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Publisher Says Turkish Writer Orhan Pamuk Could Face Prison ForInsul

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  • Publisher Says Turkish Writer Orhan Pamuk Could Face Prison ForInsul

    PUBLISHER SAYS TURKISH WRITER ORHAN PAMUK COULD FACE PRISON FOR INSULTING NATIONAL CHARACTER
    By Benjamin Harvey

    The Associated Press
    08/31/05 12:07 EDT

    ISTANBUL, Turkey (AP) - One of Turkey's best-known novelists has been
    charged with insulting Turkey's national character and could be facing
    prison, his publisher said Wednesday.

    Orhan Pamuk is scheduled to go on trial on Dec. 16 and could face up
    to three years in prison for comments on Turkey's killing of Armenians
    and Kurds, publisher Tugrul Pasaoglu said.

    Turkish court officials were not immediately available to comment.

    "Thirty-thousand Kurds and one million Armenians were killed in these
    lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it," Pamuk was quoted as
    saying in an interview with a Swiss newspaper magazine in February.

    The "one million Armenians" refers to Armenians killed by Ottoman
    Turks around the time of World War I, which Armenians and several
    nations around the world recognize as the first genocide of the
    twentieth century.

    Turkey vehemently denies that an Armenian genocide took place, saying
    the death toll is inflated and Armenians were killed in a civil war
    as the Ottoman Empire collapsed, eventually giving way to the Turkish
    Republic in 1923.

    The "thirty thousand Kurds" mentioned by Pamuk refers to those killed
    since 1984 as Turkey fought a vicious war against armed Kurdish
    separatists. The fighting paused in 1999 after a cease-fire was called
    by the rebels, but has resumed since then.

    Turkey, along with the United States and the European Union, considers
    members of the main rebel group - the Kurdistan Workers' Party or
    PKK - terrorists.

    Turkey, which has been trying to improve its human rights record as
    it vies for membership in the European Union, is extremely sensitive
    about both the Armenian and Kurdish issues, and the new Turkish penal
    code makes it a crime to denigrate Turkey's national identity.

    As the code was being debated earlier this year, freedom of speech
    advocates said that the clause on national identity was too vague and
    could lead to the imprisonment of artists, scholars and journalists.

    Pamuk's books, which include the internationally acclaimed "Snow"
    and "My Name is Red," have been translated into more than 20 languages.

    Pamuk lives in Istanbul. His publisher said that the writer does
    not go out much and was not readily available for comment. He said,
    however, that Pamuk is determined to answer his charges in court.

    The new penal code restricts the rights of parties to discuss an
    ongoing case.

    "We have to wait for the court. Then he (Pamuk) will make his speech
    in the court," Pasaoglu said.

    Many of Pamuk's books deal with Turkish identity, a complex mixture
    of Western European, Oriental and Islamic values. Pamuk has not shied
    away from dealing with Turkey's more controversial historical issues,
    and the author has become a magnet of criticism for his statements.
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