A PRIZE AFFAIR: TURKEY AND THE ARMENIANS
The Economist
October 21, 2006
U.S. Edition
A Nobel winner
Orhan Pamuk, the French parliament and the Armenian massacres
WAS it for his writing or his commentary? The question has consumed
the country since Orhan Pamuk became the first Turk to win the Nobel
prize for literature (or indeed any Nobel). The comments, about the
mass slaughter of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks, led last year to
Mr Pamuk’s prosecution on charges of insulting the "Turkish identity" .
The charges were later dropped on a technicality, but not before they
had attracted a storm of international criticism.
Ascribing to him the Byzantine wiles displayed by some of his
characters, Mr Pamuk’s enemies are now saying that he engineered his
own trial so as to win the Nobel. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the mildly
Islamist prime minister, urged fellow Turks to "put aside polemics"
and congratulate Mr Pamuk, but the (pro-secular) president remained
pointedly silent.
The novelist’s detractors were given a boost, hours before the
award was announced, by the French National Assembly, when it voted
overwhelmingly for a bill to criminalise denial that the Armenians
were victims of a genocide. The bill is unlikely to become law, but
it still sparked a wave of anti-French demonstrations and vows that
France would somehow be made to "pay" for its misdeeds. Why not boot
out some 70,000 illegal workers from neighbouring Armenia, suggested
Yasar Yakis, a former minister from the ruling AK party?
The European Union enlargement commissioner, Olli Rehn, said that the
French bill "instead of opening up the debate [on the Armenians in
Turkey] would rather close it down." Mesrob Mutafyan, the Armenian
Orthodox patriarch in Istanbul, voiced fears that his 80,000-member
flock might now become targets for ultra-nationalist vigilantes.
Happily, no Armenian has been hurt (or deported) so far. Nor
have efforts to break the ice between ordinary Turks and Armenians
stopped-an exhibition by Turkish and Armenian photographers depicting
daily life in Istanbul and Yerevan is to open soon.
There may even be a silver lining to the French cloud. Basking on
the moral high ground, Mr Erdogan said he would not be trapped into
responding to France’s "assault on free speech" in kind. The justice
minister, Cemil Cicek, is hinting that Turkey’s article 301, under
which Mr Pamuk and scores of fellow writers and academics have been
prosecuted, may be scrapped. If it is, Turkey’s EU hopes would be
resuscitated-and future award-winning novelists could then claim to
have been judged solely by their works, not their deeds.