Toronto Star, Canada
Oct 16 2005

Exposing dark side of Turkey

Writer’s ordeal a test case for Europe’s principles, says Salman
Rushdie

The work room of the writer Orhan Pamuk looks out over the Bosphorus,
that fabled strip of water which, depending on how you see these
things, separates or unites – or, perhaps, separates and unites – the
worlds of Europe and Asia.

There could be no more appropriate setting for a novelist whose work
does much the same thing. In many books, most recently the acclaimed
novel Snow and the haunting memoir/portrait of his home town,
Istanbul: Memories and the City, Pamuk has laid claim to the title,
formerly held by Yashar Kemal, of “Greatest Turkish writer.”

He is also an outspoken man. In 1999, for example, he refused the
title of “state artist.”

“For years I have been criticizing the state for putting authors in
jail, for only trying to solve the Kurdish problem by force and for
its narrow-minded nationalism,” he said. “I don’t know why they tried
to give me the prize.”

He has described Turkey as having “two souls,” and has criticized its
human-rights abuses.

“Geographically we are part of Europe,” he says, “but politically?”

I spent some days with Pamuk in July, at a literary festival in the
pretty Brazilian seaside town of Parati. For those few days he seemed
free of his cares, even though, earlier in the year, death threats
made against him by Turkish ultranationalists – “He shouldn’t be
allowed to breathe,” one said – had forced him to spend two months
out of his country.

But the clouds were gathering. The statement he made to the Swiss
newspaper Tages Anzeiger on Feb. 6, which had been the cause of the
ultranationalists’ wrath, was about to become a serious problem once
again.

“Thirty thousand Kurds and 1 million Armenians were killed in
Turkey,” he told the Swiss paper. “Almost no one dares to speak out
on this but me.”

He was referring to the killings by Ottoman forces of thousands of
Armenians between 1915 and 1917. Turkey does not contest the deaths,
but denies that they amounted to genocide. Pamuk’s reference to
“30,000” Kurdish deaths refers to those killed since 1984 in the
conflict between Turkish forces and Kurdish separatists.

On Sept. 1, Pamuk was indicted by a district prosecutor for the crime
of having “blatantly belittled Turkishness” by his remarks. If
convicted he faces up to three years in jail.

Article 301/1 of the Turkish penal code, under which Pamuk is to be
tried, states: “A person who explicitly insults being a Turk, the
Republic or Turkish Grand National Assembly shall be sentenced to a
penalty of imprisonment for a term of six months to three years …
Where insulting being a Turk is committed by a Turkish citizen in a
foreign country, the penalty shall be increased by one-third.” If
Pamuk is found guilty, he faces an additional penalty for having made
the statement abroad.

You would think Turkish authorities might have avoided so blatant an
assault on their most internationally celebrated writer’s fundamental
freedoms at the very moment their application for full membership of
the European Union – an extremely unpopular application in many EU
countries – was being considered at the EU summit.

However, in spite of being a state that has ratified both the U.N.
and European covenants on human rights, both of which see freedom of
expression as central, Turkey continues to enforce a penal code that
is clearly contrary to these same principles and has set the date for
Pamuk’s trial for Dec. 16.

The number of convictions and prison sentences under the laws that
penalize free speech in Turkey has declined in the past decade. But
International PEN’s records show that more than 50 writers,
journalists and publishers currently face trial. Turkish journalists
continue to protest against the revised penal code, and the
International Publishers Association, in a deposition to the U.N.,
has described this revised code as being “deeply flawed.”

The Turkish application is being presented, most vociferously by
Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair, as a test case for the EU. To
reject it, we are told, would be a catastrophe, widening the gulf
between Islam and the West. There is an element of Blairite poppycock
in this, a disturbingly communalist willingness to sacrifice Turkish
secularism on the altar of faith-based politics.

But the Turkish application is indeed a test case for the EU: a test
of whether the EU has any principles at all. If it has, then its
leaders will insist that the charges against Pamuk be dropped at once
and further insist on rapid revisions to Turkey’s repressive penal
code.

An unprincipled Europe, which turned its back on great artists and
fighters for freedom, would continue to alienate its citizens, whose
disenchantment has already been widely demonstrated by the votes
against the proposed new constitution. So the West is being tested as
well as the East. On both sides of the Bosphorus, the Pamuk case matters.