GAZETTE ARTICLE:
The Gazette, Montreal, Friday, December 23, 2005
Writers Fined for ‘Insulting’ Turkey
Suzan Fraser
Associated Press
Ankara, Turkey - An Istanbul court separately fined an author and a journalist yesterday for insulting the state, the latest convictions under a law that EU officials say must be changed.
But the government indicated it has no plans to make changes. “Freedoms are not limitless, in freedom there’s a definite limit,” said Prime Minister Recap Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday.
Zulkuf Kisanak, the author of Lost Villages, was sentenced to five months in prison, which was immediately converted to a $2,200 U.S. fine. Aziz Ozer, editor of the far-left magazine Yeni Dunya Icin Cagri, was sentenced to a 10-month prison term, which the judge later switched to a $4,400 U.S. fine.
Both men were fined under a law that makes it a crime to insult the Turkish republic, “Turkishness” or state institutions. The law has soured relations with the European Union, which insists that the country-which began EU membership negotiations in October-do more to protect freedom of expression.
The law is also being used against Orhan Pamuk, a prominent writer charged with insulting Turkey after telling a newspaper “30,000 Kurds and one million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares to talk about it.”
Kisanak’s book tells the story of 14 villages that were forcibly evacuated by the Turkish military in the early 1990s, during the height of clashes between Turkish troops and autonomy-seeking Kurdish rebels.
Ozer was sentenced for two articles - 80 Years of the Turkish Republic, 80 Years of Fascism and No to a Partnership of Invasion in Iraq - published in the magazine.
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UNPUBLISHED LETTER TO THE EDITOR / MY RESPONSE
December 26, 2005
To the Editors of The (Montreal) Gazette,
Having just returned from the 4th International Symposium Against Isolation held in Paris, France, I feel compelled to add my personal footnote to a story you ran last week about an author and journalist who were sentenced to prison and later fined by an Istanbul court for dissing the state (Writers fined for “insulting” Turkey, December 23, 2005). The four-day conference dealt with the imprisonment of political and cultural activists and the increased application of isolation and torture as a means of suppressing legal and democratic rights opposition, particularly in Turkey. I was part of a Canadian delegation of poets (including Elias Letelier, Jorge Etcheverry and Endre Farkas) invited to participate in the struggle of a dedicated group of Turkish people committed to speaking out against such injustices.
Your story mentioned that the writers in question were fined under a law that makes it a crime to “insult the Turkish republic, ‘Turkishness’ or state institutions.” But if these authors are anything like the stout-hearted people I met in Paris, fighting to overturn a barbaric, Draconian prison system, then what is their crime? Trying to improve the human condition?
There is a world of difference between criticizing state institutions and criticizing the culture of a people. The closing night of the symposium, we- the four Canadians- recited our poems about resistance and about the power of the human spirit to an audience of roughly 400 people. We received a standing ovation.
And in the heat of that moment up on stage, I thought about how we, in this country, take for granted the rights and freedoms we have guaranteed to us by our own Canadian Charter. I thought about how complicit we are-particularly those of us living in the so-called “free” world- if we don’t find hands-on ways of expressing our solidarity with the people in this world who most need our help. I thought about American author Herman Melville who once said: “We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibres, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.”
Carolyn Marie Souaid
Poet
Montreal, Canada
