INSIGHT Weekly commentary
September 22 , 2006
Turkey on Trial
Good news: Elif Shafak, the novelist accused of insulting Turkey, has won her case in Istanbul. The Arizona-based writer was the first to be charged for a work of fiction. But others, less celebrated, are not so fortunate.
Fatih Tas, the owner of Aram Publishing in Istanbul, who published translated editions of many books critical of Turkey’s human rights record, including my 1997 book,Spoils of War, remains at risk. He is, by any measure, a provocative and courageous young man. And for that he faces many years in a Turkish prison, because I and others (like Noam Chomsky) in these books have “insulted” the state, the army, Ataturk, and so on—in short, challenged Turkey’s hypernationalism. His trial was postponed again from this week to late November. Also on trial are the book's two translators, Lutfi Taylan Tosun and Aysel Yildirim. Like Tas, they deny that they should be charged.
My crime is criticism—well documented, mind you—of the war against the Kurds in the 1980s and ’90s. Some 40,000 people died in that war, which was spurred by the PKK, a guerrilla group, and the military’s response to its insurgency. But the state’s reaction—which included the forced evacuation of thousands of Kurdish villages, unambiguously a violation of human rights law—was excessive and may have benefited the PKK’s recruitment. We know now that the humiliation and aggressiveness of such counterinsurgency campaigns can actually fuel rebels’ causes. At the same time, the Turkish state was denying Kurdish identity and marginalizing moderate Kurds politically and economically, a recipe for continuing strife.
But even reporting this situation is a crime in Turkey. As is raising the matter of the genocide of Armenians during the First World War, questioning the state’s dedication to democratic values, and so on. Something close to one hundred writers, editors, translators, columnists, and publishers have been charged. It is often said that a few rogue prosecutors, opposed to entry into the EU, are running this show, but the “deep state” of the military is also involved, and the elected government could stop it cold. It has chosen not to. Either it believes it can’t, and therefore democratic government is not viable in Turkey, or it won’t, which means that democratic values are not viable in Turkey. Either case is troubling.
The U.S. Government, and most of the American press, has been mute. Only when celebrity novelists like Orhan Pamuk or Elif Safak are prosecuted does the press take notice (and thank goodness they do so at all). The Bush administration, to my knowledge, has said nothing in protest of the prosecutions, despite its endless incantations about supporting freedom in the world. It has told Europeans to mute their criticisms of Turkey’s human rights record, however, and so it seems that is the official policy. (It needs Turkey for a number of errands in the region, such as not messing with Iraq’s Kurds, which indeed was the point of my book.)
So Fatih Tas may go to jail for my sins, as could the two translators. Washington stands in cowardly silence. The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, NBC, Fox, et alia follow suit. It’s a dispiriting experience, and one that reveals our inability to cope with the ‘tweeners of global politics, those that are neither Jeffersonian democracies nor Saddam-like tyrannies. Turkey is on a path to self-destruction, for this and other reasons, and we can, in that event, only wonder why “someone” let it happen.
- John Tirman
See further discussion of this issue here. This is updated from Sept. 17.
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