The Scotsman, UK
September 16, 2006, Saturday
Critique Edition

Burning Questions

WHY SHOULD SCOTLAND CARE ABOUT CENSORSHIP IN TURKEY?

THESE are tough times for freedom of speech in Turkey. Next week Elif
Shafak comes before the courts for writing a novel in which one
character makes a passing mention of Turkey’s role in the Armenian
massacres. A fortnight further on, and another best-selling Turkish
woman writer, Ipek Calislar, goes on trial for claiming that the
country’s founder, Mustafa Kamal Ataturk, dressed up as a woman.

Well, that’s fair enough, isn’t it? You’d expect people to be a bit
upset if it turns out that he was a secret Eddie Izzard.

Don’t be stupid. And anyway, he wasn’t. All Ataturk did was escape a
besieged house by wearing a woman’s chador. It meant that he avoided
being assassinated in 1923. And all Mrs Calislar did was mention the
episode in her biography of Ataturk’s wife. The story came from an
eyewitness to Ataturk’s escape who told it to someone she
interviewed.

I don’t see what the problem is. It’s just like Bonnie Prince Charlie
dressing up as a woman to foil the redcoats. In any case, ingenuity,
resourcefulness and cunning are what you’d want to find in a leader,
aren’t they?

Turks don’t see it like that. They’ve been gradually shaving off bits
of their laws that Europe doesn’t like, but they’ve still got this
catch-all law banning anyone from "insulting Turkishness" –
everything from saying Turks massacred Armenians to insulting the
army, the judges, or Ataturk himself. Which is why there are 45
writers and journalists facing those kinds of trials right now.

I still don’t get it. If Turkey wants to join the European Union –
and I know most Turks do – all of this is going to be used as
evidence that it’s still not fit to do so. So who benefits from all
these cases?

Now you’re on to something. Suppose you are a Turkish nationalist
lawyer. The last thing you’d want would be to link up with Brussels,
lose your currency, standardise the laws, lose sovereignty to
Brussels – all the usual stuff. And you know just how badly putting a
heavily pregnant novelist like Elif Shafak on trial, or threatening a
historian with jail just for writing up historical evidence, will
play with the EU.

I’m starting to understand this. It’s like they’re using something
good to smash something they hate. They know how much Europe needs a
secular modern Muslim state right now, the kind of country in which
women writers aren’t silent and submissive but just as actively
involved in culture, politics and debate as they are here, and
they’ll do what they can to prevent it. And putting bestselling
writers – like Orhan Pamuk, earlier this year – on trial fits the
bill perfectly. They’ll probably argue that no-one gets hurt because
the verdict is usually a suspended sentence and thedemonstrations
outside and inside the courtroom make great propaganda. And they’ll
forget all about the stress it puts on the writers, and how Turkey’s
creative life is slowly being stifled in the process.

Got it in one. Cynical bastards, aren’t they?