RIGHTS IN TURKEY

Irish Times
Feb 19, 2007

The Turkish Nobel laureate, Orhan Pamuk, has cancelled a book tour
of Germany and is reported by a colleague to have gone into exile
in New York because of fears for his safety following the murder of
Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink last month. Pamuk’s decision now to
move will bring renewed, unwelcome attention to Turkey as it struggles
to bring its human rights situation into conformity with EU standards.

Three weeks ago Yasin Hayal, the man police say has confessed to
organising Dink’s murder, shouted "Orhan Pamuk, be smart, be smart"
to journalists as he was being led into an Istanbul court. Pamuk’s
friends fear he is high on the target list of ultranationalists who
resent the two men’s support for acknowledgment by Turkey of the
genocidal massacre of Armenians in 1915.

The call last Monday by Turkey’s foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, for
the amendment of the country’s infamous Article 301 is welcome. It
prohibits insults to "Turkishness" or state institutions and was
used in 2006 to prosecute 50 writers. But, though the case against
Pamuk was dropped and many were acquitted, Dink, the editor of Agos,
a bilingual Armenian-Turkish newspaper which promoted reconciliation,
had been prosecuted several times for "insulting Turkish identity"
and in 2006 got a six-month suspended sentence.

In April an Adana court sentenced broadcaster Sabri Ejder Ozic to
six months, suspended pending appeal, for "insulting parliament" by
describing a decision to allow foreign troops on Turkish soil as a
"terrorist act". In September British artist Michael Dickinson was
jailed for two weeks and deported for publishing a collage showing
prime minister Erdogan as President Bush’s poodle.

Ipek Calislar, biographer of founder of the republic Kemal Atat’rk’s
first wife, is on trial under the Law to Protect Atat’rk. In an
interview, Calislar had told an anecdote, supposedly shameful,
that Kemal had put on his wife’s hijab once in 1923 to escape an
armed rival.

Such prosecutions, often at the instigation not of the state but of
nationalist groups, do not normally result in jailings but their effect
is chilling and oppressive on debate and, as Mr Gul acknowledged,
Article 301 is "casting a shadow over the reform process".

Also deeply chilling, as Mr Pamuk’s exile testifies, is the climate of
fear and polarisation in this deeply divided society. A recent poll
showed Turkey’s far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) likely to
become the third largest party in parliament after elections due before
November. Ominously, a majority also opposed the repeal of Article 301.