Turkish court rejects nationalists’ compensation demand from novelist
Orhan Pamuk

AP Worldstream; Jul 28, 2006

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 A3,700) 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.

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.