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Turkey: Freedom Of Speech Again An Issue

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  • Turkey: Freedom Of Speech Again An Issue

    TURKEY: FREEDOM OF SPEECH AGAIN AN ISSUE
    Nicholas Birch

    EurasiaNet
    Feb 1 2008
    NY

    Turkey's troubled record on freedom of expression is again in the
    spotlight following the convictions of several Turks, including a
    prominent academic, for insulting the memory of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk,
    the founder of the modern Turkish state.

    In the most prominent case, a Turkish court gave a 15-month suspended
    sentence on January 28 to Atilla Yayla, who became the target of a
    media-led hate campaign after he questioned the ubiquity of images
    of Ataturk during a speech given in November 2006.

    In an interview from the United Kingdom, where he is now on sabbatical,
    Yayla declined to comment on his conviction. "All I will say is that
    without freedom of expression, Turkey cannot call itself a civilized
    country," he said. "If Turks want their country to progress, they
    must defend the right to speak out."

    The day after Yayla's sentence was announced, two students in the
    northern Turkish city of Samsun received similar suspended 15-month
    sentences. Their crime was sticking flyers advertising the play,
    The Vagina Monologues, over a poster of Ataturk at a local university
    campus.

    On January 30, the news website Today's Zaman published comments
    attributed to a European Union Commission representative indicative
    of Brussels' profound displeasure with the verdict against Yayla.

    Turkey's bid to join the EU has met with second-guessing in recent
    months on the part of some influential member states, namely France.

    The convictions would do nothing to bolster Turkey's accession chances,
    the EU official suggested. "This illustrates the need for Turkey to
    bring freedom of expression in line with European standards," said
    the EU official, speaking to Today's Zaman on condition of anonymity.

    Yayla was prosecuted under Article 301, which limits free speech by
    criminalizing insults to "Turkishness." Other intellectuals prosecuted
    in recent years under the Article 301 include Nobel Prize winning
    novelist Orhan Pamuk and Hrant Dink, an Armenian-Turkish journalist
    who was assassinated last January. [For background see the Eurasia
    Insight archive].

    Article 301 has also figured in many lower-profile cases. In 2007,
    for example, authorities in the resort town of Bodrum opened an
    investigation into a 17-year old girl who doodled a clown's hat on
    the picture of Ataturk in her school history book. The headmaster let
    the girl off after she apologized. But some parents of her classmates
    complained to the local deputy-governor, who ordered the opening of
    criminal proceedings. In another 2007 case, a local politician was
    arrested and charged after a military officer spotted him chewing gum
    while laying a wreath in front of an Ataturk statue on Republic Day.

    Some analysts say that veneration for Ataturk is perhaps stronger now
    in Turkey than at any time since the founder's death in 1938. "The
    cult of Ataturk used to be organized by the state," says Ahmet Insel,
    a liberal-minded political scientist. "Now, it has become a social
    phenomenon. Standing up for Ataturk comforts people in their sense
    of being good, upright citizens."

    Public reverence for Ataturk took off in the 1990s, which was generally
    a period of growing fears about political Islam and angst generated by
    a brutal war against Kurdish separatists in the southeast. Ataturk's
    legacy received even more attention following the 2002 elections, when
    a party rooted in political Islam took control of the government and
    reawakened secularist fears about the country's future direction. When
    10 million Turks visited Ataturk's mausoleum in central Ankara in 2006,
    it was an all-time record. Last year, 15 million people made the trip.

    Turkan Saylan, one of the organizers of last year's huge secularist
    march, said that Turks "love and respect Ataturk as the British love
    and respect their Queen."

    Turkey's best-known producer of the statues and busts of Ataturk, many
    of which grace town squares and public buildings throughout Turkey,
    is the sculptor Necati Inci. Despite his professional connection to
    Ataturk, he is skeptical about the recent trend.

    "Ataturk has become an excuse for the incompetence of secularist
    politicians," he said. "These people stick pictures of him up, as
    though that is enough to endow them with his qualities. It isn't."

    Sitting in a cluttered office at the heart of the foundry he runs in
    the southern outskirts of Istanbul, Inci describes plans he has to
    persuade the Turkish army to donate him land so that he can erect a
    70-meter-high statue of Ataturk. "Think of it: the Statue of Liberty is
    only 46 meters high," he says. "I've dreamed of this since I started
    making statues 40 years ago. Once I've done it I can retire."

    Somewhat surprisingly, Inci then goes on to admit reservations about
    what he calls the "idolization" of Turkey's founder. "If you stick
    statues of the man everywhere, of course he's going to be idolized,"
    he says.
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