June 2, 2006
MOSCOW — Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk made a plea on Thursday for freedom of _expression in Turkey on the mass killings of Armenians carried out under the Ottoman Empire, calling on his country to become “free and more open”.
“Whatever happened to Ottoman Armenians, we in Turkey should be able to talk about. It is first a Turkish issue, an issue of freedom of speech, democracy and liberal society rather than an international political issue,” Pamuk said at a press conference in Moscow.
The Turkish writer – a winner of numerous international awards for his writings – was in Moscow to promote the Russian translation of his book Istanbul: Memories and the City.
“I hope my country be free and more open, that we can talk about this issue without having any anxiety. But I don’t know when,” he said. “There should be no limits to freedom of speech” for writers, Pamuk continued.
Last year prosecutors charged Pamuk with “public denigration of the Turkish identity” for remarks on the massacres of Armenians made in an interview with a Swiss newspaper.
“One million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it,” Pamuk was quoted as saying in the interview.
The charges, which could have jailed Pamuk for up to three years, were later dropped.
Armenians say that up to 1.5 million of their kinsmen died in orchestrated killings nine decades ago during the last years of the Ottoman Empire, the precursor of modern Turkey.
Turkey argues that 300,000 Armenians and thousands of Turks were killed in what was civil strife during World War I when the Armenians rose up against their Ottoman rulers.
Born in 1952 in Istanbul, Pamuk became famous for works such as The White Castle, My Name is Red, and Snow. His works have been translated into 40 languages.
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