TURKISH NOVELIST DENOUNCES GOVERNMENT AT BOOK FAIR
By Motoko Rich
IHT
October 16, 2008
FRANKFURT: Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist and Nobel Prize laureate,
publicly and forcefully denounced the Turkish government for its
treatment of writers in a speech he gave at the opening ceremony of
the Frankfurt Book Fair on Tuesday evening as the president of Turkey
sat listening.
Every year, a nation is chosen to be guest of honor at the fair,
an annual rite of the international publishing industry, and this
year it is Turkey.
Hundreds of thousands of publishers, editors, agents and authors are
gathered here from 100 countries to talk about and negotiate deals
for upcoming books in what has become the most important annual event
on the book-publishing calendar.
At Tuesday’s opening ceremony in a packed auditorium, Pamuk spoke
quietly but intensely as Abdullah Gul, the president of Turkey,
sat in the audience.
"A century of banning and burning books, of throwing writers into
prison or killing them or branding them as traitors and sending them
into exile, and continuously denigrating them in the press — none of
this has enriched Turkish literature — it has only made it poorer,"
Pamuk said.
Pamuk, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, was the subject
of criminal charges of "insulting Turkishness" after giving a 2005
interview to magazine in which he condemned the mass killings of
Armenians in Turkey in World War I and the killing of Kurds by Turkey
in the 1980s. The charges were dropped, but many nationalists have
not forgiven Pamuk.
"The state’s habit of penalizing writers and their books is still very
much alive," Pamuk said in his speech. "Article 301 of the Turkish
penal code continues to be used to silence and suppress many other
writers, in the same way it was used against me; there are at this
moment hundreds of writers and journalists being prosecuted and found
guilty under this article."
When he was working on his latest novel, "Museum of Innocence,"
Pamuk said he used YouTube to research Turkish films and songs. Now,
he said that YouTube, along with many other domestic and international
Web sites, are blocked in Turkey "for political reasons."
President Gul, who spoke immediately following Pamuk, said that Turkey
was "really proud" of his Nobel Prize and the fact that Turkish
literature was being recognized more generally as well as at the
Frankfurt Book Fair.
He did not address Pamuk’s criticisms directly, but said that "today,
I can state with happiness that in Turkey, thanks to political
and economic reforms that have gradually and more intensively been
integrated," his nation is coming closer to fulfilling the conditions
necessary to join the European Union. "Although we have not been
fully successful and there is a lot yet to be done," he said, "If we
compare it to the situation before, we can say that in Turkey there
has indeed been a positive development."