In Trabzon the people were quite separate from the Turks for the entire Ottoman period.

A specific Pontian Greek identity was maintained there, and of course the Pontic Greek language. In 1920 the population of Pontians Greeks in that area was about 700,000 to one million speakers. But between 30% to 40% of them had converted to Islam in forced conversions and other pressures over 400 years. A very large chunk of the poplaton was killed, snd all the Orthodox Christian remnanets expelled to Greece. But the Greek speaking Moslem Pontians could not be expelled.
The Turkish state found itself with a group of people who spoke Greek, had a Greek identiy and had been living there for 3000 years (at least) which they could not expell in the exchages as they were Moslem and exempt.
The policy adopted to counter this was to import populations of extreme nationalist ethnic Turks in to that area and radicalize, empower and arm them in order to cow the Pontians. There have been extra judicial state killings sprees there and the "gray wolves" terrorist/paramilitary operate there as a matter of state policy to that end. They are above the law and directly connected to the military.
The imported Turkish nationalists were even given unique access to weapons and local organized gendarmes or militias in order to keep the pressure on the Pontians.
In the case of Dink's killer he is not only coming from that background of nationalists, but is probably part of a still functioning and encouraged group in Trabzon.
In addition to the history my personal experience meeting with many people there indicated they fell into two distinct groups. One was people who knew they were not ethnic Turks. The other group was nationalist (in an extreme I saw nowhere else in Turkey, not even in the southeast!) which served as the imported and state empowered persecutors of the indigenous population.
Also I must say there is no such thing as "secularism" per se in Turkey. It is "secular nationalism," or "nationalist secularism". Non-Turkish Moslems minorites in modern Turkey have been ruthlessly massacred and oppressed once the Christians were forced out or subject to genocide.
Ultimately the political movements one needs to know to understand Ataturk are the Ba'ath and Nazi movements. I always found it shocking that people on our side on the war on terror held up Ataturk as an example to be followed. In fact if Atatürk were alive today, the contemporary political system and leader he would have most identified with would have be Saddam and his Ba'athist Iraq.
Lastly, yes the Moslem Kurds did kill many Armenians (and other Christians including Assyrians and Greeks). But the key here is that the authorities, including the later secular revolutionaries KNEW this would happen and marched them through there to that end (indeed most died on the death marches themselves from starvation and exposure as opposed to predation by Kurds). So you had direct shootings by Turkish military the same as the Einsatzgruppen, burning of villages, impressment into "labor battalions" that served as moving death camps and the death marches through Kurdistan, as killing methods. That for the latter portion of killings non-Turkish moslems were used is notable, but this was still a policy set in motion with intent by the "secularists."