Lawyer leads effort
to prosecute citizens
critical of the state
By PHILIP SHISHKIN
March 14, 2006; Page A6
ISTANBUL, Turkey — Kemal Kerincsiz dreams of a day when Turkey will reclaim its Ottoman-era greatness, become a regional superpower and turn away from both the European Union and the U.S. But for now, the nationalist lawyer would be happy to see Hrant Dink thrown in jail.
Last year, Mr. Dink, the editor of the Istanbul-based Armenian weekly Agos, was found guilty of denigrating the Turkish state in one of a string of cases instigated by Mr. Kerinsciz. The self-proclaimed defender of the Turkish state has dusted off old articles in the Turkish penal code to force prosecutors to put Mr. Dink and others on trial. Mr. Kerinsciz has instigated cases against Orhan Pamuk, an acclaimed Turkish novelist, and against the organizers of an academic conference. He has even tried, without success, to get a Dutch member of the European Parliament punished for criticizing Turkey’s armed forces.
The maverick lawyer’s quest to restrict free speech has undermined Turkey’s effort to burnish its democratic credentials, exposing the residue of the country’s authoritarian past at a time when Ankara is trying to change its ways to join the EU. Mr. Kerincsiz is part of a nationalist movement that is trying to pull the country in the opposite direction and away from Western alliances — with the U.S. as well as Europe.
Mr. Kerincsiz’s limited success, despite tireless efforts, suggests Turkey’s civil-society movement has advanced. But critics say the country needs to do more to rid itself of archaic prosecutorial tools. “In our penal code, it’s considered a crime to criticize the state, the army, the parliament,” says Mr. Dink, the Armenian newspaper editor. “But in a modern democracy, you should be able to criticize these institutions.”
Moving Westward
While Turkey faces at least a decade of tough negotiations before it can join the EU, the country already has changed many of its laws and traditions to conform with Europe’s democratic requirements. Ankara has given greater civil rights to its ethnic minorities, abolished the death penalty, limited the role of the military in state affairs and shelved a law that would have criminalized adultery.
Turkey is well along the path of political and economic integration with the West. Indeed, Turks in general favor closer ties to Europe: While opposition to the EU has increased, some 63.5% support EU membership, while 30% oppose it, according to a poll last year by the Pollmark agency. The nationalists aren’t giving up without a fight, though, and they have succeeded in putting the government on the defensive.
“We don’t need the European Union — it will divide us and hinder us from becoming a regional power,” Mr. Kerincsiz says. Recalling how the Western powers divided the Ottoman Empire after World War I, in which the Turks fought and lost on the German side, he adds, “The West hasn’t changed its policy toward Turkey since then.”
Eye on Elections
With Turkey’s next general election scheduled for 2007, the nationalists are appealing to anti-Western sentiment that is always present in parts of Turkey’s mostly Muslim society. “The Valley of the Wolves, Iraq,” a hit fictional movie released earlier this year, shows U.S. soldiers killing women and children at an Iraqi wedding, while a recent novel imagines a war between Turkey and the EU.
Seven years ago, Mr. Kerincsiz founded an association of nationalist lawyers, whose membership has since grown to 800 members in Istanbul alone. The association’s long-term goal: a Turkey-led confederation stretching from the former Ottoman provinces in the Balkans to the Turkic republics of Central Asia. “You have to have big goals in life,” says Mr. Kerincsiz, a lanky and energetic 46-year-old who was an honors student in law school.
But it is his immediate strategy — prosecuting words and deeds he considers damaging to the Turkish republic — that has pulled the association from the nationalist fringe into the center of a debate on what the modern Turkish state should look like. His first high-profile strike came last year when two Istanbul universities teamed up to organize a conference on Armenians in Turkey, one of the most controversial issues in the country’s history. Armenia says the Ottoman government orchestrated a genocide of the Armenian population during World War I. Turkey denies that what took place was a genocide, arguing that thousands of Turks died too in a brutal conflict.
Taking on Universities
Mr. Kerincsiz, who says he doesn’t recognize Armenia as an independent nation, complained to an Istanbul court, fearing the conference was a foreign plot to force Turkey to admit to a genocide, open the door to compensation claims and weaken the Turkish state. He urged the court to investigate the academic credentials of the participants and their sources of funding. The judges instructed the two universities to suspend the conference. The organizers eventually managed to hold the gathering by moving it to a school that wasn’t covered by the ruling.
The flap over the conference spawned a lively debate in the Turkish media. Murat Belge, a professor of comparative literature, wrote a column in the Radikal newspaper accusing the court of trampling the law by banning the academic gathering. To drive his point home, he recounted a disparaging joke about judges.
Mr. Kerincsiz then got prosecutors to haul Mr. Belge, along with four other columnists, to court, claiming they had insulted the court. That, he said, would be a crime under Turkish laws banning the denigration of the state and its institutions. The laws date to the early days of the Turkish republic, when the government sought to strengthen the young state against separatist influences. The laws have never been removed from the books, though they are rarely enforced by the government.
The court hearing last month quickly descended into chaos. Mr. Kerincsiz and his nationalist lawyers yelled at the judge and lashed out at the presence of foreign observers at the trial, participants said. The judge had to remove one unruly lawyer from the courtroom. “The irony is that our case starts with the premise that some people had insulted the court,” Mr. Belge says.
Image Problem
Mr. Kerincsiz’s most famous attack — against Mr. Pamuk, for mentioning during an interview the killings of Armenians and Kurds in Turkey — failed when the court dropped the case against the novelist.
Turkey’s foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, has acknowledged anti-free-speech laws are tarnishing the country’s image. Yet the government has shied away from changing any of them. And that has only encouraged Mr. Kerincsiz, who says he aims more for political impact than legal victories. His association has even joined a quixotic campaign to kick the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate out of Turkey, accusing it of attempts to set up a Vatican-style state within a state.
For Mr. Dink, the Armenian newspaper editor, the consequences of Mr. Kerincsiz’s nationalist quest aren’t hypothetical. In 2004, Mr. Dink wrote an article urging Armenians “not to fight with the ‘Turk’ anymore” because the animosity creates poisoned blood. The nationalists read the article to mean that the Turkish blood itself is poisoned and took Mr. Dink to court.
He received a six-month suspended sentence, which he appealed. When he criticized the judgment in print, the nationalists sued him again for insulting the court. “I’m going to leave the country if the higher court doesn’t overturn the judgment,” says Mr. Dink, who was born and raised in Turkey. Of Mr. Kerincsiz, he says: “He’s always there trying to chase me.”
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