Nadire Mater, an award-winning journalist, is accused of accepting a payment to produce a book critical of the Turkish military at the behest of the CIA, funneled through one of the most respected philanthropic organizations in the United States--the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
The scenario may seem too far-fetched to warrant attention elsewhere, but it has been taken seriously in Turkey, which has been roiled by one controversy after another in recent months.
The allegations against Mater appeared online and moved from one Internet site to another, until the print media picked it up and Turkish columnists made it their own.
Within 48 hours, she was the subject of heated tea garden debates as Turks pondered her work and her character.
"This is a psychological lynching," she said.
In 1997, Mater applied for a MacArthur Foundation grant to write a book about the war in southeastern Turkey between the government and Kurdish insurgents. Six months later, her project was among 32 chosen from the 726 applications for an award, this one for $59,000.
`Mehmet's Book' riles military
In early 1999, she published her work, "Mehmet's Book," a compilation of interviews with Turkish soldiers who fought in the war. She used the soldiers' stories anonymously, she said, to protect them from retribution. She acknowledged the MacArthur grant in the book's forward.
Her accounts conflicted directly with the military's official version of a nobler struggle, however.
As a result, in June 1999 Mater was formally charged with insulting the military, a charge that could have carried a 12-year prison sentence. In a trial that attracted international attention and concluded last September, she was acquitted.
In the process, she became the poster child for free speech and human rights in Turkey and, time after time, the courtroom filled with her supporters. That all fell apart last week.
A story, written anonymously, appeared on a Web site called Kuva-yi Medya. The article cited two conservative American writers and their research as evidence that a CIA-MacArthur Foundation existed, which cast doubt on Mater and her work.
Emin Colasan, columnist at Hurriyet, the largest newspaper in Turkey, followed up with his own article. Citing the alleged CIA-MacArthur connection, he wrote that Mater's book was "a skillful job of PKK [Kurdistan Workers Party] propaganda. If you had been unconscious, or a traitor, or had a tendency toward the other side, you might read this book and say, `Well done, PKK.'"
No one, apparently, in the Turkish media had contacted the American writers upon whose work these accusations were based.
J. Michael Waller, a writer at Insight Magazine in Washington, was shocked to discover that he had made the front pages of Turkish papers and even more surprised to hear of the opinions being attributed to him on the basis of his paper, "Funding the Subversion of National Security."
"The thought never occurred to me that the MacArthur Foundation would do anything for the CIA. That's crazy," he said.
The other American writer cited by Colasan was Martin Morse Wooster, author of "The Great Philanthropists" and a Visiting Fellow at the Capital Research Center.
"I would never say that the MacArthur Foundation is a front for the CIA," Wooster said in an interview.
Foundation defends grants
Explaining how the grants are awarded and emphasizing the MacArthur Foundation's independence, John Slocum, program officer and chairman of the research group that awarded Mater her grant, said: "There is no government money involved in anything we do. We don't take money. We don't act as an intermediary. The process of applying for our grants is open and these works are not solicited."
In Turkey, a country rife with conspiracy theories, the question remains: What prompted these accusations?
"It is not a simple thing," Mater said. "I must be very careful when discussing this, but it appears to be a kind of campaign. It seems to have been well-prepared by someone, somewhere. ... Maybe it is because `Mehmet's Book' has just been published in Italy and Germany."
The answer might lie in the other headlines that reflect the enormous financial difficulty faced by Turks this year--the devaluation of the Turkish lira, unstoppable inflation and a volatile stock market. Her critics return repeatedly to the financial award she received.
Deniz Som, who has written several blistering columns, said in an interview: "The real issue is this $59,000. ... In a country where more than 4,000 journalists have been laid off, this is a large amount of money."
Copyright (c) 2001, Chicago Tribune
