TURKEY: FREEDOM OF SPEECH AGAIN AN ISSUE
Nicholas Birch
EurasiaNet
Feb 1 2008
NY
Turkey’s troubled record on freedom of expression is again in the
spotlight following the convictions of several Turks, including a
prominent academic, for insulting the memory of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk,
the founder of the modern Turkish state.
In the most prominent case, a Turkish court gave a 15-month suspended
sentence on January 28 to Atilla Yayla, who became the target of a
media-led hate campaign after he questioned the ubiquity of images
of Ataturk during a speech given in November 2006.
In an interview from the United Kingdom, where he is now on sabbatical,
Yayla declined to comment on his conviction. "All I will say is that
without freedom of expression, Turkey cannot call itself a civilized
country," he said. "If Turks want their country to progress, they
must defend the right to speak out."
The day after Yayla’s sentence was announced, two students in the
northern Turkish city of Samsun received similar suspended 15-month
sentences. Their crime was sticking flyers advertising the play,
The Vagina Monologues, over a poster of Ataturk at a local university
campus.
On January 30, the news website Today’s Zaman published comments
attributed to a European Union Commission representative indicative
of Brussels’ profound displeasure with the verdict against Yayla.
Turkey’s bid to join the EU has met with second-guessing in recent
months on the part of some influential member states, namely France.
The convictions would do nothing to bolster Turkey’s accession chances,
the EU official suggested. "This illustrates the need for Turkey to
bring freedom of expression in line with European standards," said
the EU official, speaking to Today’s Zaman on condition of anonymity.
Yayla was prosecuted under Article 301, which limits free speech by
criminalizing insults to "Turkishness." Other intellectuals prosecuted
in recent years under the Article 301 include Nobel Prize winning
novelist Orhan Pamuk and Hrant Dink, an Armenian-Turkish journalist
who was assassinated last January. [For background see the Eurasia
Insight archive].
Article 301 has also figured in many lower-profile cases. In 2007,
for example, authorities in the resort town of Bodrum opened an
investigation into a 17-year old girl who doodled a clown’s hat on
the picture of Ataturk in her school history book. The headmaster let
the girl off after she apologized. But some parents of her classmates
complained to the local deputy-governor, who ordered the opening of
criminal proceedings. In another 2007 case, a local politician was
arrested and charged after a military officer spotted him chewing gum
while laying a wreath in front of an Ataturk statue on Republic Day.
Some analysts say that veneration for Ataturk is perhaps stronger now
in Turkey than at any time since the founder’s death in 1938. "The
cult of Ataturk used to be organized by the state," says Ahmet Insel,
a liberal-minded political scientist. "Now, it has become a social
phenomenon. Standing up for Ataturk comforts people in their sense
of being good, upright citizens."
Public reverence for Ataturk took off in the 1990s, which was generally
a period of growing fears about political Islam and angst generated by
a brutal war against Kurdish separatists in the southeast. Ataturk’s
legacy received even more attention following the 2002 elections, when
a party rooted in political Islam took control of the government and
reawakened secularist fears about the country’s future direction. When
10 million Turks visited Ataturk’s mausoleum in central Ankara in 2006,
it was an all-time record. Last year, 15 million people made the trip.
Turkan Saylan, one of the organizers of last year’s huge secularist
march, said that Turks "love and respect Ataturk as the British love
and respect their Queen."
Turkey’s best-known producer of the statues and busts of Ataturk, many
of which grace town squares and public buildings throughout Turkey,
is the sculptor Necati Inci. Despite his professional connection to
Ataturk, he is skeptical about the recent trend.
"Ataturk has become an excuse for the incompetence of secularist
politicians," he said. "These people stick pictures of him up, as
though that is enough to endow them with his qualities. It isn’t."
Sitting in a cluttered office at the heart of the foundry he runs in
the southern outskirts of Istanbul, Inci describes plans he has to
persuade the Turkish army to donate him land so that he can erect a
70-meter-high statue of Ataturk. "Think of it: the Statue of Liberty is
only 46 meters high," he says. "I’ve dreamed of this since I started
making statues 40 years ago. Once I’ve done it I can retire."
Somewhat surprisingly, Inci then goes on to admit reservations about
what he calls the "idolization" of Turkey’s founder. "If you stick
statues of the man everywhere, of course he’s going to be idolized,"
he says.