Scotsman.com

Saturday, 16th September 2006

Writers on trial, state in the dock

ELIF SHAFAK IS A TURKISH NOVELIST WHO has spent much of her life in
Europe and the US. She fills her books with characters who defy all
orthodoxy, and in her journalism she lives by the same code, mixing
feminism and nuanced political analysis with a deep interest in
Ottoman culture. She is also unafraid of censorship, which is why this
Thursday she will come before the courts in a case the world would do
well to watch.

In her latest novel, The Bastard of Istanbul, already a bestseller in
Turkey, one character declares: "My father is Barsam Tchakhmakhchian,
my great-uncle is Dikran Stamboulian, his father is Varvant
Istanboluian, my name is Armanoush Tchakhmakhchian, all my family tree
has been Something Somethingian, and I am the grandchild of genocide
survivors who lost all their relatives in the hands of Turkish
butchers in 1915, but I myself have been brainwashed to deny the
genocide because I was raised by some Turk named Mustapha!"

These are strong words in a country whose official historians maintain
that the Armenian genocide at the hands of Turks is a fiction. In
February last year, when Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s most famous novelist,
said in passing to a Swiss journalist that "a million Armenians had
been killed in these lands, and I am the only one who talks about it,"
he was branded a traitor and prosecuted for "denigrating
Turkishness". Shafak must have known that she was risking the same, as
she has frequently challenged Turkey’s treatment of its minorities. A
year ago, she spoke at the first Turkish conference to challenge the
official line on the Ottoman Armenians , and though she went on to
state her own position in several newspapers, the censors left her
alone. But in July, Shafak learned that she was to be prosecuted for,
among other things, allowing a character of partly Armenian heritage
in her novel to utter the forbidden G-word.

Since its inception in 1923, Turkey has policed its writers
fiercely. Its penal code, taken from Mussolini’s Italy, puts serious
curbs on freedom of expression, but leading writers have never toed
the line. The great modernist poet Nazim Hikmet spent much of his
adult life in prison and died in exile. The novelist Yashar Kemal, for
many decades Turkey’s most famous writer, has been serially harassed
and prosecuted. Between the 1970s and 1990s, so many writers,
journalists and scholars were imprisoned that a prosecution became a
badge of honour.

But 18 months ago, the game looked set to change. The European Union
had at last set a date for talks on Turkish accession. The long
conflict with Kurdish separatists was apparently over, and the Kurds
had been accorded limited cultural rights. Encouraged by the prospect
of entry into the EU, other Muslim and non-Muslim minorities were
beginning to make themselves heard. It was finally possible to tap the
rich multicultural Ottoman legacies that nationalist ideology had so
long repressed. There was a new vogue for family memoirs. Some showed
how peacefully the empire’s diverse "nations" had coexisted. Others –
like Fethiye Cetin’s My Grandmother, in which she recounts her
discovery that her grandmother was Armenian – explored suppressed
histories. In Europe, a new generation of bicultural Turks were mixing
Turkish and Ottoman traditions with European forms and winning
prizes. As Pamuk’s star rose in the West, many other novelists –
Shafak, Latife Tekin, Asli Erdogan and Perihan Magden – had their
works translated. All refused to conform to national – or nationalist
– modes.

In so doing, they seemed to be reflecting the mood of the country as a
whole. An overwhelming majority wanted to join the EU. Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, the pro-market, pro-Europe Islamist prime minister, had
committed himself to a new penal code to bring Turkey into line with
Europe. However, Article 301 of the code recommends sentences of up to
three years for "denigrating Turkishness" or insulting the judiciary
or other state organs, while other articles make it an offence to
insult the memory of Ataturk or "seek to alienate people from military
service". A recently revised anti-terror law is so broad that human
rights groups say it will make it a crime to espouse any view shared
by an outlawed group, or even to publish a statement by an illegal
organisation.

To date, there have been more than 60 cases against novelists,
publishers, journalists, scholars, politicians and cartoonists. Hrant
Dink, editor of the Turkish-Armenian weekly Agos, currently has two
cases against him. The publisher Fatih Tas is on trial for a book that
looks critically at the Turkish army. Two eminent professors faced
charges for saying, in a never-published government-commissioned
report, that Turkey’s treatment of its minorities fell short of
European standards, while the magazine Penguen and one of its
cartoonists were prosecuted for portraying the prime minister as a
kitten and an elephant, among other animals.

So far, no-one has been sent to prison. Some defendants have been
acquitted; others, like Pamuk, have seen their cases dropped on
technicalities. Many were given suspended sentences that were then
converted to fines. However, it should not be assumed that writers
have nothing to fear.

Behind most of the high-profile prosecutions is an ultra-nationalist
lawyers’ group called the Unity of Jurists. Its main spokesman is a
lawyer named Kemal Kerincsiz. His rabidly xenophobic sound-bites have
turned him into a celebrity, and his words are echoed by the thugs who
have taunted and assaulted defendants in the corridors of the
courthouses, denouncing them as traitors and "missionary children" (a
reference to the foreign schools many of the defendants attended) and
spouting racist slogans that call to mind Berlin in 1935, while the
riot police look on .

There must be others within the state apparatus who believe, like
Kerincsiz, that "the European Union means slavery and a prisoner’s
chains for Turkey". They must be pleased that the trials have damaged
the case for Europe inside Turkey, while also giving fodder to
anti-Turkish nationalists in Europe. They must be rejoicing that the
EU sees the 301 trials as serious impediments to accession. This is
not a tug of war between East and West as the West likes to understand
it: while some of Turkey’s ultra-nationalists are Islamists, most are
old-guard secularists. The battle is about democracy, with supporters
of EU membership hoping for peaceful change and opponents hoping for a
return to authoritarian rule.

How best to help the writers caught in the middle? Because Kerincsiz
and his colleagues have successfully labelled foreign trial observers
as spies and agitators, many in Turkey believe that non-Turkish human
rights groups should keep their mouths shut. But if the
ultra-nationalists are allowed to continue their campaign
unchallenged, they stand a very good chance of winning. And if they
do, the oldest stable secular state in the Muslim world will cease to
democratise, and a brave new literature will die.

– Maureen Freely is the author of five novels and the translator of
Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, Istanbul and The Black Book. She teaches creative
writing at the University of Warwick.

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Last updated: 16-Sep-06 01:12 BST