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Orhan Pamuk:Turkey - Facing up to the Past
Turkey - Facing up to the Past
Broadcast: 28/02/2006
Reporter: David Hardaker
Transcript
HARDAKER: It’s the fabled city of spires and minarets, lying at the crossroads of East and West. Istanbul, the surging, soaring heart of Turkey and the new chic place to be. But one man with talk of the past, is spoiling the party - modern Turkey’s greatest writer Orhan Pamuk.
ORHAN PAMUK: What happened to Turkey’s Ottomans is a grave, important issue that the nation should know about and we have to have freedom of speech.
HARDAKER: What happened to Orhan Pamuk is a salutary tale of state repression, not only of freedom of speech today but of the truth of the country’s past. Orhan Pamuk’s sin as such, was to publicly question the deeds of the nation’s founding fathers but the way the Turkish State has handled his case, reveals the deep forces which are pulling at the fabric of Turkish society and it shows exactly why Turkey faces so many hurdles when it comes to joining the European Union.
Orhan Pamuk dared to speak of a dark episode in Turkey’s past, the forced removal and killing of over a million Armenians.
ORHAN PAMUK: This was a taboo, which lies at the heart of modern Turkish republic.
HARDAKER: For breaking that taboo, he ran headlong into the turbo charged power of Turkish nationalism.
KEMAL KERINCISCZ: [Addressing crowd] It gets you nowhere to insult and slander the Turkish nation, to humiliate your own history. Turkish historians, novelists and academics should know this.
HARDAKER: Pamuk was charged with insulting the Turkish State, his court appearance capping an extraordinary yearlong saga. The popular press dubbed him an “abject creature”. His books were burnt, his photograph shredded and there were threats on his life.
If every city has its author, then for Istanbul it is Orhan Pamuk. The beauty and the intrigue, the rumours and the secrets – no one knows the streets better.
ORHAN PAMUK: When I talk about Istanbul, it’s like talking about your family. This is the town that was given to me and I have learnt to love it, to embrace it as one loves and embraces one’s family.
HARDAKER: Orhan Pamuk is a son of Istanbul’s establishment, who as a young man was exposed to the ways of the West. He’s the insider who sees his town through the eyes of the stranger.
ORHAN PAMUK: Especially if you’re a novelist it’s your job to elaborate the difference of your thinking. It’s your job to think differently, to contradict what the public opinion or the strongest opinion tells you to think about the town, the life, the quality of life.
HARDAKER: Contradicting public opinion has proved a dangerous pursuit for Orhan Pamuk. It’s turned him from best selling popular author to social outcast. Fatefully for him, he raised the plight of those who live on the margins of Turkish life, the nation’s Armenian population.
Once a thriving community lived here, now in this Istanbul suburb only a handful remain. A shared memory of pain lights a dark past, what the Armenians call the first genocide of the 20th century. Like a torch it’s passed from generation to generation, a bond all the stronger because the Turks deny that it ever happened.
SARKIS CERKEZYAN: If one who is guilty is taken to court, he denies everything, doesn’t he? It is like a guilt complex. They found the easy way out – they sit on all their assets, their money, everything – and say such a thing never happened.
HARDAKER: Around the corner from the Armenian church lives Sarkis Cerkezyan. At 90 years of age he still bears witness to the horrors visited upon his people. His home is a monument to the Armenian suffering, capturing the time when rulers of the old Ottoman empire expelled Armenians from their land and out of their homes and forced them to march into the desert of neighbouring Syria. Men, women and children – their fate was a near certain death.
SARKIS CERKEZYAN: They experienced such a trauma. And people got so tired, they had big cracks in their feet and used to smear bitumen on the cracks to take the pain away. People got to the point where they couldn’t even carry their children – and when they were marching through Arabic villages they just left their children there and kept walking.
HARDAKER: Sarkis Cerkezyan’s father and mother were on that desert march. By a miracle they survived but with a tragic legacy.
SARKIS CERKEZYAN: Before me, she had another child… she gave birth towards early morning. In the morning the police came and said to remove the tents. My father came out of the tent and said, “Well look, my wife gave birth – could we start a bit later so she can rest?” He hit my father with a whip. “We’re trying to wipe out your roots! Are you still reproducing?” He would have been my elder brother but he died.
HARDAKER: What happened to Sarkis Cerkezyan’s people is recognised as genocide by governments around the world and by most historians. In modern Turkey though, there’s been 90 years of near silence until last year when Orhan Pamuk spoke about it to a Swiss newspaper.
ORHAN PAMUK: What I said is true, legally I have the right to say it and historically and more also, morally this has to be said if we are decent human beings.
KEMAL KERINCISCZ: [Addressing crowd] These attacks are not only against our leader but all our nationalist values. But we have the necessary power to stand against all those attacks to our nationalist values.
HARDAKER: Beneath the gaze of the founder of the Turkish Republic, Kemal Ataturk, the razor sharp lawyer Kemal Kerinciscz is the man who’s turned the power of Turkish nationalism on the author.
KEMAL KERINCISCZ: What Orhan Pamuk has done here is directly insult the Turkish nation, and the very idea of being Turkish.
He is doing this to gain the attention of intellectuals in our country and in Europe. And he’s also doing it so he’ll be nominated for the Nobel Prize. He is twisting history.
HARDAKER: The populist lawyer doesn’t want Turkey to be part of the European Union, whatever the country’s leaders say about the economic pluses. His anti-outsider message plays well in the court of public opinion and he saves his special venom for those who carry the lamp of the West – people like Orhan Pamuk.
KEMAL KERINCISCZ: If you claim that your forefathers are murderers, and if you say that 30 thousand Kurds and one and a half million Armenians were massacred, and you say this was carried out by your forefathers without relying on any historical facts, then in other words, what you are clearly saying is that your forefathers were murderers and they carried out genocide. This is clearly meant to humiliate the Turkish nation.
HARDAKER: Kemal Kerinciscz speaks for nearly all Turks when he argues that there was no genocide of the Armenians in 1915. The official Turkish version, is that the Armenians had sided with the Russians at the onset of World War I and were therefore the enemy. They say the Armenians have exaggerated the death toll and that in any case, just as many Turks were killed by Armenians and departing from that script made Orhan Pamuk a national villain.
ORHAN PAMUK: The reaction was exaggerated, filled with lots of personal envy and resentment and the fact that I made this remark to a Swiss newspaper was also xenophobically exaggerated and it was a hate campaign. A sort of, what others call, lynching campaign. Unfortunately, I was forced to leave the country for a while but I returned.
HARDAKER: Pamuk’s words were taken by many as an attack on Kemal Ataturk, the father of the modern Turkish state. To attack him, is to attack the country’s greatest military figure – heresy in a country where the victor at Gallipoli is still venerated and where the military holds enormous sway.
One Istanbul District prosecutor with sympathy for the nationalists’ argument charged the writer under Article 301 of Turkey’s Penal Code, a law which makes it an offence to insult the Turkish state. It carries a six months gaol sentence and it was a direct hit on the writer’s freedom of speech.
ORHAN PAMUK: I think that this is a law that they keep in a drawer, not displayed to European Union or international community because they will think that that’s bad.
HARDAKER: You’ve called Article 301 a secret gun.
ORHAN PAMUK: It is a secret gun, not in the sense that it’s not being displayed to civilised world but it’s in the drawer and when they want to hit, shoot someone in the head because they’re angry, they just pull it out and shoot a person.
HARDAKER: Indeed, Orhan Pamuk is only the best known of those charged under Article 301. The State has charged dozens of others. Hrant Dink runs the Armenian newspaper in Istanbul. Grand total? Six thousand copies. A small print run it may be but for advocating the Armenian cause, Hrant Dink is facing three separate actions under Article 301. It’s a sign he says of how fragile Turkey is about its past.
HRANT DINK: What is really dangerous for those who are in charge is the awakening from inside. That is why they are more disturbed about us talking inside – and indeed, they would go to the end against this. And really, the Turkish people have now started asking what has really happened in our history.
HARDAKER: Ataturk’s self styled defenders have little time for self-reflection when it comes to the Armenian question. For them, Turkey is for the Turks and there’s no having outsiders to crash the party, especially the Europeans with their demands that Turkey acknowledge the Armenian genocide. That, says Kemal Kerinciscz, will only embolden the Armenians to demand the return of land and more.
KEMAL KERINCSIZ: It is possible that the Turkish state will come to face billions of U.S. dollars of compensation. And European politicians say “So what if they need to pay four or five billions dollars to the Armenians – what is wrong with that? This should be the foundation of a brotherhood between them.” When we saw the statements they made we realised how right our defence is.
HARDAKER: The case against Orhan Pamuk reached a farcical end last month. Under pressure from Europe, the prosecution of the author under Article 301 was dropped but that’s far from the end of it. Kemal Kerinciscz wants the author punished and he’s appealing the decision. For his part, Orhan Pamuk is acutely aware that his case has now become a symbol for all those who are for and against Turkey joining the European Union.
ORHAN PAMUK: Let’s not forget that Turkey is not joining European Union today. Even the most optimistic people tell us that this will happen in ten years or say fifteen years. We are, we have just managed to start negotiations with European Union and during this process of course lots of things hopefully will change, likes of me, perhaps in two or three years we are hoping, will not go to court for saying political things or saying non violent things.
HARDAKER: The words of this celebrated Turkish author have forced the Turkish State to confront some tough truths about its past and its present. How it deals with these truths will decide its European fate.
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