TURKEY:As the European Union celebrates 50 years of peace and prosperity, life for dissidents in would-be Europe - Turkey - is getting more difficult. Nicholas Birchreports from Istanbul
As a foreigner, waving your yellow press card usually opens doors in Turkey.
It didn't impress the police officer guarding the entrance to Agos, the Turkish-Armenian newspaper run by Hrant Dink until a teenage nationalist murdered him this January as he stepped out of his office.
"Who are you working for?" he asks suspiciously. "Who do you want to talk to?"
Like the closed-circuit camera set up last month to survey the patch of Istanbul street where Dink died, his questions betray the heightened sense of insecurity facing dissidents in Turkey today.
A well-known columnist who took over as editor of Agos after his friend's death, Etyen Mahcupyan has been receiving threats for as long as he can remember.
"You are so accustomed to [ them] that when the threats go down, you ask what is happening," he says, "and that's why the murder was a real shock. Because you have so many threats every day and nothing happens."
Hrant Dink's death was a turning point for Atilla Yayla, too. An Ankara-based political scientist, his problems started last November when he publicly described Turkey's founder Kemal Ataturk as "that man".
Turkey's press branded him a traitor. His university removed him from his teaching position for four months.
Last week, a prosecutor opened a case against him for "insulting the legacy of Ataturk". He faces up to three years in jail.
"For five days, I couldn't sleep," Yayla remembers, comparing the media campaign against him to Stalin's Moscow trials. "In the end I collapsed physically."
But it wasn't until after Dink's death that he began to take the death threats he had been receiving seriously. Like more than a dozen other Turkish dissidents, he now shares his life with a police bodyguard.
"He is so much a part of me that I'm planning to buy him and his family presents," Yayla comments wryly.
Other Turkish intellectuals find it much less easy to laugh at the new climate of fear. One of the most prominent of 50 people taken to court by ultra-nationalists last year on charges of "insulting Turkishness", best-selling novelist Elif Safak, now keeps trips outside her house to a minimum.
Dink "was a close friend and I haven't got over the shock of his death", she said in a phone conversation last week. She declined to talk at length.
Interviewed by daily Hurriyet in February, her husband Eyup Can said she was so upset that she was no longer able to breast-feed her six-month-old daughter.
Orhan Pamuk, meanwhile, the novelist who won last year's Nobel Prize for literature, left Turkey under police escort on February 1st, days after the man believed by police to have organised Dink's murder threatened him as he was taken into custody.
Turkey's tourism ministry has since announced it will be using Pamuk as part of its new campaign to attract tourists to Turkey.
When well over 100,000 people attended Dink's funeral procession late in January, many hoped his death might mark the end of what one columnist called "the ultra-nationalist tsunami" sweeping Turkey since its European Union bid started.
In fact the protest, and the protesters' choice of the slogan "we are all Armenians", stirred nationalists up further.
A key demand made by protesters, that the law criminalising insults to "Turkishness" should be changed, remains ignored by an electioneering government afraid of losing nationalist support. Despite the risks they face, though, Turkish dissidents say they have no intention of giving up the struggle.
"Such a thing has happened that you cannot be cautious any more," says Agos's new editor Etyen Mahcupyan. "It's immoral to be cautious."
Like Mahcupyan, who says you can only tell the real threats from the false ones after it's too late, Baskin Oran knows his bodyguard will not be able to stop a professional assassination attempt.
"This nice person is protecting me from amateur killers, like the one who killed Hrant," says this political scientist, who co-authored a 2004 government report on minority rights that many see as the first spark to today's nationalist surge.
He goes on to quote a Turkish proverb that he who fears birds doesn't plant corn. "If you are afraid, you should stop. But how can I look into the mirror in the morning if I do stop? How can I lecture my students?"
Today's threats and restrictions on freedom of movement, he says, are part of the growing pains of Turkish democracy. "The road to paradise passes by hell, and we are walking."