‘Turkey must drop Pamuk charges’: book trade

Expatica, Netherlands
Sept 2 2005

2 September 2005

FRANKFURT – Germany’s book trade, which is to hand its most prestigious
annual award, the Peace Prize, to Orhan Pamuk next month, called
Friday on Istanbul prosecutors to abandon charges against the author
of denigrating Turkey.

It was reported on Wednesday that the novelist is to go on trial on
December 16 for saying, “Thirty thousand Kurds and 1 million Armenians
were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it.”

Turkey denies that a genocide of Armenians took place during World
War One and claims that the numbers of people who died were much
lower than the 1.5 million figure that is often cited.

Dieter Schormann, chairman of the Boersenverein,

the group representing both publishers and booksellers in Germany,
said, “We protest. We demand the Turkish state ceases proceedings
against Orhan Pamuk.

“The freedom of the word is one of the fundamental values of a
democratic society.”

The German Book Trade Peace Prize council also criticized the
prosecution Friday. Pamuk is set to receive the prize, worth EUR
25,000, on October 23 in a ceremony attended by German leaders in
the Church of St. Paul in Frankfurt.

While Pamuk did not actually use the word genocide, his acknowledgement
that 1 million Armenians were killed was enough to raise the ire of
extreme nationalists in Turkey who called for his books to be banned.

Pamuk’s books include “My Name is Red” and “Snow”. The latter was
named in the New York Times Top 10 books for 2004. His books have
been translated into 34 languages.