WAN Asks: Charges be Dropped

According to reports, Tas, owner and editor of the Istanbul-based Aram Publishing Company, is due to appear in court on 13 February on charges of publishing "propaganda against the indivisible unity of the country, nation and State of the Republic of Turkey".

The charges relate to the publication of a lecture given by American linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky on 4 March 2001 in Toledo, Ohio. The lecture was entitled "Prospects for Peace in the Middle East" and Chomsky criticised the United States government for its support of alleged human rights abuses perpetrated by Turkey against its Kurdish minority.

In September, Aram Publishing Company, a publishing house known for its support of Kurdish human rights issues, published a translated collection of Chomsky's essays and lectures under the title "American Interventionism". The collection included the transcript of the Toledo lecture.

The indictment quotes two passages from the Toledo lecture: first, Chomsky's description of Turkey's treatment of the Kurds as "one of the most severe human rights atrocities of the 1990s" and, second, his remark that the Kurds

"have been miserably oppressed throughout the whole history of the modern Turkish state but things changed in 1984. In 1984, the Turkish government lunched a major war in the Southeast against the Kurdish population...tens of thousands of people killed, two or three million refugees, massive ethnic cleansing with some 3,500 villages destroyed." (NM) Tas, is due to appear in court on charges of publishing "propaganda against the indivisible unity of the country, nation and State of the Republic of Turkey".