PRAVDA, Russia
July 28, 2006

Novelist Orhan Pamuk gains suit at law
Front page / Society
07/28/2006 13:23 Source:

A Turkish court on Friday dropped a lawsuit against novelist Orhan
Pamuk, rejecting a compensation demand by nationalists from the
author for claiming that Turkey had killed more than 1 million
Armenians and more than 30,000 Kurds.

Nationalist lawyer Kemal Kerincsiz and five other nationalists were
seeking 6,000 Turkish Lira (US$4,500 or 3,700) each from Pamuk
accusing him of "insulting, humiliating and making false
accusations."

Pamuk was quoted as telling a Swiss newspaper that: "Thirty-thousand
Kurds and 1 million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody
but me dares to talk about it."

Kerincsiz had instigated an earlier high-profile court case against
Pamuk for the same comments, but those charges were dropped earlier
this year, under harsh criticism from the European Union, which
Turkey hopes to join.

Armenians say that as many as 1.5 million of their ancestors were
killing in an organized genocidal campaign by Ottoman Turks, and have
pushed for recognition of the killings as genocide around the world,
the AP reports.

Turkey vehemently denies that the killing of Armenians by Ottoman
Turks around the time of World War I was genocide. Turkey
acknowledges that large numbers of Armenians died, but says the
overall figure is inflated and that the deaths occurred in the civil
unrest during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.