Big ups to my Columbia buddy Benjamin Harvey, a reporter for the Associated Press, who is doing an excellent job of covering the trial of Turkey’s best novelist, Orhan Pamuk.
By BENJAMIN HARVEY
Associated Press Writer
© 2005 The Associated Press
ISTANBUL, Turkey — Turkey’s foremost novelist goes on trial Friday in Istanbul in a free-speech case that has divided the nation, embarrassed its liberals and cast a pall over its dream of joining the European Union.
For Europeans who oppose Turkey’s membership in their prosperous club of democracies, the prosecution of Orhan Pamuk reinforces the view that the nation of 70 million Muslims, while a useful buffer between Europe and the Middle East, is no part of contemporary European civilization.
Pamuk, the critically acclaimed author of “My Name is Red,” “Snow” and “Istanbul,” faces up to three years in prison for saying to a Swiss newspaper in February that no one in Turkey is willing to deal with painful episodes in the country’s past treatment of its Armenian minority or its continuing problems with its 12 million Kurdish citizens.
His remark that “30,000 Kurds and 1 million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares to talk about it,” is being prosecuted as a breach of a law against insulting the Turkish Republic or “Turkishness.”
On Thursday, the European Union made the stakes clear. “It is not Orhan Pamuk who will stand trial tomorrow, but Turkey,” said EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn, adding that prosecuting “a nonviolent opinion casts a shadow over the accession negotiations between Turkey and the EU.”
