AUTHOR CLEARED OF INSULTING TURKEY’S FOUNDING FATHER

Agence France Presse — English
December 19, 2006 Tuesday 12:44 PM GMT

An Istanbul court on Tuesday cleared a best-selling author of charges
of insulting modern Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in a book
about his wife at a time of EU pressure on the country to ensure
freedom of speech, the writer’s lawyer said.

Veteran journalist Ipek Calislar risked up to four-and-a-half years
in jail under a special law to protect the legacy of the much-revered
Ataturk for insulting him in a biography about his wife Latife Ussaki.

She was charged along with Necdet Tatlican, an editor of the
mass-selling daily Hurriyet, which published excerpts of the book.

The judge ruled Tuesday in the second hearing of the trial that the
alleged offense had not taken place and acquitted both defendants,
attorney Fikret Ilkiz told AFP.

In her book "Latife Hanim", released in June, Calislar draws a fresh
portrait of Ataturk’s enigmatic wife, whose image to Turks has been
one of a shrill and bossy shrew blamed for the collapse in 1925 of
her short-lived marriage with the national hero.

The passage that landed Calislar in court quotes a witness as telling
how Ataturk, facing an armed attack by a political opponent, put on a
chador to disguise himself as a woman to flee the presidential palace
in Ankara.

The suit was filed on a petition to the court by a reader of the book,
Huseyin Tugrul Pekin, who wrote: "It is the greatest insult to claim
that Mustafa Kemal, whose courage none of us would dare judge, did
something like that."

Dozens of Turkish intellectuals, among them 2006 Nobel literature
laureate Orhan Pamuk, have been put on trial over the past year for
dissident views.

Most of them have been charged over remarks contesting the official
line on the massacres of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire under
a controversial penal code article which makes it a crime to insult
"Turkishness" and state institutions.

The European Union has warned this goes against European standards
on freedom of speech which the country must meet if it is to join
the bloc.

No one has been imprisoned under the provision, but the appeals
court in July confirmed the suspended six-month sentence against
Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, setting a precedent for 70
other pending cases.