GENOCIDE DEBATE CASES DISMISSED AGAINST 4 OF 5 TURKISH JOURNALISTS
Deutsche Presse-Agentur
April 11, 2006, Tuesday
12:12:03 Central European Time
A court in Istanbul on Tuesday dismissed charges laid against four
prominent journalists who had criticised another court’s decision
to ban a conference on the politically-sensitive Armenian question,
the Anadolu news agency reported.
The court was to continue hearing a case against a fifth journalist,
it said.
The five journalists were charged with “trying to influence judicial
process” and “insulting the judiciary” over comments they made after
a court had ordered a halt to a conference on the controversial issue
of the massacres of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during and after World
War I.
The conference was later held after lawyers found a loophole in the
original banning decision.
The court on Tuesday found that complaints lodged against four of
the journalists by a group of nationalist lawyers, and later taken
up by prosecutors, were lodged outside of a two-month time limit.
The court decided, however, to continue to hear the case against the
fifth journalist, Murat Belge, as the complaint in his case was made
within the two-month period. If found guilty, Belge faces up to 10
years imprisonment.
The journalists were charged under controversial Article 301 of the
Turkish penal code – the article under which world-renowned author
Orhan Pamuk had been charged.
Those charges, in which Pamuk was accused of “insulting Turkishness”
for his comments on the massacres of Armenians, were later dropped.
The massacres of Armenians are still an extremely sensitive subject
in Turkey.
Turkey denies that the deaths constituted genocide, instead claiming
the deaths occurred after Armenians joined invading Russian forces
during World War I. It also claims that the numbers of people who
died were much lower than the 1.5 million figure often cited.