ORANGE ROW OBSCURES TURK’S BRAVERY

First Post
March 19 2008
UK

While a phoney war erupts up over the new Orange Prize for women
novelists – Antonia Byatt and Nadine Gordimer are two established
writers who won’t allow their publishers to enter their work for the
"unnecessary" award – one of the novels on yesterday’s long-list for
the annual prize has provoked a real and serious controversy.

The publication of The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak (pictured)
saw the novelist join more than 60 Turkish writers who have fallen
foul of the notorious Article 301, an ambiguous law that forbids
people denigrating the Turkish nation, government and military and
carries a maximum sentence of three years in prison. Shafak, put
on trial during the latter stages of pregnancy in September 2006,
was ultimately acquitted.

The Bastard of Istanbul tells the story of a Westernised Turkish
girl who shows her American-born Armenian friend the sights of her
native Istanbul. Shafak’s crime was to mention the role played by
‘Turkish butchers’ in the 1915 Armenian genocide. Asya, Shafak’s
strong-willed Turkish teenager, protests at one point: "They always
talk about the past, but it is a cleansed version of the past… Every
day we swallow yet another capsule of mendacity."

The man who brought Shafak to court is Kemal Kerincsiz, a prodigious
nationalist lawyer who also prosecuted Nobel prize-winning novelist
Orhan Pamuk, after he told a Swiss magazine: "30,000 Kurds and a
million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares
to talk about it."

Again, it was Kerincsiz who called for the famous Turkish-Armenian
journalist Hrant Dink to receive greater punishment after he was given
a six-month suspended sentence under Article 301. Dink was shot dead
in Istanbul by a teenage nationalist in 2007.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress