Orhan Pamuk, the words he dared say
Writing novels is hard enough without becoming a conductor for the static surrounding Turkey's entry into the EU. Writing novels is hard enough without catching yourself between conservatism and liberalism, isolation and modernity in Turkey. It's a damned dangerous place to be, in fact. But that's where Orhan Pamuk, author of the beautiful My Name Is Red
As Serbia until recently denied its genocide against Bosnians, Turkey, for far longer, has denied there ever was a genocide against Armenians. 'We are confronted with an immense human tragedy and immense human suffering we did not learn about at school. So it is a fragile subject,' Pamuk acknowledges. Even he didn't call it "genocide." He said last February to a Swiss newspaper, "30,000 Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands."
In the context of EU entry, the Turks' tone deafness in bringing Pamuk to court is doubly perverse.
The European Parliament is insisting Turkey acknowledge there was a genocide in 1915, at the end of the Ottoman Empire. Concurrently, a national discussion on the taboo subject has broken out among the Turks. "Last month a group of Turkish scholars broke 90 years of official silence, braving court orders, death threats and fierce condemnation in the right-wing press to hold a conference in Istanbul. For the first time, Turks dared to ask Turks what happened to the Ottoman Armenians." The country is talking about it, the European Union is talking about it, the New York Times, The Guardian, and the BBC are talking about it.
The government might as well give it up and talk about it, instead of giving in to the right wing elements of Turkish society and exerting censorship on Turkey's most famous literary figure; then they can drop the charges against Pamuk and settle this hash with the EU. And they can be as courageous as Pamuk, when he says today, "It goes without saying that I stand by my words. And even more, I stand by my right to say them."
