Gita Hashemi on Tue, 29 Jan 2002 03:33:01 +0100 (CET)
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[Nettime-bold] Fw: Turkey Prosecutes Chomsky Publisher
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Title: Fw: Turkey Prosecutes Chomsky
Publisher
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/europe/story.jsp?story=116073
Turkey prosecutes Chomsky publisher for essay on Kurds
By Robert Fisk, Middle East Correspondent
24 January 2002
Noam Chomsky, one of America's greatest philosophers and
linguists, has become the target of Turkey's chief of "terrorism
prosecution".
Scarcely two months after the European Union praised Turkey for
passing new laws protecting freedom of expression, the authorities in
Ankara are using anti-terrorism legislation to prosecute Mr Chomsky's
Turkish publisher.
Fatih Tas of the Aram Publishing House faces a year in prison for
daring to print American Interventionism, a collection of Mr
Chomsky's recent essays including harsh criticism of Turkey's
treatment of its Kurdish minority.
Mr Chomsky, a linguistics professor at Harvard, is planning to
fly to Turkey for Mr Tas's first court appearance on 13 February and
has already written to the offices of the United Nations high
commissioner for human rights, pointing out that amendments to Turkish
law were supposed to have provided greater freedom of expression, not
less.
Mr Chomsky plans to visit the Turkish city of Diyarbakir to meet
Kurdish "activists" and it will be a test of Turkey's
freedoms to see if he is allowed to visit the area.
In one of his essays, originally a university lecture, he says
that "the Kurds have been miserably oppressed throughout the
whole history of the modern Turkish state ... In 1984, the Turkish
government launched a major war in the south-east against the Kurdish
population ... The end result was pretty awesome: tens of thousands of
people killed, two to three million refugees, massive ethnic cleansing
with some 3,500 villages destroyed."
This, according to the Turks, constitutes an incitement to
violence. Mr Chomsky has been suitably outraged, regarding the trial
as part of a much broader wave of repression directed against Kurds
appealing for greater use of the Kurdish language. Bekir Rayif
Aldemyr, Turkey's chief prosecutor, claims that the Chomsky essay
"propagates separatism".
A spiky, inexhaustible academic of Jewish origin who has been an
inveterate critic of Israel and especially of the United States, Mr
Chomsky's condemnation of Turkey's treatment of the Kurds - and of
the vast arms shipments made to Turkey by the United States - was
bound to enrage Ankara.
Mr Chomsky describes the prosecution as "a very severe
attack on the most elementary human and civil rights". The EU, so
impressed by those changes in Turkish law last November, has remained
silent.
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A world that has no walls needs neither windows nor gates.
(Annonymous linux programmer)