The New York Times
January 25, 2008 Friday
Late Edition – Final
Putting a Dent in a Law Against Insulting Turkishness
By SABRINA TAVERNISE; Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting from Izmir
and Istanbul.
IZMIR, Turkey
When Atilla Yayla, a maverick political science professor, offered a
mild criticism of Turkey’s first years as a country, his remarks
unleashed a torrent of abuse.
”Traitor!” a newspaper headline shouted. His college dismissed him.
State prosecutors in this western city, where he spoke, opened a
criminal case against him. His crime? Violating an obscure law
against insulting the legacy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey’s
founder.
”I need thoughts to counter my ideas,” Mr. Yayla said. ”Instead
they attacked me.”
Turkey’s government has taken on the issue of free speech and is
expected as early as Friday to announce a weakening of a law against
insulting Turkishness, an amendment that is considered a key measure
of the democratic maturity of this Muslim country as it tries to gain
acceptance to the European Union.
But while that law, called Article 301, is known to many in the West
— Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist, was
prosecuted under 301 — it is just one of many laws that limit
freedom of expression for intellectuals in Turkey. The law under
which Mr. Yayla was prosecuted, for example, dates from 1951 and is
not even part of the penal code.
While the change in Article 301 is likely to stop the wanton
application of that law, the single most common statute used against
critics of Turkey’s official line, the government was unable to
remove it from the books completely, as liberals here had wanted.
The reason goes to the heart of the state of Turkey today: Despite
its booming economy, gay pride parades and ambitious European
aspirations, a large part of Turkish society is deeply conservative.
When it comes to free speech, many Turks support the limitations.
As nationalism has been rising in Turkey in response to the broad
changes sweeping society, so have the number of court cases against
writers, publishers and academics. The European Union, in a report in
November, said the number of such people prosecuted almost doubled in
2006 over the year before, and rose further in 2007.
In all, about 39 articles limit free expression in Turkey, though
only 13 are commonly used, said Zafer Gokdemir, a rights lawyer who
has represented defendants in these cases since 1995.
The laws are deeply damaging, liberals argue, because they block
society’s thinkers from asking the difficult questions needed to
overcome a painful past.
Turkey was born fighting for its life against European powers that
were carving it up at the end of World War I. It was left defensive,
with low self-esteem and weak institutions, and a deep-seated
insecurity lingers.
But unlike Russians who were cynical about the Soviet state, most
Turks strongly believe in their system. Nationalist taboos on
questioning official history are held in place as much by society as
by Turkey’s controlling state.
The legal complaints, for that reason, emerge from the most insecure
part of society: a nationalist, sometimes violent fringe, whose
political backers are the staunchly secular old guard. With vast
power, but limited public accountability, that old guard is not
unlike senior Soviet apparatchiks. The heart of this class works in
the military, an elite institution in Turkey, and in the judiciary.
In Turkey’s court system, any private citizen can file a complaint,
requiring prosecutors to investigate, and a vast majority of the
freedom of expression cases begin that way. An ultranationalist
lawyer who started the case against Mr. Pamuk, Kemal Kerincsiz, said
in an interview that he had gotten about 50 cases opened since 2005.
Mr. Yayla’s speech, in 2006 at a youth conference in Izmir, drew
eight complaints, including one from the Izmir Bar Association,
according to his lawyer, Nalan Erkem. Mr. Yayla’s argument — that
the early years of the republic were less democratic than the period
after Turkey became a multiparty system, and that Ataturk’s monopoly
on public images would be perplexing to Europeans — ”had no basis
in science,” said Huseyin Durdu, a Turkish patriot lawyer and a
complainant.
Asked what would happen if the law were rescinded, Mr. Durdu looked
stricken.
”People would be insulting each other,” he said, in an immaculate
office in downtown Izmir, a small bust of Ataturk on the wall behind
him. ”It would be conflict and chaos.”
Mr. Yayla, for his part, said he was simply trying to provoke a
thoughtful discussion on the monopoly of political symbols.
”Of course we need to have Ataturk statues, but there are other
people in Turkish history, and they deserve statues, too,” he said
by telephone.
In a surprising twist, Turkey’s class of religious Muslims — deeply
despised by the secular old guard primarily because it is considered
a serious threat to the old guard’s power — has pushed to weaken the
laws. President Abdullah Gul has said that Article 301 has been as
damaging to Turkey’s reputation as ”Midnight Express,” a 1978 film
about an American drug smuggler brutalized in a Turkish prison.
The old guard, which professes to stand for Western values but in
fact is deeply suspicious of the freedoms they would bring, deftly
places obstacles in the path of the religious class by invoking the
specter of extremism.
Mr. Yayla, who cites John Stuart Mill and John Locke, is harder for
the old guard to trip up.
Indeed, Mr. Yayla’s speech was so scholarly that the only thing his
critics found to charge him with formally was referring to Ataturk as
”this man.” (For reference, in the Turkish Constitution, he is
described as the ”immortal leader and unrivaled hero.”)
The prosecutions result in suspended sentences, fines, closings of
publishing houses, but rarely jail time. Even so, they have chilled
free speech. Public trials go for months and draw leering
ultranationalists. Last year one turned lethal when a nationalist
teenage gunman killed Hrant Dink, a Turkish-Armenian journalist.
Mr. Yayla is now in self-imposed exile in Britain, even though his
job in Turkey was reinstated. Before leaving, he moved around with a
bodyguard.
The convictions that sometimes do carry jail time are often against
Kurds. An arsenal of laws relating to the charge of terrorism is
aimed at Kurdish writers, publishers and artists.
”When you use the word Kurd or Kurdistan, you are conducting
terrorist propaganda, no matter what you are saying,” said Ahmet
Onal, a Kurdish publisher of 270 books, for which he has stood trial
27 times and served prison terms twice.
The issue of Kurds is delicate because Turkey has been warring with a
militant fringe of its Kurdish population since the 1980s, and the
lines between expression and revolt are blurry. For years the old
guard refused to acknowledge its Kurds as a distinct population.
Many Turks say European countries should be more understanding of
Turkey, a far younger state than many, with bigger problems. European
democracy is a ”thornless garden,” said Umit Kocasakal, a lawyer.
Besides, he says, Europeans have similar laws restricting speech.
Articles 90A and 90B in Germany prohibit disparaging the state, its
symbols and constitutional institutions, and Article 290 of the
Italian penal code prohibits vilifying the republic and its military.
But application in Europe is extremely rare. In Italy the only
punishment is a fine.
The laws in Turkey may be frustratingly tenacious but besides the
amendment, the government is fighting back in its own way. It
detained more than 30 ultranationalists with shady ties to the old
guard on Tuesday in an operation that thrilled liberals. Among those
detained was Mr. Kerincsiz, who had opened the cases against Mr.
Pamuk and Mr. Dink.
Mr. Yayla spends his days reading in Britain. He says it feels good
to pore over pages about the possibility of free societies in Muslim
countries. Despite Turkish liberals’ fight with the rigid, dying old
guard, it is the new religious class that seems certain to determine
the future of democracy in Turkey, and Mr. Yayla says he wants to be
prepared.
”I am an individualist,” he said. ”I believe in the value of human
beings. I don’t like insulting people. I can usually make my point
without it.”