LET THEIR BE SUCH CASES SO ALL IS EXPOSED
Opinion by Semih ÝDÝZ
Turkish Daily News
Oct 13 2005
Anti-EU forces that are using the legal system to hound people like
Orhan Pamuk and Hrant Dink may believe they are doing a great service
to the country. They don’t realize, however, that they are doing the
opposite. All they are doing in the end is blemishing the good name
of their country. Whether they have the capacity to understand this
is another question, of course.
Looked at from another, and somewhat perverse, perspective, what they
are doing could actually be considered as being beneficial for the
country, albeit inadvertently. They are exposing an outmoded system of
thought for what it is and forcing progressive Turks to rally around
principles like respect for freedom of thought.
Take the case of Dink, who received a suspended six-month prison
sentence for allegedly insulting Turkey. His paper Agos, one of
Turkey’s few Armenian newspapers, has become something of a shrine
for Turkish intellectuals. A large group of them visited Dink this
week to express their support for him and to condemn, through their
show of solidarity, the process under which he and those like him
can be convicted.
Of course, such cases are bad for Turkey’s EU prospects, as one after
another of my diplomat friends from Europe like to point out.
That goes without saying. But it is also a fact that the change in
mood that has come with this EU perspective — especially now that
membership talks are to start — is helping to separate the good from
the bad and the ugly in the country.
Both Pamuk and Dink know that there is little chance of them actually
being incarcerated at this stage. Even Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul
thinks as much. Instead, they stand to become folk heroes of another
kind, which we have always had in this country.
Take, for example, Atilla Ilhan, the renowned poet and playwright
who died at the ripe age of 80 on Monday.
Apart from his literary genius, which touched the hearts of millions of
Turks from different generations, his claim to fame included being sent
to prison as a young lad of 16 and being banned — on the orders of
the minister for education — from enrolling in any school in Turkey
after serving his sentence. What is it that enables a system to do
this? In Ilhan’s case it was that he had sent a poem by Turkey’s
“outlawed poet laureate” — the determined and unrepentant Marxist
Nazim Hikmet — to his girlfriend. Ilhan was sent to prison and banned
from school for this all those decades ago.
So Pamuk and Dink join a long list of “literati” who have trodden
this path, and under much worse circumstances. This is a list that
includes names such as Kemal Tahir, Fakir Baykurt, Sabahattin Ali
and, of course, the great Yasar Kemal. In fact, being hounded by the
system has always been a seal of approval for Turkish intellectuals,
be they writers, musicians, philosophers or otherwise.
It is the tradition of these great intellectuals that Turkey has
as a cultural reservoir that it can tap into in order to show the
country’s best face to the world. Many Turks are engaged in doing
just that. There is a great explosion in the arts in Turkey today,
and much of it is not going unnoticed.
But there also appears to be those who are embedded in the system
who insist on showing the country’s ugly, instead of delightful,
face to the world. They do so in the name of a nationalism that has
little to do with true patriotism. So, in a perverse way, one says,
“Let there be cases like Pamuk and Dink’s so that all is exposed.”
Provided, of course, that no one gets hurt — which certainly was
not always the case in the past.
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