Orhan Pamuk: Armenian Genocide is a Moral Issue
By Khatchig Mouradian

The Armenian Weekly
Oct. 12, 2007

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (A.W.)’Answering a question from the audience during
his book reading organized by the Harvard Bookstore on Oct. 12,
Turkish novelist and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk said that the Armenian
genocide is a moral issue that needs to be discussed freely in Turkey.

The question read, `What do you think about the Armenian Genocide
Resolution in the U.S. Congress?’ Pamuk said, `I was expecting this
question.’ Interrupted by laughter from the audience, Pamuk continued,
`Don’t worry, I’ll get out of it.’

`For me, it’s a moral issue, it’s a personal issue,’ he went on to
say. `For me it’s an issue of free speech, which we don’t totally have
in Turkey. ¦ The Turkish people should be able to freely discuss [this
issue].’

Pamuk added, `I basically think it is upsetting that this issue is
getting to be an arm-twisting issue [between states] rather than a
moral or free speech issue in Turkey.’ Pamuk was in Cambridge to read
from his newly published book Other Colors: Essays and a Story (Alfred
A. Knopf, 2007). He is the winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in
Literature. In 2005, he was charged with `insulting Turkishness’ under
Turkey’s notorious Article 301 for saying in an interview with a Swiss
magazine that `Thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were
killed in these lands and nobody dares to talk about it.’ The charges
were later dropped.