İçeriğe geçmek için "Enter"a basın

Turkey opens new case against journalist

By LOUIS MEIXLER

ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

ISTANBUL, Turkey — A Turkish prosecutor has opened a new case against one of the country’s leading Turkish-Armenians for comments he made about an earlier prosecution.

Hrant Dink, editor of the bilingual Armenian-Turkish newspaper Agos, was convicted in October of “insulting Turkishness” and received a six-month suspended sentence. The case became one of several prominent prosecutions over speech that prompted questions about Turkey’s dedication to democracy from officials of the European Union, which Turkey is trying to join.

Defense lawyer Fethiye Cetin said Monday that Dink now faces charges of attempting to influence the judiciary, punishable by 4 1/2 years in prison, for saying that he would leave the country if the case against him was not dropped.

Cetin and Dink said they had not received formal notice of the new charges.

A group of Turkish writers, academics, journalists and artists called on the government Monday to scrap the law making it a crime to insult Turkey, “Turkishness” or state institutions.

The country’s most famous novelist, Orhan Pamuk, was charged under the law with insulting Turkey, for telling a Swiss newspaper in February that “30,000 Kurds and 1 million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares to talk about it.”

The novelist’s remarks highlighted two of the most painful episodes in Turkish history: the massacre of Armenians during World War I – which Turkey insists was not a planned genocide – and recent guerrilla fighting in Turkey’s overwhelmingly Kurdish southeast.

The group of 169 intellectuals issued a statement Monday saying they viewed Pamuk’s trial as “a grave interference in our country’s democratization process.”

Turkey’s government has indicated that it has no plans to change the law.

“Freedoms are not limitless; in freedom there’s a definite limit,” Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said last week.

Dink was convicted in October of insulting the country’s national identity in a series of articles calling on diaspora Armenians to stop focusing on Turks and to turn instead to the welfare of Armenia.

An editor at Agos said Dink told Armenians that their enmity toward the Turks “has a poisoning effect in your blood” and the court took the remark out of context to mean that Dink believed Turkish blood was poison.

Dink said at the time that he would appeal the ruling and later said that he would leave the country if he did not succeed.

Three other journalists, including his son, also were charged with trying to influence the judiciary after they criticized Dink’s conviction.

Yorumlar kapatıldı.