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Haaretz: Turkish Citizens Find New Ways To Deal With Regime's Tyrann

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  • Haaretz: Turkish Citizens Find New Ways To Deal With Regime's Tyrann

    TURKISH CITIZENS FIND NEW WAYS TO DEAL WITH REGIME'S TYRANNY
    By Amira Hass Tags

    http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/features/turkish-citizens-find-new-ways-to-deal-with-regime-s-tyranny-1.319689
    Published 01:38 18.10.10
    Latest update 01:38 18.10.10

    Here's what a Turkish musician enjoys: identifying with conscientious
    objectors and demanding the judicial system put him on trial. And he
    is not alone - 80,000 citizens have done the same over the past 10
    years, flooding the system.

    Turkey for beginners is filled with endless surprises. One,
    which you won't find in the travel guides, is well-known citizens'
    participation in acts of civil disobedience. These are people who do
    not allow their respectable status to deter them from being brought to
    trial for violating the law (alongside Kurds, Armenians and left-wing
    activists). Isn't it inevitable that a law meant to suppress will be
    violated? Is this not a civic duty when the law perpetuates privileges?

    The daring of these citizens obviously has to be weighed against
    the fact that Turkey is (still) interested in joining the European
    Union and therefore takes the EU's positions into account. Sometimes
    those who defy the regime petition the European Court of Human Rights
    against the Turkish authorities. Submitting such a petition, however,
    did not protect the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. He was
    murdered in January 2007 - after enduring a defamation campaign,
    receiving threats and being tried for "insulting Turkishness."

    Turkish citizens have found unique ways to deal with the regime's
    tyranny.

    Photo by: AP

    A month ago, the European court ruled that the Turkish authorities had
    not done enough to protect his life and that their investigation into
    his murder had not been serious. The court ordered the government to
    pay the murdered man's family a fine (which was then donated to an
    organization that promotes equal opportunities in education).

    On the evening of Friday, October 8, a small demonstration
    disturbed the shoppers and partygoers on Istanbul's Istiklal
    Avenue. An acquaintance who was accompanying me explained that the
    demonstration's organizers - a coalition of left-wing groups - were
    demanding the release from jail of all terminally ill prisoners. This
    now-regular demonstration was launched in the wake of what happened
    to Guler Zere, a woman of Kurdish origin sentenced 15 years ago to
    34 years' imprisonment due to her activities on behalf of a small
    left-wing organization. In November 2009, following a public campaign
    that included a petition to the European court, she was pardoned by
    Turkish President Abdullah Gul. Zere died in May of this year.

    Another demonstration had taken place on Istiklal a short while earlier
    that Friday. Women's organizations protested the acquittal of a group
    of men charged with the rape of a 12-year-old girl. The reason for the
    acquittal? The sex had been consensual. The following day, yet another
    demonstration was held there - the regular weekly demonstration of
    "Saturday mothers," women demanding that those responsible for the
    disappearance (or murder) of dozens of Kurdish activists be brought
    to trial.

    A variety of clauses in Turkish law restrict freedom of expression,
    and could have been employed to suppress these demonstrations. The
    fact that they are not being used could perhaps be connected to an
    initiative that dates back 15 years.

    'And that was fun'

    In 1995, the Turkish writer Yasar Kemal was tried in the state security
    tribunal for an article he'd published in the German newspaper Der
    Spiegel. Immediately after that, 1,080 Turkish citizens added their
    names to the list of publishers of a book that included 10 texts
    which had been banned from publication, including one written by
    Kemal. Representatives of these "publishers" then reported to the
    security court's prosecutor in the tribunal, saying they'd committed
    a crime. The "publishers" formed a long line outside the prosecutor's
    office, demanding they be taken to court. They succeeded and cases
    were opened against 185 of them.

    "And that was fun," says the musician Sanar Yurdatapan, who initiated
    the protest. (Yurdatapan himself served a two-month prison sentence
    after publicly repeating the refusal statement of an imprisoned
    conscientious objector.)

    For every banned text whose writer was imprisoned, Yurdatapan enlisted
    the aid of hundreds of partners to publish the same forbidden words
    for a second time - secular citizens, Muslims, writers, actors, people
    of Turkish and Kurdish and Armenian descent. The signatories would
    then appear at the prosecutor's office and report their crime. Over
    the course of a decade, some 80,000 people added their names to the
    publication of 48 "forbidden" booklets and seven "forbidden" books, and
    demanded they be put on trial. One can only imagine the confusion and
    anger within the swamped legal system that eventually became blocked.

    The prosecution has since ceased indicting people in such cases. Those
    who were suspected of violating the law but were never prosecuted,
    appealed and asked that the law be upheld. The appeals authorities
    informed them that the prosecution had the right not to indict. Now
    that the system has invented ways to circumvent the protesters,
    Yurdatapan and his colleagues are working on new ways to challenge
    them.

    A week ago, the seventh symposium on "The Initiative for Freedom
    of Expression," founded by Yurdatapan, was held in Istanbul. Eleven
    journalists who had been tried for news items they'd published shared
    their experiences. Among them was Nedim Sener, who published a book
    about an investigation he carried out into Dink's murder.

    Tried but not jailed

    According to the Turkish BIA organization for freedom of the press, 323
    people were tried in 2009 on various charges related to restrictions
    on freedom of expression, 123 of them journalists. Today, however, even
    if they are found guilty, the authorities take care not to jail them.

    The American linguist Noam Chomsky, who was also invited to the
    conference, listened to all the other speakers for two days. During
    his lecture, which closed the symposium, he voiced a great deal of
    criticism about Turkish governments, including the present one. He
    spoke about how American aid to Turkey was being used to fund the
    bloody repression of the Kurds and stated that the more a people's
    demands for rights are repressed, the more it triggers violent actions.

    A considerable part of Chomsky's lecture was devoted to providing
    exact details on human rights violations in Turkey. He also mentioned
    the trial expected to open today - of 151 Kurdish political activists
    accused of membership in a terrorist organization.

    But neither his criticism, which had been expected, nor the subversive
    forum in which it was delivered, led the Turkish Interior Ministry
    to prevent him from entering the country.




    From: A. Papazian
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