[1398] in peace2
Turkey Prosecutes Chomsky Publisher (fwd)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mohammad Mahdian)
Fri Jan 25 11:39:59 2002
Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2002 11:41:16 -0500 (EST)
From: Mohammad Mahdian <mahdian@theory.lcs.mit.edu>
To: <peace-list@mit.edu>
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<h1>
Turkey prosecutes Chomsky publisher for essay on Kurds</h1>
<h3>
By Robert Fisk, Middle East Correspondent</h3>
<h4>
24 January 2002</h4>
Noam Chomsky, one of America's greatest philosophers and linguists, has
become the target of Turkey's chief of "terrorism prosecution".
<p>Scarcely two months after the European Union praised Turkey for passin=
g
new laws protecting freedom of expression, the authorities in Ankara are
using anti-terrorism legislation to prosecute Mr Chomsky's Turkish publis=
her.
<p>Fatih Tas of the Aram Publishing House faces a year in prison for dari=
ng
to print <i>American Interventionism</i>, a collection of Mr Chomsky's
recent essays including harsh criticism of Turkey's treatment of its Kurd=
ish
minority.
<p>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.
<p>Mr Chomsky plans to visit the Turkish city of Diyarbakir to meet Kurdi=
sh
"activists" and it will be a test of Turkey's freedoms to see if he is
allowed to visit the area.
<p>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 thr=
ee
million refugees, massive ethnic cleansing with some 3,500 villages destr=
oyed."
<p>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 grea=
ter
use of the Kurdish language. Bekir Rayif Aldemyr, Turkey's chief prosecut=
or,
claims that the Chomsky essay "propagates separatism".
<p>A spiky, inexhaustible academic of Jewish origin who has been an invet=
erate
critic of Israel and especially of the United States, Mr Chomsky's condem=
nation
of Turkey's treatment of the Kurds =96 and of the vast arms shipments mad=
e
to Turkey by the United States =96 was bound to enrage Ankara.
<p>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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