise, it will engineer all discourses and institutions to be compliant for members of this “central group” to practice whatever they please against the sons of “other groups.”
None of this is abstraction or imagination; rather, it is daily life lived by Syrians throughout the past months. The ruling authority in Syria today did not deal with the thousands of perpetrators who committed crimes against Alawite and Druze civilians during the past months in a manner different from how the Turkish authorities dealt with the killer of the Armenian writer and researcher Hrant Dink, and with thousands of other perpetrators.
This authority, for instance, did not pay any political price for what happened under its rule; rather, it considered the matter to be merely individual acts! Likewise, its security and judicial apparatuses did not interact on the basis of their loyalty to and sympathy with the victims; rather, the exact opposite was true, to the extent that some of those apparatuses were involved in practicing the massacres themselves. Beyond both matters, the national Syrian space close to the ruling authority and its hard core—even at the level of their elites—did not manifest anything suggesting the existence of a “national catastrophe”; rather, the matter was taken on the basis of “it happens in the best of families.”
In conclusion, if we assume, for example, that the current Syrian judicial system arrested a perpetrator involved in committing a crime against Alawite or Druze Syrian people and brought him to trial, can we imagine the relationship of harmony and affection that might bring him together with the judge, the guard, and the policeman in this system?
