Turkey muzzles speech
The Globe and Mail, Canada
Sept 26 2005
Editorial
It is still a crime to speak freely about the past in Turkey. Earlier
this month a Turkish prosecutor charged leading novelist Orhan Pamuk
with denigrating the Turkish identity, for having said, in an
interview with a Swiss newspaper, that the genocidal killing of
Armenians in 1915 is a historical fact. Then on Thursday, a Turkish
court tried to ban an academic conference on the events of 90 years
ago. It also made an outrageous demand to review the credentials of
each participant at the conference.
The freedom to think loses meaning if a person can’t speak his
thoughts and share them with others. Mr. Pamuk is sometimes mentioned
as a possible Nobel laureate. His most recent novel, Snow, was lauded
by Margaret Atwood in a front-page New York Times Book Review last
year. Speaking up, as he has done, may shape the thoughts of others.
Those others may in turn have something to say. The freedom to
inquire into a nation’s past is closely linked to the freedom to
think.
The genocide is, as Mr. Pamuk says, a historical fact,
well-established in diplomatic reports and news dispatches at the
time (Canadians were so distressed they made an exception to their
discriminatory immigration rules and took in 100 Armenian orphans in
the 1920s) and affirmed since then by independent historians.
Mr. Pamuk’s willingness to challenge the official truth is one
encouraging sign of change. Another is that the academics that the
court wished to silence said they would go ahead anyway at a
different venue. As Turkey presses on with its bid to join the
European Union, it will find that the country is increasingly
buffeted by currents of thought it cannot control.
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