Writers Lament States Assault on Free Speech

He took one case to the European Court of Human Rights last year. The case was annulled and the Turkish government paid him €5,000 compensation.

Mr Kurkcu's problem is that he keeps colliding with the country's notion of "Turkishness", and that spells danger for writers, historians and novelists, who bring the wrath of the establishment down on their heads every time they are deemed to have belittled it.

Turkishness is Orhan Pamuk's big problem too. Turkey's greatest living writer is due in court in the Sisli district of Istanbul today on charges of "denigrating Turkishness", a criminal offence carrying a sentence of up to three years - four if the offence is committed outside Turkey. His is the highest-profile freedom of expression and human rights case brought here in years.

He is expected to walk free, but the damage has probably been done just by putting him in the dock. Turkey's image as a dynamic, reforming country negotiating its way into the European Union has taken a hammering since the country moved against the prize-winning novelist for making what many outside Turkey would regard as a tame remark in an interview with a Swiss journalist.

His offence was to state that 30,000 people have died in the Turkish military's ongoing conflict with the Kurdish insurgency in the south-east of the country, and that around 1 million Armenians died on Turkish territory during the first world war.

Mr Kurkcu, like many other Istanbul liberals, commits the same "crime" virtually every day. "What Pamuk said is generally correct - 30,000 in any case is the official government figure for the casualties and a million Armenians did lose their lives. Even the Ottoman figures talk of 600,000," he says.

Conservatives and nationalists view such remarks as heresy and there are punitive, if vague, laws that make it an offence to denigrate "the republic, the Turkish parliament, the institutions and organs of the state".

The Pamuk case is just one of many ongoing criminal prosecutions of publishers, writers, historians, journalists and university academics. Sixteen journalists were put on trial in the first nine months of this year, with 12 of them being found guilty, according to the independent watchdog Independent Communications Network. Another source, The Publishers Association, says that in the 18 months until this summer 37 authors were tried for criminal offences in connection with the publication of 47 books. And that is not counting the number of civil suits targeting journalists.

A raft of other regulations make it possible for Turkey to muzzle, fine and pressure the publishing industry, newspapers and television stations for stepping out of line. Censorship flourishes, too, through requirements that manuscripts be submitted to state authorities for approval and special licensing arrangements that oblige the books industry to get official stamps before a book can be published.

"Very recently there appears to have been an increase in old prohibitory tendencies," said a recent report from the Publishers Association. "Positive steps taken forward with respect to freedom of thought and expression have started moving backwards."

The author of the report, Ragib Zarakolu, has been prosecuted many times and is currently on trial.

While the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan boasts of vast improvements in its human rights record and has implemented crucial legal reforms aimed at getting the country into the EU, the prime minister is a zealous litigant on matters of free speech.

This year he has issued several lawsuits, including recently taking two cartoonists to court for depicting his facial features on a horse and a cat. In one case Mr Erdogan was awarded some £4,000 in damages, although the appeal court rescinded the award.

Erol Onderoglu, who monitors freedom of expression for the watchdog Independent Communications Network, said none of the 12 journalists found guilty of criminal offences have been jailed, suggesting that the government and the judiciary are keen to control public opinion, but reluctant to attract negative publicity, especially abroad, by throwing dissidents in jail.

"Jailing is no longer recommended because we're at the gates of the EU," says Mr Kurkcu.

An Armenian editor, Hrant Dink, is one of several writers currently on trial, although he is widely acknowledged as a tireless advocate of reconciliation between Turks and Armenians.

Many of the alleged crimes concern books on Armenian, Kurdish or security themes, but fiction is not immune. One novelist was put on trial because the dustjacket of his book carried "separatist colours" - an alleged declaration of sympathy with Kurdish separatism.

When the courts sought to ban an unprecedented academic conference on the Armenian question in September, five university lecturers complained in the newspapers and were prosecuted for their efforts.

Despite the use of the courts to keep writers quiet, everyone agrees that things are much better than in the 1990s, when jail terms, killings and "disappearances" were common. "You can't compare the situation now with the situation then," says Mr Onderoglu.

Mr Pamuk said this week that this morning's trial qualifies him as a real Turkish writer, since Turkey is a country that "honours its pashas, saints and policemen at every opportunity but refuses to honour its writers until they have spent years in courts and in prisons".

For books as with newspapers, the trend is for acquittals or avoiding jail terms. But the impact on writers, historians, and journalists is to discourage free speech.

"I prefer outright censorship to self-censorship," says Nadire Mater, a writer and activist acquitted in 2001 after a two-year trial resulting from her book Voices From the Front, which consisted of transcripts of interviews with Turkish soldiers taking part in the Kurdish campaign.

"Surprisingly things are getting worse," she says. "They don't put people in prison any more. But they bring all these cases to pressure us, to terrorise us and produce self-censorship. Look at the Pamuk case. The message is, if they can put Orhan Pamuk on trial, I should steer clear of this stuff, not touch it."

Backstory

Some 600,000 to 1.5 million Armenians were killed or deported from their homeland in Asian Turkey to present-day Syria between 1915 and 1917.

The Ottomans suspected them of sympathising with Russia. Armenians want the world, and particularly Turkey, to recognise the killings as genocide. Turkey claims the dead were victims of the first world war.

The two countries have no diplomatic ties, and their borders are closed. In 1985 the UN Committee on Human Rights declared the Ottoman Empire responsible for the massacres. Two years later Europe agreed that Turkey's refusal to recognise the killings as genocide was an obstacle to its admission to the EU.

Isabelle Chevallot