Willingly or not, Orhan Pamuk has become as much a political symbol as a man of letters. February 7, next week, was the date set for Turkey to try its foremost novelist for the crime of “publicly denigrating Turkishness”. The trial would have been of obvious import both to Europe, which is considering – sceptically in some corners – Turkish entry into its Union, and to the United States, where the President has called Pamuk a “great writer” whose “work has been a bridge between cultures”. George W. Bush, rather like his father when he was President, has often referred to the Republic of Turkey as the bridge between two cultures and, indeed, as a model of secular democracy for all neighbouring countries. There was a strong sense that the trial of Pamuk was a test for Turkey, a test of the substance behind its recent wave of democratic reform, and a test of its commitment to the civil liberty that enables individuals to say or write what they like. Then, after a great deal of media coverage, Pamuk did not go to trial; after uproar came bathos. Two crucial questions remain. First, has Turkey passed its tests? Second, was this the right test set by the international community? The answers lie, as ever, in the detail of the case, and in the Nabokovian caressing of that detail. Pamuk would appreciate the comparison.
The charges originally brought against Pamuk followed comments he made in an interview with the Swiss newspaper, Tages-Anzeiger, published in February 2005, where he was quoted as saying: “thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it”. Pamuk is referring to the conflict between the Ottoman Armenians and the Empire’s armed forces during the First World War, as well as to the hostilities ongoing since the mid-1980s between the Turkish Republic and Kurdish separatists. Turkey does not dispute the deaths of ethnic Armenians in the conflicts that saw the Ottoman Empire’s fall, but continues to stress that the killings were never part of a genocidal campaign, arguing that many ethnic Turks also lost their lives during that period. Turkey also rejects claims that its efforts to contain Kurdish separatist uprisings can be classed as genocide. Pamuk could not have chosen two issues more loaded, political, or divisive.
On December 16 last year, the judge adjourned proceedings because of uncertainty over whether Pamuk should be tried under Article 159 of the old penal code – current law at the time Pamuk made his statements – or under Article 301 of the revised penal code which was enacted several months before the district prosecutor filed his action against Pamuk in September 2005. Crucially, under the old law, express approval is required from the Minister of Justice for such a trial to go ahead. No such provision exists under the new penal code, which has been reformed in order to reduce executive influence on the course of justice. The court asked for direction. After a protracted silence, the Ministry of Justice declared that it would not give its permission for such a trial to go ahead. The trial, set to resume on February 7, was therefore abandoned and the case against Pamuk dropped.
International condemnation of the trial undoubtedly sent a clear message to Turkey, but the nature of the criticism has betrayed, equally clearly, how little some politicians, lawyers and writers have grasped the nature of the Pamuk test. For example, in an article published in The Times on October 14, 2005, entitled “How can a country that victimises its greatest living writer also join the EU?”, Salman Rushdie wrote:
“You would think that the Turkish authorities might have avoided so blatant an assault on their most celebrated writer’s fundamental freedoms at the very moment that their application for full membership of the European Union . . . was being considered at the EU summit . . . . the Turkish application is indeed a test case for the EU, a test of whether the Union has any principles at all. If it has, its leaders will insist on charges against Orhan Pamuk being dropped at once – there is no need to keep him waiting until December – and on further, rapid revisions to Turkey’s repressive penal code . . . . an unprincipled Europe, which turns its back on great artists and fighters for freedom, will continue to alienate its citizens . . . . the West is being tested as well as the East.”
When Khomeini issued the fatwa against Rushdie in 1989, Pamuk was the first novelist from a Muslim country to defend Rushdie’s freedom of expression and to stress, as a reader of The Satanic Verses, the absurd nature of the claims on which opponents’ allegations were founded. The lines drawn up then were between secular democracy, with its championing of the freedom of speech and thought, and a fundamental brand of political Islam intolerant to such civil liberties. The murder, in November 2004, of the Dutch filmmaker, Theo van Gogh, is the appalling evidence that such demarcations remain relevant. (Van Gogh had made a controversial film criticizing Islamic culture.)
But the Pamuk case offers an altogether different scenario, in that the voices of censure against the writer claim to be upholding the values of secular democracy in Turkey. These voices come from what is often termed
Turkey’s derin devlet (literally, “deep state”) made up from officials in the state bureaucracies and some ranks of the military establishment, which still hold considerable power in the country. These elements have long seen themselves as the custodians of secularism in Turkey, and certain quarters within this derin devlet view with suspicion the vigorous reform agenda that is being run by a government with its roots in Islam. Rushdie should, therefore, not be surprised that the District Prosecutor of Pamuk’s case chose to bring the charges shortly before crucial accession talks for Turkey at the European Union summit. Prosecutions such as these, in this case initiated by a group of nationalist lawyers, are an attempt to embarrass and undermine the present government’s drive towards EU accession. Furthermore, urging EU leaders to exert political pressure on the Turkish judiciary in a high-profile legal case would not only be to play into the hands of the nationalist element in Turkey that has often argued against what it sees as Europe’s malign influence in
sovereign state affairs. It would also be to abandon any principled commitment to a democratic notion of the rule of law. Pamuk should be tried as an ordinary Turkish citizen, before an ordinary Turkish Court, under ordinary Turkish laws. He was not. Instead, he was acquitted on a legal technicality at the discretion of a Government minister, bowing to international and domestic pressure. Turkey followed Rushdie’s reasoning and earned itself a Pyrrhic victory. Pamuk should have been kept waiting, subject to the law’s delay, subject to the rule of law.
Calls to repeal Article 301, under which Pamuk could have been charged, seem sensible. The article had not featured in the first draft of the revised Penal Code put before Parliament by the Government in an effort to draw Turkey’s domestic law closer to the jurisprudence of the European courts. Article 301 seems to have been appended later as part of a compromise to nationalists to get the Code through the legislature. The wording of the Article’s four provisions is wide and imprecise, open to arbitrary interpretation. For instance, Pamuk was to be tried under Provision One, “the public denigration of Turkishness”, and yet Provision Four states that “expressions of thought intended to criticise shall not constitute a crime”. There is also an objection to be made regarding the compatibility of such terms with Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Articles 5 and 10 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Turkey is a signatory to both conventions. Disposing of a shoddily drafted law is not a complete solution to a repressive penal code. Turkey’s Prime Minister is in the privileged position of holding such a big majority in Parliament that he and his Cabinet can, should they wish, pass new legislation and push for the repeal of any offending statute with greater ease than any elected Turkish Government in the past forty years. But it is the administration and interpretation of these laws that will determine how they will affect ordinary people. As in any Western constitutional arrangement, a great deal of responsibility lies with an independent judiciary committed to the rule of law.
Human rights lawyers and campaigners have quite rightly used the publicity that has surrounded Pamuk to draw attention to the further fifty writers, journalists and publishers who are still facing trial in Turkey under similar legislative provisions. There have, as yet, been no withdrawals from trial like Pamuk’s. There is still another opportunity for Turkey to prove its commitment to free speech, this time within the parameters of the rule of law. These cases will also highlight again the need to reform, if not repeal, Article 301. Fifty cases involving the right to free expression may be an infringement, but, in fact, they mark an unparalleled decline in numbers, indicating the direction of change in Turkey. Away from the press houses of Istanbul and Ankara, the most visible and remarkable changes have been felt by ethnic Kurds living in eastern Turkey. In an essay for the New York Review of Books (January 12, 2006), Stephen Kinzer reports a recent conversation with the Kurdish writer Lutfi Baski:
“Before, we were afraid to speak out. The government was insisting that there were no Kurds, that there was no Kurdish language or culture. They arrested us and closed our organizations. Now, so much has changed, especially in the last few months. Our problems haven’t been solved, not at all, but at least we can talk about them honestly. It’s a huge difference.”
Even the distant prospect of Turkey’s accession to the European Union has given ethnic Kurds a new confidence. There seems no indication that the surfacing of a Kurdish state in northern Iraq will lead Kurds in Turkey to join it. The chance of membership to the European Union is rewriting Turkish political life. Pace Rushdie, it would be an unprincipled Europe which turned its back on Turkey and the progress it has so visibly made. Less than a decade has passed since Recep Tayyip Erdogan was charged with sedition for reciting these lines taken from the work of a nationalist Turkish poet of the early twentieth century, Ziya Gökalp:
The mosques will be our barracks,
the domes our helmets,
the minarets our bayonets,
and the faithful our soldiers.
Today Erdogan is Turkey’s Prime Minister. As more Turks, like Pamuk, attempt to challenge long-standing taboos, they will come up against an old order that has much to lose if Turkey joins Europe. In these cases, it is important that Western intellectuals and politicians distinguish between the reforming majority and the reactionary minority. In this respect, the West is being tested as well as the East.
Pamuk’s case was, of course, not the first time an eminent Turkish writer has been put on trial for his views. Yashar Kemal’s appearance at the proceedings last December serves to remind commentators how much the charges brought against Pamuk resemble the ones brought against Kemal a decade ago by the Turkish state for an essay – subsequently published in Index on Censorship – entitled “The Dark Cloud over Turkey”. Kemal’s essay had condemned the treatment of ethnic Kurds by the Turkish military during the separatist uprisings of the early 1990s and his fiction has often focused on the repression of peoples and their suffering at the hands of an oppressor. Ince Memed (Memed, My Hawk) tells the story – Kemal remains Turkey’s greatest storyteller – of Memed’s struggle to defend his fellow villagers against the oppression of the local Agha (feudal master), who owns five villages in the area. The novel ends with Memed murdering the oppressor and redistributing his land before vanishing into the mountains, a hero. The story stirred the late Sir Peter Ustinov to render Kemal’s beguiling novel into a memorable film. Before Kemal, in 1938, the poet Nazim Hikmet was arrested for inciting the Turkish navy to revolt. He was subsequently tried on a warship, and eventually sentenced to twenty-eight years in prison for sedition. His release came at the hands of Turkey’s first democratically elected government, after a campaign by an international committee of writers and artists which included Pablo Picasso, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The remarkable poem that led to Hikmet’s arrest, The Epic of Sheik Bedrettin, is based on a fifteenth-century peasant rebellion against Ottoman rule and remains a major contribution to Turkish poetry in its linguistic experimentation and mixture of narrative voices, Ottoman scholarship and unconcealed political message. Hikmet offered a challenge to Auden’s oft-quoted line, in his elegy of Yeats, that “poetry makes nothing happen”; his work pointed to the possibilities – in literature and in politics – open to those trying to have it otherwise.
Although Pamuk’s work owes a great deal to these writers’ legacies, he has helped Turkish literature to move on from its outmoded and often suffocating commitment to overt political and moral didacticism to a more ambitious project – what Margaret Atwood has called “narrating the country into being”. His novels are quests for their protagonists who wander through the streets of Turkey’s past and present, often seeking their one true love, but trying at the same time to reconcile the Eastern and Western pulls of their history, their faith and their art; but the novels are also quests for the reader, who must try to follow a writer whose fiction is perpetually questioning whether an artist working on the periphery of two great traditions can ever find an authentic voice, an authentic style. Pamuk’s characters are often faced with the futility of such endeavours. In The Silent House, there is a section of the novel, set in the outskirts of Istanbul during the reign of the last Ottoman Sultan, in which a physician devotes himself entirely to writing an encyclopedia that will enlighten a backward East, represented here by the largely illiterate peasants. The physician describes his project of enlightenment:
“When I complete my forty-eight-volume encyclopaedia, all the great ideas and words that ever need to be uttered will have been said; I will fill that unbelievable gap in one stroke; every one of them will be utterly bewildered.”
But it is the physician who ends up bewildered when the abrupt introduction of the Latin alphabet throughout the country renders his efforts useless. In The White Castle, the efforts of two scholars – one Venetian, the other Ottoman – to prove to each other the superiority of their respective civilizations lead them to the question “Why am I what I am?”. Their answers do not result in affirmations of the clear dichotomies of East and West, Christian and Muslim, but instead in a gradual intermingling of the character’s identities, so that it is difficult for the reader to distinguish between the two. The novel culminates, in effect, with an absolute exchange of identity. A process that begins as a struggle between two seemingly incompatible knowledge and value systems ends in collaboration. The two supposed grand narratives of identity – that of the East pitted against the West – yield to a closing image of a swing moving silently in the wind. A similarly framed silence punctuates the narrative in Snow, exposing the villainous and seductive eloquence that “great ideas” can enjoy. The novel is undoubtedly Pamuk’s most considered dramatization of domestic Turkish politics; it explores the conflict between the forces of secularism and political Islam in Kars, a provincial city on Turkey’s eastern border. But Pamuk casts judgement on neither side. The novel warns of the dangers of any art that espouses an overt political message and those artists who use art as a political weapon. Sunay Zaim, an actor and militant secularist, proposes to put on a propaganda play, entitled “My Fatherland or My Scarf”, which depicts the triumph of secularism over a backward Islam. The piece is calculated to provoke the supporters of political Islam in Kars, but it soon becomes evident that Sunay wants to use any unrest the play may cause to bring about a takeover of the city. Sunay’s Islamic counterpart, Blue, asks KA, the novel’s protagonist, whether the Shakh nameh story is “so beautiful that a man could kill for it”. Asked in an interview whether a novel should ever express an opinion, Pamuk replied:
“The point is that novels can and should take political and moral questions and then play around with them and make them a part of their subject matter: morality can be in the texture and atmosphere of the book. I think that novels are not instruments . . . as a working mechanism a novel is more deeply rooted in producing amosphere.” (Areté, Winter 2002)
By leaving political and moral judgement outside of his fiction, Pamuk is rather like the narrator in Saul Bellow’s Dangling Man who speaks of himself in the third person:
“Theories of a wholly good or wholly malevolent world strike him as foolish . . . . For him, the world is both, and therefore it is neither. Merely to make a judgement of that kind is, to representatives of either position, a satisfaction. Whereas, to him, judgement is second to wonder, to speculation on men . . . . In a sense, everything is good because it exists. Or, good or not good, it exists, it is ineffable, and for that reason, marvellous.”
Orhan Pamuk will continue to explore the quandaries of Turkey’s identity in his novels and confront, outside of his fiction, the barriers to free expression that remain in a country that until recently has, as Joyce wrote of Ireland, “always sent / her writers and artists to banishment”. There is no doubt that Turkey must reform its law. Pamuk’s reprieve is a welcome step but such decisions must come from the courts, and not from ministers, if Turkey is to uphold the rule of law and continue in its progress to become a democracy. But as the sincerity of Turkey’s commitment to human rights reform must remain open to close scrutiny by the international community, so too must those outside try to understand the developments of a country that not only unites two continents but functions as a tertium quid veering between the world’s two dominant belief systems. “We boast our light; but if we look not wisely in the Sun itself, it smites us into darkness.” Milton is entirely right.
