PAMUK WINS, TURKEY LOSES

Washington Post,DC
Oct 25 2006

Istanbul, Turkey – The most important story in Turkey over the past
two weeks was Orhan Pamuk winning the Nobel Prize for literature. The
announcement came an hour after the French National Assembly passed
a resolution making it a criminal offence punishable by five years
in jail to deny that a genocide against the Armenians of the Ottoman
Empire was committed during World War I.

Pamuk himself was once tried for defaming "Turkness" because he said
"a million Armenians and thirty thousand Kurds have been killed in this
land" in the course of an interview he gave to a Swiss newspaper. Many
of his detractors viciously linked the two developments. They argued
that the prize was given to Pamuk not because of his literary
accomplishments, his recognition as a master of the novel who
transformed this literary form and raised substantive questions
about East and West and their relations in his work but because of
his political stance. The public in general was unable to rejoice in
the accomplishment of one of its own.

This peculiar and rather unhealthy reaction is a reflection of
the growing self-absorption of the public in Turkey and a growing
mistrust of the West. Such a mood of xenophobic nationalism ill-suits
Turkey’s current trajectory and undermines its future projects. The
deterioration of Turkey’s relations with the West and the rise of an
anti-Western orientation will harm Turkey’s long-term interests.

Beyond that such a development will exacerbate the West’s legitimacy
problems, further fuel anti-Western rage in the Middle East and
beyond and seriously undermine pro-Western and/or secular forces in
the region as well as assisting in Iran’s ascent.