Workers' Liberty

By Joan Trevor

The Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk faces charges of insulting Turkishness, that might earn him up to three years in prison. An earlier charge against him of insulting Turkey's armed forces has been dropped.

Pamuk's prosecution by Turkish nationalists under Article 301 of the penal code opened and was halted on 16 December, while the judge seeks the justice ministry's approval to go ahead.

Pamuk, a contender for the 2005 Nobel Prize for literature, is being sanctioned for telling a Swiss newspaper in February 2005: "One million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares talk about it." He was referring to the Ottoman empire's attempted genocide of its Armenian population between 1915 and 1923, and to Turkey's suppression of Kurdish separatists since 1984.

As it attempts to join the European Union Turkey is under pressure to improve its disastrous human rights record, but it has a very long way to go. Pamuk himself was optimistic in June 2005 when he won the German Book Trade Peace Prize: "Much is still in transition. The hope of joining the EU has relaxed the country. And whenever I'm asked whether Turkey is ready for Europe, I say: It's only a beginning. The negotiations have just begun. The Turks won't be joining the EU tomorrow. They hope to become a member in ten years, and by then the country will have developed economically, politically and culturally."

Pamuk is one of a handful of journalists and writers currently being prosecuted under Article 301, which came into force in June 2005 as part of Turkey's reformed, supposedly human rights-friendly, new legal code.

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