"insulting Turkish identity"

[Reincarnated Am]

The Turkish Dilemma

By George Gregoriou

At a party the other day a French woman who was connected with the United Nations said to me “Turkey will not be in the European Union”. I said “I will not loose any sleep over it. If Turkey does change she does not deserve to be in the EU”. Maybe the cynical among us will not loose any sleep. But, Washington and London will, and the Turkish corporate interests and the left, who want to move in the direction of Europe. Official Athens and Nicosia also want Turkey to be in Europe. A more civilized Turkey will be a better neighbor in the Aegean, even settle the Cyprus problem in a way which is acceptable to the Greek and Turkish Cypriots. At least, this has been the official line from the moment Ankara became a candidate for membership in the European Union.

Not all Turks want to join the European Union. Not just nationalists and Islamicists. Secularists are not eager, especially if Turkey will pay a price for membership in the EU. PM Embarkan, PM Erdogan’s predecessor/head of the Islamist movement, wanted to redirect Turkey towards the Islamic Middle East, even form an Islamic “NATO”. He was booted out of power by the military. PM Erdogan has managed to tip-toe around this issue, maintaining his Islamic credentials but maneuvering in the direction of the EU, for the economic benefits.
The recent crisis over the trial and possible jailing of the prominent novelist Orhan Pamuk is only the tip of the iceberg. Pamuk is not the real issue. Turkey is on trial, stated Oli Rehn, the EU enlargement commissioner. The charge against Pamuk is over his statement in an interview with Das Magazin, a Swiss publication, that the Ottoman Turks committed genocide against the Armenians in 1915. Over a million Armenians were massacred. The Kurds, who were “promised” Armenian land and property, hand a hand in this massacre, until Ataturk turned his guns on these “mountain Turks”. Pamuk’s other “crime” was his statement that thousands of Kurds were killed in the war against the separatist P.K.I. in the 1980s. These comments “denigrate Turkishness”. Any criticism of the state, the army, or the founder of the Turkish Republic, Kemal Ataturk, are crimes which can send one to prison. Pamuk is not the first to be charged. According to the NYTimes(12/17/05) nearly 60 intellectuals have been charged with this crime. On his way to court Pamuk was confronted by protestors hurling eggs and insults “Traitor Pamuk!

The Islamic religion in Turkey is not the only issue. Those who brought the charges against Pamuk are known secularists who brought charges against women wearing the shroud, which violates the Ataturk legacy of modernization. So, if we were to add the Islamists and the nationalists/secularists who will defend Turkish “honor” against free speech and democratic rights, who among the 70 million Turks is eligible to be in the EU at a time when the wave of anti-Muslim attitudes is on the increase throughout Europe?

The Pamuk trial was so hot, the political and criminal establishment postponed the case until February 7. Turkey¹s trajectory into the EU is at risk. If Pamuk is found not guilty in February the penal code is invalidated. If he is guilty, more ammunition is given to those opposing Turkey in the EU, a slap in the face of the Bush-Blair regimes promoting. Turkey’s accession talks for geopolitical reasons, to control the Middle East and Central Asia for their oil and natural resources.

Turkey’s trajectory into the EU will be very bumpy. The Pamuk case involves admission by the Ankara regime for the crimes committed against Armenians and Kurds, which is common knowledge throughout the world. The worse scenario would be demands for reparations by the descendants of the Armenians massacred. The Turkish state seems to be good at taking, not giving or paying its dues, even offering an apology for crimes committed 90 years ago. Money is the real problem, but there is more to it. Pandora’s box will be opened. A flood will be cascading into the faces of those Turks hiding behind the fig leaf of “honor” to deny the barbarism within the Turkish civilization.

If official Ankara cannot admit to the massacre of Armenians and Greeks at the turn of the last century, how can it admit to the crimes committed against the 15 million Kurds, persecuted since the days of Ataturk. Ataturk’s policy was, those who could be Turkified could stay in Turkey, those who could not, be eliminated. The fate of millions of Greeks, Armenians, and Jews in Asia Minor is well-known to Turks in the street, but not to the all the regimes in Ankara since WWI.

This Turkish barbarism is not just the legacy of the past. The war on the Kurds continued throughout the 20th Century. It continues today in Eastern Anatolia and Ankara’s current policy towards the Kurds in northern Iraq. It continues in Cyprus as well. The invasion and ethnic cleansing in 1974 has been in place for 31 years. 200,000 Cypriots were forced to leave the northern part of Cyprus, to make room for 130,000 settlers from Anatolia. This is the Turkish method of settling disputes, settlers to change the demographics and an army of occupation to guarantee that the facts on the ground created by the invasion are irreversible. There could be a settlement of the Cyprus problem between the Greeks and Turks of Cyprus within 24 hours if the settlers and the Turkish army were to go back to Turkey. Ankara is not alone in this crime. Washington and London are its co-conspirators.

The Turkish dilemma is real. If Ankara cannot admit the massacre of the Armenians and is prosecuting one of Turkey¹s best known novelist, Orhan Pamuk, how can it deal with the Kurdish and Cyprus problems if it is serious and wants to be in the EU? Nicosia, Athens, and other European capitals may have the last word: a veto over Turkey¹s membership in the European Union.

*** George Gregoriou
Professor, Critical Theory and Geopolitics
Department of Political Science
The William Paterson University
Wayne, New Jersey 07470
e-mail: [email protected]

http://www.greeknewsonline.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4248

[Reincarnated Am]

The Turks haven't learned the British way of denying past atrocities

The Turks haven't learned the British way of denying past atrocities

It is not illegal to discuss the millions who were killed under our empire. So why do so few people know about them?

George Monbiot
Tuesday December 27, 2005
The Guardian

In reading reports of the trial of the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, you are struck by two things. The first, of course, is the anachronistic brutality of the country's laws. Mr Pamuk, like scores of other writers and journalists, is being prosecuted for "denigrating Turkishness", which means that he dared to mention the Armenian genocide in the first world war and the killing of the Kurds in the past decade. The second is its staggering, blithering stupidity. If there is one course of action that could be calculated to turn these massacres into live issues, it is the trial of the country's foremost novelist for mentioning them.

As it prepares for accession, the Turkish government will discover that the other members of the EU have found a more effective means of suppression. Without legal coercion, without the use of baying mobs to drive writers from their homes, we have developed an almost infinite capacity to forget our own atrocities.
Atrocities? Which atrocities? When a Turkish writer uses that word, everyone in Turkey knows what he is talking about, even if they deny it vehemently. But most British people will stare at you blankly. So let me give you two examples, both of which are as well documented as the Armenian genocide.

In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, published in 2001, Mike Davis tells the story of famines that killed between 12 and 29 million Indians. These people were, he demonstrates, murdered by British state policy. When an El Niño drought destituted the farmers of the Deccan plateau in 1876 there was a net surplus of rice and wheat in India. But the viceroy, Lord Lytton, insisted that nothing should prevent its export to England. In 1877 and 1878, at the height of the famine, grain merchants exported a record 6.4m hundredweight of wheat. As the peasants began to starve, officials were ordered "to discourage relief works in every possible way". The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 prohibited "at the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices". The only relief permitted in most districts was hard labour, from which anyone in an advanced state of starvation was turned away. In the labour camps, the workers were given less food than inmates of Buchenwald. In 1877, monthly mortality in the camps equated to an annual death rate of 94%.

As millions died, the imperial government launched "a militarised campaign to collect the tax arrears accumulated during the drought". The money, which ruined those who might otherwise have survived the famine, was used by Lytton to fund his war in Afghanistan. Even in places that had produced a crop surplus, the government's export policies, like Stalin's in Ukraine, manufactured hunger. In the north-western provinces, Oud and the Punjab, which had brought in record harvests in the preceeding three years, at least 1.25m died.

Three recent books - Britain's Gulag by Caroline Elkins, Histories of the Hanged by David Anderson, and Web of Deceit by Mark Curtis - show how white settlers and British troops suppressed the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya in the 1950s. Thrown off their best land and deprived of political rights, the Kikuyu started to organise - some of them violently - against colonial rule. The British responded by driving up to 320,000 of them into concentration camps. Most of the remainder - more than a million - were held in "enclosed villages". Prisoners were questioned with the help of "slicing off ears, boring holes in eardrums, flogging until death, pouring paraffin over suspects who were then set alight, and burning eardrums with lit cigarettes". British soldiers used a "metal castrating instrument" to cut off testicles and fingers. "By the time I cut his balls off," one settler boasted, "he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket." The soldiers were told they could shoot anyone they liked "provided they were black". Elkins's evidence suggests that more than 100,000 Kikuyu were either killed or died of disease and starvation in the camps. David Anderson documents the hanging of 1,090 suspected rebels: far more than the French executed in Algeria. Thousands more were summarily executed by soldiers, who claimed they had "failed to halt" when challenged.

These are just two examples of at least 20 such atrocities overseen and organised by the British government or British colonial settlers; they include, for example, the Tasmanian genocide, the use of collective punishment in Malaya, the bombing of villages in Oman, the dirty war in North Yemen, the evacuation of Diego Garcia. Some of them might trigger a vague, brainstem memory in a few thousand readers, but most people would have no idea what I'm talking about. Max Hastings, on the opposite page, laments our "relative lack of interest" in Stalin and Mao's crimes. But at least we are aware that they happened.

In the Express we can read the historian Andrew Roberts arguing that for "the vast majority of its half-millennium-long history, the British empire was an exemplary force for good ... the British gave up their empire largely without bloodshed, after having tried to educate their successor governments in the ways of democracy and representative institutions" (presumably by locking up their future leaders). In the Sunday Telegraph, he insists that "the British empire delivered astonishing growth rates, at least in those places fortunate enough to be coloured pink on the globe". (Compare this to Mike Davis's central finding, that "there was no increase in India's per capita income from 1757 to 1947", or to Prasannan Parthasarathi's demonstration that "South Indian labourers had higher earnings than their British counterparts in the 18th century and lived lives of greater financial security.") In the Daily Telegraph, John Keegan asserts that "the empire became in its last years highly benevolent and moralistic". The Victorians "set out to bring civilisation and good government to their colonies and to leave when they were no longer welcome. In almost every country, once coloured red on the map, they stuck to their resolve".

There is one, rightly sacred Holocaust in European history. All the others can be denied, ignored, or belittled. As Mark Curtis points out, the dominant system of thought in Britain "promotes one key concept that underpins everything else - the idea of Britain's basic benevolence ... Criticism of foreign policies is certainly possible, and normal, but within narrow limits which show 'exceptions' to, or 'mistakes' in, promoting the rule of basic benevolence". This idea, I fear, is the true "sense of British cultural identity" whose alleged loss Max laments today. No judge or censor is required to enforce it. The men who own the papers simply commission the stories they want to read.

Turkey's accession to the European Union, now jeopardised by the trial of Orhan Pamuk, requires not that it comes to terms with its atrocities; only that it permits its writers to rage impotently against them. If the government wants the genocide of the Armenians to be forgotten, it should drop its censorship laws and let people say what they want. It needs only allow Richard Desmond and the Barclay brothers to buy up the country's newspapers, and the past will never trouble it again.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1673991,00.html

[Gavur]

Crossing The Divide

Saturday December 24, 2005
The Guardian

How did Orhan Pamuk end up in court? His friend and translator Maureen
Freely investigates

Last Friday, Orhan Pamuk, Turkey's most celebrated writer,
was subjected to a grotesque public shaming. Branded a "traitor"
by fascist agitators whom a like-minded police force did little to
contain, and pelted with stones and eggs outside the court where he
was to have been tried for insulting Turkishness, he remained calm and
dignified. At a party hosted by his publishers that same evening, he
looked relaxed, even cheerful. As did Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian
journalist and editor who was prosecuted in the same court earlier this
autumn, also for "insulting Turkishness," and the columnist, scholar,
and longtime human rights activist, Murat Belge, who will be going to
court on February 7 with four other columnists charged with insulting
the judiciary. Also in attendance were several editors facing charges
on account of books they have published, the Turkish and European
human rights activists, and the dozen EU parliamentarians who had,
like Pamuk, been insulted and/or assaulted by fascist agitators in
and outside the court earlier in the day.

This is hardly the first time a Turkish writer has been pilloried
for speaking his mind. Nâzim Hikmet, the great modernist poet who
who shared the 1950 International Peace Prize with Pablo Neruda,
spent most of his adult life in prisons. When an entire generation
of writers found itself behind bars after the 1971 and 1980 coups,
it kept itself going by reciting his verse. In the 1990s, when the
army was waging war against the Kurdish PKK in the southeast, the
mantle passed to Yasar Kemal, Turkey's other great living author,
who, like Pamuk, has often been tipped as a Nobel contender. He wrote
an article about the Kurds that resulted in his being prosecuted and
vilified in much the same way that Pamuk is today.

A recent dirty tricks campaign drew the two authors into a highly
publicised dispute, so great significance was given to Kemal's presence
at the trial last Friday. Everyone knew he was there to support not
just Pamuk but all writers who dare to question the national myth -
that Turkey has no black spots in its history, that the path it must
follow is the one decreed by its founding father, Ataturk, and that
its army never makes mistakes. Sooner or later, most serious writers
find themselves branded traitors: therein lies their importance. What
makes Pamuk's case different is that retribution came so very late.

Until last February, Pamuk enjoyed a de-facto immunity that the state
accords only to those with a profile in the west. For this read:
powerful friends who will kick up a fuss if anything happens to
them. With this immunity came responsibilities that Pamuk has taken
very seriously. In the 90s, when other writers were being jailed for
speaking up for the Kurds, it would, he thought, have been wrong to
stay silent. So he spoke and, by speaking, eased the pressure on
the others. Having spoken, he was of course pressed to speak for
a multitude of other causes, not all of them worthy. The literary
grapevines of Istanbul abound with stories about his standoffishness,
but as his friend and translator, I know just how much thought he
gave the endless string of moral dilemmas spilling from his fax
machine. If something seemed important - if a principle was at stake
- he'd always make time for it, no matter how long it kept him from
the beckoning desk.

That is my understanding of what happened last February. Turkey had
at last been given a date for EU accession talks. A pro-European
Islamist government was pushing through a package of reforms, and the
old monolithic republic was moving towards a permissive secularism in
line with Europe. A grassroots democracy movement was taking shape,
and it seemed possible to speak about topics previously marked taboo.

It was in this context that Pamuk told a Swiss newspaper that "30,000
Kurds and one million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody
but me dares to talk about it" - and the important thing to remember
about this sentence is that it appeared first in Europe. Because by
last February, there was consternation in some cogs of the Turkish
state machine about the "true costs" of entering Europe. By which
I do not mean Jihadis or Islamist fundamentalists wishing to drag
the country east. These are old-guard secularists - the Kemalist
authoritarians who will see their power severely curbed if Turkey's
bid is successful. To keep that prospect at bay, they needed a scandal
that would play into the hands of anti-Turkish nationalists in Europe,
exploit divisions about EU entry inside the ruling party, and drum up
anger against the EU and Europeans throughout Turkish society. What
better target than a writer already famous on both sides of the divide?

The shameful spectacle last Friday was consistent with this agenda. In
the street outside the court, the biggest fascist banner (ignored by
the European press but of central interest to the Turkish) named Pamuk
and six others facing charges for speaking out on the Armenian issue,
branding them "missionary children", meaning they are not pure Turks
but bastard hybrids, spawns of European proselytisers.

To Turkish readers, the banner is also a reminder that many of
the 301 defendants were (like so many others in the business and
professional elites) educated in Istanbul's foreign lycees or
abroad. The implication is that they are not to be trusted. They
have European friends. And now they're helping them overrun the
country. That allegation has found echoes in even the moderate press:
however appalled they might have been about the "security breakdown",
most columnists agree that Europeans had no business being there in
court in the first place. Even if the government drops the charges
against Pamuk, the people behind the prosecution will still have
achieved their primary aim: to inflame the Turkish public's fears
about Europe.

That's how important writers are in Turkey. That's how their words get
policed, twisted and appropriated. As I sit here in my study in Bath,
safe in the knowledge that my own words will never know this fate,
my mind keeps going back to last August, when Orhan first told my
partner and me about the pending prosecution. After we had discussed
it for some time, I asked Orhan what outcome he most hoped for. He
thought for a moment and said, "I want to be able to sit here, at
this table, and have the conversation we've just had, knowing that
no one cares about it."

[Gavur]

Cotton And How To Tarnish Your Image

Source: "Turkish Daily News" newspaper (Turkey) [December 26, 2005]
Author: Dogu Ergil

Why has the issue of Mr. Orhan Pamuk's prosecution on grounds of
insulting `Turkishness' been blown out of proportion? For a westerner
(of the democratic kind) the issue is a violation of freedom of
expression in general and Turkey's obligation to uphold EU legal
standards as an `accession country' in particular. For a native Turk
it may be somewhat different. First of all, which Turk is it we are
talking about? The problem starts there.

Those who see Turkishness as being a part of the human family, and
thus abide by the rules of living together, see the necessity in
adapting their cultural-historical heritage to the new rules and
conditions. Those who see Turkishness as unique and distinctly
different from the others have no intention to change or adapt to
changing circumstances and new rules of engagement. The first category
is in tune with modernity and democracy. The latter is uncomfortable
with both.

Pamuk belongs to the first category and tries to manifest his identity
by writing in his native tongue and telling the stories of his country
through the universal language of humanity. But that is not enough for
many. He should portray the Turk as the others have construed it, not
the way he sees it: honest, pure, gallant, loyal and good-willed, heir
to a glorious and impeccable empire and ready to sacrifice self for
one's country upon demand. No Turk short of these qualities is a good
Turk. And there is no place in our country for the bad Turk; he/she
ought to be punished or banished. One of the most often chanted themes
in street demonstrations is `love it or leave it.' If you want to stay
you will take it as is, without complaint or criticism. Has any one of
those chanting in this way, kicking or throwing eggs at people like
Orhan Pamuk, thought why philosophy, science and wealth have not grown
on their native soil but conflict, corruption and poverty have been
abundant?

Apparently no, they have made and backed laws to protect Turkishness
from the bad Turks and/or non-Turks and followed through on these
laws, having no time to think about the welfare of their country
except for their own security. Yet, there is no definition of what
Turkishness is. However, the guardians of the country and the nation
and the prosecutors and judges must know. Mr. Pamuk has been accused
of insulting and degrading Turkishness because he said in an interview
with a foreign journal that many Kurds and many Armenians have been
decimated on these lands. How dare he? First of all, he shouldn't say
such odd things; secondly, he shouldn't say it to foreigners. Why?
Because the Turks' image (Turkishness) will be tarnished. But wouldn't
prosecuting the most internationally acknowledged author of the
country by condemning him with an archaic law (oops, have I also
committed a legal offense?) be more damaging to the nation's image in
this age of human rights and rule of law?

What Mr. Pamuk said may be exaggerated or simply wrong. There are more
civilized ways of dealing with such cases like refuting him
scientifically and in the same fashion, verbally, or by
well-documented written evidence. Trying to imprison him, and those in
similar situations, and throwing eggs and tomatoes or kicking and
slapping the foreign dignitaries who were there to show solidarity
with Pamuk does not portray a better Turk. This is exactly what the
adversaries of Turkey want to see and show the world that Turkey is
not ready to be part of Europe.

Why is this contradiction so blatant yet goes unrecognized by the
rulers and a segment of Turkish society? Is it really an amateurish
effort to fix the national image that is believed to be tarnished; or
does it have more to do with the regime and the education system
(officially called `national' but really nationalist) that is
instrumental in shaping the national psyche?

The regime still sees merit in restricting freedom of speech to
protect national interests. In this case the national interest is what
is seen as best for the nation by the state elite. There are few
independent social categories that do not derive their income, status
and benefits from the state to propose an alternative interpretation
of history and sociology of the country or modus operandi of
things. Given this backdrop, the republican generations have been
raised with no knowledge of the past except for its
glories. [Furthermore, an objective sociology of the country is yet to
be written.] The rest was either forgotten or repressed for a clean
break from the past that ended up with the loss of a major empire and
its traumatic effects on the Turks as well as others. When the average
Turk hears of past injustices and atrocities of their forbearers,
associated with recent events that they have come to accept as
unfounded and unjust ethnic terrorism that threaten the country's
integrity and the nation's security, they shy away from supporting
people who say and write things concerning these matters. Pamuk has
been the victim of this psychological void or distance from the past
and present reality despite his global popularity as the most
prominent Turkish writer of our day.

What will happen now? Will the Turk try to improve his image by doing
just the opposite? I do not believe so. The government will intervene
despite the lip service it pays to the `autonomy of the judiciary' and
the case will be dropped since the presiding judge has asked the
Ministry of Justice if he should proceed according to the old law,
which would not deem Mr. Pamuk's statement as criminal, unlike the
newer code that went into effect this year. Why? Because neither the
government, who sees its fortunes with the European Union, nor the
realistic people of Turkey can put up with this much embarrassment.

One final judgment must be passed on the political `opposition' that
has acted so spineless on this issue although the occasion offered a
golden opportunity to criticize the government for being callous on
basic rights and adamant in prosecuting Mr. Pamuk and others whose
freedoms are threatened by Article 301 of the new penal code that the
government enacted recently. But looking at their position in opposing
to lower the Parliament election threshold from 10 percent on the
grounds that it will lead to ethnically fractured politics, their
concern is not democracy but power. However, power to do and power to
control are gateways to different worlds. If you prevent
representation in Parliament, then people start looking for other,
non-conventional ways to get their voices heard, whose actions are
described as illegal in general and terrorist in particular.

It looks as if we will sweat a lot until becoming a full fledged
democracy and will need a lot of cotton to absorb that sweat. After
all, pamuk means cotton in Turkish

[Gavur]

Gul: Trials Resemble the Film 'Midnight Express'

12.29.2005 Thursday - ISTANBUL 01:25



Published: Wednesday, December 28, 2005
zaman.com


The recent files brought to the court relating to Article 301 are doing as much harm to the image of Turkey as the film Midnight Express had once done, said Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul. The interveners of those files are determined to create turmoil, according to Gul.

Gul made strong statements about Article 301 to NTV, and told there is a particular mindset that is deliberately trying to create chaos in Turkey.


Speaking about the trials of Orhan Pamuk and Joost Lagendijk, Gul said: “The laws may become obsolete, what matters are the values. It is necessary to be patient in order for radical changes to be fully assimilated. After the release of the new Turkish Penalty Code, in many decrees, the judges made references to the decrees by the European Court of Human Rights. A few days ago, a court issued a decree that said the criticism is severe, but it is based on the accurate grounds.”


“We will consolidate the reforms. We will both develop the reforms and keep a track of the way in which those reforms are implemented,” Gul confirmed.

[Gavur]

Participatory and Transparent-ETYEN MAHCUPYAN

12.29.2005 Thursday - ISTANBUL 02:14



Those Westerners, accustomed to perceiving themselves as superior, have started pressuring us recently, having realized that Turkey's European Union (EU) membership could work to their advantage.


Determined to democratize us, new criteria and norms have come into being and participatory-ness and transparency top the list of criteria and norms… As a matter of fact, the Western world has begun a search for democracy based on those criteria alongside the criticism of modernity; however, the question over the degree to which the Turks can put this into action may lead to sarcastic discussions. In this respect, the trial of Orhan Pamuk is very timely… Perhaps now, the entire world has clearly seen how participatory and transparent we can also be and how fundamental a place those principles occupy in us.



The attitude of our "friends" who shouted before the world media how much we dislike Orhan Pamuk, a literary man and a citizen who has been bestowed with one of Turkey’s highest honors, did, however, receive widespread appreciation. The bureaucratic "thinkers," who tolerated nationalism on the street, maintained their provocative stance saying that those reactions tended to appeal to the masses, and refused to hide their admiration for the demonstrators. In fact, the standard of the demonstrations was quite amazing. Picture it, on the one hand, creative slogans such as "love or leave," "Traitors will account for what they have done," "children of missionaries" were being shouted in a solemnity that perfectly befits us; while on the other hand, we bore witness to a woman trying to smash a file into Pamuk's face, to European Parliament monitors following the trial being tripped and to those who displayed our national consciousness by punching and tripping -- we felt proud.
Above all, the protest staged after the trial with eggs and stones, together with profane language, reveal just how a trial can turn into a participatory and transparent festival.


Meanwhile, the slogan "Go sell yourselves out in your own country," directed towards the foreigners, was like a slap in the face of those who want to split the nation as well as the state; and probably sent a clear message to Westerners that abject wishes will never come true in this country.

The real destructive blow was, however, concealed in the urging and profound message addressed to a member of a minority and editor of the Armenian-language weekly Agos, Hrant Dink. The demonstrators, whose self-confidence grew with rising sensationalism over national issues, definitely thought they were reflecting a state of mind that had percolated down through time when they shouted to this member of a minority, Dink, "You’re presence is provoking us!"
Any thanks to them for this transparency would be insufficient.
Such support fully acknowledging the importance of clearly understanding the official historical views of Turkey is often difficult to find.
I bring to the attention of our National Assembly the task of congratulating the committee, as well as the participants, who organized the demonstration at issue, one by one.
Why not in fact put up a banner, for example, reading, "They swore for the nation… they fought for the nation" in the street in front of the Sisli courthouse.

I need to confess that I am staggered by, as well as full of regret for the statement, "They could have conducted themselves in a more civilized manner," made by party leaders, with undoubtedly a great deal of experience in handling state-related affairs with regards to this field, regarding the protesters.
No, sir! They could not have conducted themselves in a more civilized manner. It could only have been conducted in this civilized manner! What more do you expect? Participatory-ness? Yes, it is participatory-ness. Transparency? Yes, it is transparency… Those far too meticulous to allow us join the EU should now rethink their ideas.
Those unashamedly calling others barbarians, I hope, are now suffering the humiliation of facing the real civilization…


December 23, 2005



12.28.2005

Bold's and rearrangment of article by me.

[Hovik]

Partial Reprieve For Turk Writer

PARTIAL REPRIEVE FOR TURK WRITER

BBC NEWS:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/europe/4566972.stm

2005/12/29 16:42:49 GMT

Turkish state prosecutors have dropped one of two criminal charges
against the best-selling writer Orhan Pamuk.

The charge that he had insulted Turkey's armed forces was dropped, but
he still faces the charge that he insulted "Turkishness", lawyers said.

His trial was halted on its first day, when an Istanbul judge said
the case needed the justice ministry's approval.

Brussels has described the case as a litmus test of Turkey's European
Union membership credentials.

It has called on Ankara, which has just started negotiations over EU
membership, to do more to protect freedom of expression.

Legal wrangling

The trial was halted on 16 December and adjourned until 7 February.

The justice ministry's permission is being sought because of a dispute
over whether Mr Pamuk is to be tried under Turkey's old penal code
or a recent, revised version.

Mr Pamuk's lawyers have argued that he must be tried under the old
code, requiring the justice minister to give a ruling.

The case stems from a magazine interview earlier this year in which
Mr Pamuk said: "One million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed
in these lands and nobody but me dares talk about it."

Turkey maintains the deaths of Armenians in conflicts accompanying
the collapse of the Ottoman empire in the early 20th Century were
not part of a genocidal campaign, arguing that many ethnic Turks were
also killed in that period.

Turkey also denies its efforts to contain a separatist uprising in its
Kurdish community in the 1980s and 1990s can be classed as genocide.

Mr Pamuk is being tried under Article 301, which makes it illegal
to insult the republic, parliament or any organs of state. A guilty
verdict can carry a prison sentence of up to three years.

Mr Pamuk has the highest profile among a group of more than 60 writers
and publishers facing similar charges in Turkey.

The same nationalist lawyers behind Mr Pamuk's indictment have
succeeded in opening an investigation into comments made by a Euro MP,
who was part of an EU delegation attending the writer's hearing.

Joost Lagendijk, who chairs the EU parliament committee on Turkey,
is accused of insulting Turkey's armed forces after allegedly saying
troops were provoking clashes with Kurdish separatists.

[Gavur]

World Press Freedom Review

http://www.freemedia.at/wpfr/Europe/turkey.htm

[Gavur]

Turkish writer fined for 'insulting Turkish identity'

December 22, 2005

ISTANBUL -- An Istanbul court on Thursday fined a writer for insulting the Turkish nation in a book about the bloody conflict against armed Kurdish rebels in the country's southeast, the Anatolia news agency reported.

The court originally sentenced writer and journalist Zulkuf Kisanak to six months in jail on charges of "denigrating Turkish national identity" in his book Lost Villages.

But the judges then reduced the sentence to five months in jail and converted it to a fine of 3,000 Turkish liras ($2,200), the report said.

Kisanak's book, published in 2004, argued that much regional and cultural history was lost when Turkish armed forces forcefully evacuated nearly 4,000 villages in the mainly Kurdish southeast in their fight against armed rebels seeking self-rule.

The charges against Kisanak are the same as those brought against Turkish author Orhan Pamuk and Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in controversial cases that have been strongly criticized by the European Union, which Turkey is seeking to join.

Pamuk is accused of insulting Turks in remarks published in February in a Swiss magazine over the massacres of Armenians during World War I and Dink was given a six-month suspended sentence in October for a newspaper article that the court deemed insulting to the Turkish nation.

http://metimes.com/articles/normal.php?StoryID=20051222-093237-9478r

[Hovik]

Telling truths in Turkey

Chicago Tribune
Dec 31 2005

Telling truths in Turkey

Published December 31, 2005


Turkey's best-known novelist, Orhan Pamuk, faces criminal charges and
the prospect of time in jail. His crime? Publicly insulting Turkish
identity. Pamuk, in an interview published in February, said that
"30,000 Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands, and
nobody but me dares talk about it."

Those words constitute a criminal violation of Article 301 of
Turkey's penal code. The charges that have landed Pamuk in court
highlight a fast-approaching day of reckoning for Turkey. The nation
has been unwilling and unable to confront its past and that clouds
its future. Turkey wants to join the European Union, but the
prospects for that are jeopardized by its failure to allow freedom of
expression.

Pamuk's published remarks refer to two painful incidents in Turkey's
past. One is recent--the violent suppression of Kurdish separatists
in Turkey's southeast region in the 1980s and 1990s. The other was
long ago.

More than 1 million ethnic Armenians died during and after World War
I as a result of mass deportations organized by Turkey. The deaths
occurred in the chaos of the collapsing Ottoman Empire. Armenia has
charged that Turkey committed genocide. The Turks insist the
Armenians were casualties of war, as were about half a million Turks
at the hands of Armenians during that time. The truth about what
happened has for decades been shrouded in silence in Turkey.

Pamuk sought to end the silence. "From a very young age, I suspected
there was more to my world than I could see," he wrote in his latest
book, "Istanbul: Memories and the City." It's a book suffused with
melancholy about a city filled with ambiguities and still struggling
with the loss of its past greatness.

Turkey became a republic in the 1920s and its visionary leader,
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, forced wrenching change on the country,
banning Islamic symbols and practices and institutionalizing
democracy. These days the tensions between Turkey's secular democracy
and Islam are never far from the surface. But the charges against
Pamuk, like similar charges against some 60 Turkish intellectuals
over the years, don't stem from affronts to Islam. Rather they come
from alleged affronts to a fervent Turkish nationalism that
apparently can't tolerate truth.

In a TV interview broadcast last week, Turkey's Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan defended the country's criminalization of speech.
"Freedoms are not limitless," he said. But Turkey must realize how
damaging its behavior is to its own psyche, as well as to its
prospects for joining Europe. Painful national secrets don't vanish
just because those in power forbid public discussion of them.

The judge in Pamuk's case has delayed his trial on procedural
grounds. The government has until Feb. 7 to decide whether to proceed
with this case. Pamuk is unlikely to serve jail time. A journalist
convicted last week under the same law was sentenced to 5 months in
jail, but the sentence was immediately converted to a $2,200 fine.

Pamuk's case, though, should never have been brought. Speaking truth
to power is at the heart of free speech and it is an essential
component for modern democratic societies. The most courageous course
of action for Turkey is to empower its artists and scholars to find
the truth. Speak about it. Write about it. Argue about it. That will
help to free Turkey from its past and give it a vigorous future.