HOW CAN A COUNTRY THAT VICTIMISES ITS GREATEST LIVING WRITER ALSO JOIN THE EU?
Salman Rushdie
The Times, UK
Oct 14 2005
THE WORK ROOM of the writer Orhan Pamuk looks out over the Bosphorus,
that fabled strip of water which, depending on how you see these
things, separates or unites – or, perhaps, separates and unites –
the worlds of Europe and Asia. There could be no more appropriate
setting for a novelist whose work does much the same thing.
In many books, most recently the acclaimed novel Snow and the haunting
memoir-portrait of his home town, Istanbul: Memories and the City,
Pamuk has laid claim to the title, formerly held by Yashar Kemal,
of Greatest Turkish Writer. He is also an outspoken man.
Explaining his reasons for refusing the title of “state artist”,
he said, in 1999: “For years I have been criticising the State for
putting authors in jail, for only trying to solve the Kurdish problem
by force, and for its narrow-minded nationalism . . . I don’t know why
they tried to give me the prize.” He has described Turkey as having
“two souls” and has criticised its human rights abuses.
“Geographically we are part of Europe . . . but politically?” He is
not sure.
I spent some days with Pamuk in July this year, at a literary festival
in the pretty Brazilian seaside town of Parati, and for those few
days he seemed free of his cares even though, earlier in the year,
death threats made against him by Turkish ultranationalists had
forced him to spend two months out of his country. But the clouds
were gathering. The statement he had made to the Swiss newspaper
Tages Anzeiger on February 6, 2005, which had been the cause of
the ultranationists ‘ wrath, was about to become a serious problem
once again.
“Thirty thousand Kurds and one million Armenians were killed in
Turkey,” he had told the Swiss paper, adding: “Almost no one dares to
speak out on this but me.” He was referring to the killings by Ottoman
Empire forces of thousands of Armenians in 1915-17. (Turkey does not
contest the deaths, but denies that they amounted to genocide.) Pamuk’s
reference to “30,000” Kurdish deaths refers to those killed since 1984
in the conflict between Turkish forces and Kurdish separatists. Debate
on these issues has been stifled by stringent laws, some leading to
lengthy lawsuits, fines and in some cases prison terms.
On September 1, 2005, Pamuk was indicted by a district prosecutor for
having “blatantly belittled Turkishness” by his remarks. If convicted,
he faces up to three years in jail. Article 301/1 of the Turkish
penal code, under which Pamuk is to be tried, states that “a person
who explicitly insults being a Turk, the Republic or Turkish Grand
National Assembly, shall be sentenced to a penalty of imprisonment
for a term of six months to three years . . . Where insulting being
a Turk is committed by a Turkish citizen in a foreign country, the
penalty shall be increased by one third.” So, if Pamuk is found guilty,
he faces an additional penalty for having made the statement abroad.
You would think that the Turkish authorities might have avoided
so blatant an assault on their most celebrated writer’s fundamental
freedoms at the very moment that their application for full membership
of the European Union – an extremely unpopular application in many
EU countries – was being considered at the EU summit.
However, in spite of being a state that has ratified both the United
Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and
the European Convention on Human Rights, both of which see freedom
of expression as central, Turkey continues to have and to enforce a
penal code that is clearly contrary to these very same principles,
and, in spite of widespread global protests, has set the date for
Pamuk’s trial. It will begin, unless there is a change of heart,
on December 16.
That Pamuk is criticised by Turkish Islamists and radical nationalists
is no surprise. That the attackers frequently disparage his works
as obscure and self-absorbed, accusing him of having sold out to
the West, is no surprise either. It is, however, disappointing to
read intellectuals such as Soli Ozel, a professor of international
relations and a newspaper columnist, criticising “those, especially
in the West, who would use the indictment against Pamuk to denigrate
Turkey’s progress toward greater civil rights – and toward European
Union membership”.
Ozel wants the charges against Pamuk thrown out at the trial in
December, and accepts that they represent an “affront” to free speech,
but prefers to stress “the distance that the country has covered in the
past decade”. This seems altogether too weak. The number of convictions
and prison sentences under the laws that penalise free speech in
Turkey has indeed declined in the past decade, but International PEN’s
records show that more than 50 writers, journalists and publishers
currently face trials. Turkish journalists continue to protest against
the (revised) penal code. The International Publishers Association,
in a deposition to the UN, has described this revised code as being
“deeply flawed”.
Jose Manuel Barroso, the President of the European Commission, says
that Turkey’s entry into the EU is by no means assured, that it
will have to win over the hearts and minds of the deeply sceptical
EU citizenry. The Turkish application is being presented (most
vociferously by Tony Blair and Jack Straw) as a test case for the EU.
To reject it, we are told, would be a catastrophe, widening the gulf
between Islam and the West. There is an element of Blairite poppycock
in this, a disturbingly communalist willingness to sacrifice Turkish
secularism on the altar of faith-based politics. But the Turkish
application is indeed a test case for the EU, a test of whether the
Union has any principles at all. If it has, its leaders will insist
on charges against Orhan Pamuk being dropped at once – there is no
need to keep him waiting for justice until December – and on further,
rapid revisions to Turkey’s repressive penal code.
An unprincipled Europe, which turns its back on great artists and
fighters for freedom, will continue to alienate its citizens, whose
disenchantment has already been widely demonstrated by the votes
against the proposed new constitution. So the West is being tested
as well as the East. On both sides of the Bosphorus, the Pamuk case
matters.