Telling truths in Turkey

December 31, 2005
Chicago Tribune

Turkey's best-known novelist, Orhan Pamuk, faces criminal charges and the prospect of time in jail. His crime? Publicly insulting Turkish identity. Pamuk, in an interview published in February, said that "30,000 Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares talk about it."
[...]
More than 1 million ethnic Armenians died during and after World War I as a result of mass deportations organized by Turkey. The deaths occurred in the chaos of the collapsing Ottoman Empire. Armenia has charged that Turkey committed genocide. The Turks insist the Armenians were casualties of war, as were about half a million Turks at the hands of Armenians during that time. The truth about what happened has for decades been shrouded in silence in Turkey.

Pamuk sought to end the silence. "From a very young age, I suspected there was more to my world than I could see," he wrote in his latest book, "Istanbul: Memories and the City." It's a book suffused with melancholy about a city filled with ambiguities and still struggling with the loss of its past greatness.

[...] the charges against Pamuk, like similar charges against some 60 Turkish intellectuals over the years, don't stem from affronts to Islam. Rather they come from alleged affronts to a fervent Turkish nationalism that apparently can't tolerate truth.
[...]
[...] Speaking truth to power is at the heart of free speech and it is an essential component for modern democratic societies. [...].

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.