Artist Faces Prison for Criticizing National Education Director

The 3^rd Magistrate Criminal Court of Eskişehir (central Anatolia) launched a trial against Turkish actress Müjde Ar on the grounds of her pronouncement "Which hinterlands do these directors come from?", supposedly referring to Eskişehir National Education Director İbrahim Ceylan. Ar is facing prison sentence.

In a program of Turkish news channel NTV, Ceylan had suggested to use figures and pictures of Turkish national heroes for depiction on schooling material instead of foreign characters. Artist Ar is tried under charges of "insulting a public official in the media" by reason of her comment.

As reported by Sakarya newspaper, a local daily published in Eskişehir, complainant İbrahim Ceylan attended the first hearing himself. Defendant Ar was represented by her lawyer Şennur Karasakal.

Ceylan stated in the defence that he made a complaint about Ar and that he agreed with the petition handed in by lawyer Hamza Çiftçi regarding the process of investigation. Ceylan claimed that national education directors carry out the duty to raise decent generations of people for this country:

"I have a project which I have been fostering for about 1.5 years now within the scope of my duty. With this project I aim to protect children from establishing bad habits and false awareness. I was thinking of driving the children away from foreign cartoon characters they are carrying in their bags and replace them with characters from our own culture instead, like Keloğlan or Nasreddin Hoca for example. I did not mention anything about 'Barbie dolls', my work was not concerned with Barbie dolls".

Ceylan's lawyer Çiftçi argued that his client's name was mentioned in the context of "paedophilia" in internet search engines. Hereupon, they filed a complaint against Ar, Çiftçi said.

"No offence against Ceylan"

Müjde Ar's lawyer Karasakal claimed that his client worried about deficits in the field of education and stated that Ar had made an announcement saying "Are the pictures in the school bags the only thing left as far as deficits in education are concerned?"

According to lawyer Karasakal, the announcement was made in correspondence to pictures on the children's bags found to be obscene by Ceylan: "My client's statements should be regarded in a holistic manner. There was no offence against Ceylan. The pronouncements were made within the scope of press freedom and freedom of expression".

The case was postponed to 4 March in order to take the statement of Ar at the court house in the Istanbul district of Sarıyer.

Ceylan's project

Ceylan indicated in a statement on 17 May 2009 that he was working on replacing foreign fictional characters depicted on students' bags and schooling equipment with figures of national Turkish heroes such as Nasreddin Hoca and Keloğlan instead.

Ceylan aimed to "protect the children from the invasion of foreign culture". He suggested that students should use schooling equipment illustrated with Keloğlan instead of Barbie and Yunus Emre instead of Spiderman.

Ceylan argued, "Almost obscene pictures are part of the children's imaginary world, they are being driven away from reality". This news was published on 18 May in printed and mass media entitled "Keloğlan will be used instead of Barbie". (EÖ)