TURKISH NOVELIST FACES CHARGES FOR MENTIONING GENOCIDE

Socialist worker, UK
Sept 6 2005

Turkey’s most acclaimed novelist, Orhan Pamuk, faces a possible three
years in jail after being charged last week with “publicly denigrating
Turkish identity”.

The attack on the 53 year old novelist stems from an interview he
gave to the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger in February this year.

During the interview Pakuk said, “Thirty thousand Kurds were killed
here, one million Armenians as well. And almost nobody talks about
it. Therefore, I do.”

The references to the Turkish government’s murderous suppression of
the country’s Kurdish minority, and to the massacre of Armenians by
Turkish soldiers in 1915, have enraged Turkey’s ultranationalists.

This has resulted in the author facing a criminal trial on 16 December
under the country’s new penal code.

Pamuk’s novels have been translated into over 20 languages. They
include My Name Is Red and his latest book Snow, which examines the
conflicts between Turkey’s secular elite and Islamist opposition
movement.

The charges against him have drawn condemnation from human rights
groups around the world.

The international row is caught up with negotiations over Turkey’s
entry to the European Union. The EU is insisting that Turkey’s human
rights record is brought up to “European standards”.

Ironically, under the Ottoman Empire Turkey had historically been very
tolerant of subjects from different cultural backgrounds. The country’s
elite turned to racism and genocide in the early years of the twentieth
century precisely as they came to emulate Western “civilisation”.