"Debate about Armenian massacre will continue
Monday, 19th December, 2005
LIBERAL REFORMS: Recep Tayyip, the Turkish prime minister
THIRTY thousand Kurds and one million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it,” said Turkish most celebrated novelist, Orhan Pamuk, during an interview with a Swiss newspaper last February. He was charged with “public denigration of Turkish identity” by an Istanbul public prosecutor, and his trial opened on Friday. He could face up to three years in jail.
The prosecutor’s game is fairly obvious. The Turkish judiciary is not short of conservative nationalists who detest the wave of liberal reforms carried out by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government in order to qualify for membership in the European Union. It was they who smuggled in the new law under which Pamuk has been charged at the very time when the Turkish legal code was being purged of many other elements (like the death penalty) that were incompatible with EU legal norms.
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More:New Vision Online : Debate about Armenian massacre will continue
