TURKISH JOURNALIST CLEARED IN FREEDOM OF SPEECH TRIAL

Agence France Presse — English
June 8, 2006 Thursday 3:40 PM GMT

A Turkish court Thursday acquitted a prominent Turkish journalist in
a freedom of speech case linked to debate over the mass killings of
Armenians under the Ottoman Empire, the Anatolia news agency reported.

The court ruled that Murat Belge, a columnist for the daily Radikal,
did not insult the judiciary when he criticized a court decision that
briefly blocked a landmark conference last year on the massacres,
a long-standing taboo that Turks have only recently began to discuss.

The judge dropped similar charges against Belge over a second
critical article on the same issue, citing the statute of limitations,
Anatolia reported.

Belge risked up to 10 years in jail for the two articles.

The European Union has repeatedly warned Ankara that the prosecution
of intellectuals for exercising their right to free speech is damaging
Turkey’s membership bid.

Charges against four other leading journalists, who had been indicted
with Belge in the same case, were dropped in April because their
articles fell under the scope of the statute of limitations.

A landmark conference contesting Ankara’s official line on the Armenian
massacres — recognized as genocide by many Western countries —
was blocked in September when a court, petitioned by a group of
nationalists, ordered the suspension of the event.

It was held the following day after the organizers changed the venue
to circumvent the court order.

The ruling came under widespread criticism, including harsh words by
the EU and even the Turkish government, which backed the event in a
bid to prove its tolerance of dissenting views.

Armenians claim up to 1.5 million of their kin were slaughtered in
orchestrated killings during World War I and want the massacres to
be internationally recognized as genocide.

Turkey categorically rejects the genocide label and argues that
300,000 Armenians and at least as many Turks died in civil strife
when Armenians took up arms for independence in eastern Anatolia and
sided with Russian troops invading the crumbling Ottoman Empire.