The Irish Times
March 27, 2007 Tuesday

Turkish intellectuals find it hardto laugh at new climate of fear

TURKEY: As the European Union celebrates 50 years of peace and
prosperity, life for dissidents in would-be Europe – Turkey – is
getting more difficult. Nicholas Birch reports from Istanbul

As a foreigner, waving your yellow press card usually opens doors in
Turkey.

It didn’t impress the police officer guarding the entrance to Agos,
the Turkish-Armenian newspaper run by Hrant Dink until a teenage
nationalist murdered him this January as he stepped out of his
office.

"Who are you working for?" he asks suspiciously. "Who do you want to
talk to?"

Like the closed-circuit camera set up last month to survey the patch
of Istanbul street where Dink died, his questions betray the
heightened sense of insecurity facing dissidents in Turkey today.

A well-known columnist who took over as editor of Agos after his
friend’s death, Etyen Mahcupyan has been receiving threats for as
long as he can remember.

"You are so accustomed to [ them] that when the threats go down, you
ask what is happening," he says, "and that’s why the murder was a
real shock. Because you have so many threats every day and nothing
happens."

Hrant Dink’s death was a turning point for Atilla Yayla, too. An
Ankara-based political scientist, his problems started last November
when he publicly described Turkey’s founder Kemal Ataturk as "that
man".

Turkey’s press branded him a traitor. His university removed him from
his teaching position for four months.

Last week, a prosecutor opened a case against him for "insulting the
legacy of Ataturk". He faces up to three years in jail.

"For five days, I couldn’t sleep," Yayla remembers, comparing the
media campaign against him to Stalin’s Moscow trials. "In the end I
collapsed physically."

But it wasn’t until after Dink’s death that he began to take the
death threats he had been receiving seriously. Like more than a dozen
other Turkish dissidents, he now shares his life with a police
bodyguard.

"He is so much a part of me that I’m planning to buy him and his
family presents," Yayla comments wryly.

Other Turkish intellectuals find it much less easy to laugh at the
new climate of fear. One of the most prominent of 50 people taken to
court by ultra-nationalists last year on charges of "insulting
Turkishness", best-selling novelist Elif Safak, now keeps trips
outside her house to a minimum.

Dink "was a close friend and I haven’t got over the shock of his
death", she said in a phone conversation last week. She declined to
talk at length.

Interviewed by daily Hurriyet in February, her husband Eyup Can said
she was so upset that she was no longer able to breast-feed her
six-month-old daughter.

Orhan Pamuk, meanwhile, the novelist who won last year’s Nobel Prize
for literature, left Turkey under police escort on February 1st, days
after the man believed by police to have organised Dink’s murder
threatened him as he was taken into custody.

Turkey’s tourism ministry has since announced it will be using Pamuk
as part of its new campaign to attract tourists to Turkey.

When well over 100,000 people attended Dink’s funeral procession late
in January, many hoped his death might mark the end of what one
columnist called "the ultra-nationalist tsunami" sweeping Turkey
since its European Union bid started.

In fact the protest, and the protesters’ choice of the slogan "we are
all Armenians", stirred nationalists up further.

A key demand made by protesters, that the law criminalising insults
to "Turkishness" should be changed, remains ignored by an
electioneering government afraid of losing nationalist support.
Despite the risks they face, though, Turkish dissidents say they have
no intention of giving up the struggle.

"Such a thing has happened that you cannot be cautious any more,"
says Agos’s new editor Etyen Mahcupyan. "It’s immoral to be
cautious."

Like Mahcupyan, who says you can only tell the real threats from the
false ones after it’s too late, Baskin Oran knows his bodyguard will
not be able to stop a professional assassination attempt.

"This nice person is protecting me from amateur killers, like the one
who killed Hrant," says this political scientist, who co-authored a
2004 government report on minority rights that many see as the first
spark to today’s nationalist surge.

He goes on to quote a Turkish proverb that he who fears birds doesn’t
plant corn. "If you are afraid, you should stop. But how can I look
into the mirror in the morning if I do stop? How can I lecture my
students?"

Today’s threats and restrictions on freedom of movement, he says, are
part of the growing pains of Turkish democracy. "The road to paradise
passes by hell, and we are walking."