Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk is facing compensation claims in Turkey over remarks he made to a Swiss magazine in 2005.
Pamuk said in the February 2005 interview that "30,000 Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it." He was charged and tried for "public denigration of Turkish identity" under Article 301 of the penal code later that year, but the case was subsequently dropped in the wake of international outrage.
However, Turkish newspapers were reporting today that six people – including the nationalist lawyer Kemal Kerincsiz, who has filed cases in the past against Pamuk and the murdered journalist Hrant Dink, and who is currently detained in the Ergenekon trial – have been given leave to demand 36,000 lira (£15,000) in compensation from the celebrated author of My Name is Red and Snow. Their case, which claims personal damages arising from the "insult" to Turkishness, has been rejected twice previously, but was yesterday upheld by the country's highest appeals court. The case will now be reassessed.
"The worrying thing is that this whole thing keeps coming back into the public eye. It's been clear right from the beginning that the purpose of the original prosecution wasn't to put him in prison, but was just to get publicity," said Pamuk's translator Maureen Freely. "Every time this thing comes up it's another opportunity for the nationalist press to restate their position about what they think of Orhan and the other 301 defendants ... For Orhan himself, this had gone onto the back burner, and now it's come back onto the front again."
At International PEN, director of the Writers in Prison committee Sara Whyatt said it was "extremely unlikely" there would be a positive outcome for the complainants. Freely agreed. "I'd be very surprised if he had to pay damages and very surprised to find this judgment sticks," she said. "The only thing we can be certain about is that anything which keeps his name in the papers, or the names of other well known 301 defendants in the papers, is going to give oxygen to nationalist publicity."
Whyatt pointed to another Turkish author, the France-based Nedim Gürsel, who is being tried under Article 216 (3) of the Turkish penal code for "incitement to enmity or hatred" – like Pamuk, following complaints by private individuals. His book, Daughters of Allah, is alleged to "humiliate the religious values of part of the population", and Gürsel is facing up to one year in prison. According to International PEN, although at the opening hearing of the trial on 5 May the prosecutor stated there was no evidence the book was inciting hatred, the case is still being taken to the criminal court on 26 May.
"The main problem in this case as well as that of Pamuk and other writers who are in similar situations is the wide range of laws that either directly curtail free speech, or can be interpreted in such a way. This allows not only state institutions but also individuals to make complaints that then must at least be considered by the judicial authorities. These complaints are very rarely successful, and indeed, as in the Gürsel hearing, even the prosecution will at times say there is no case," said Whyatt. "Our concern is that while the likelihood of successful prosecution of these writers is relatively low, the existence of numerous articles in Turkish legislation allows for individuals to use them to harangue writers who are forced to spend time and resources defending themselves. We have long been calling for an overhaul of Turkish legislation to remove all articles and clauses that allow for this kind of harassment."
Freely is currently in the process of translating Pamuk's new novel, The Museum of Innocence, a book which she said has become a bestseller in Turkey, changing and improving Pamuk's standing in the country. "His enemies had portrayed him as a traitor, but it's so clear that he's not from this new book," she said. "It's a very Turkish book, a tribute or a farewell to an Istanbul and Turkey that's no longer there, and it's been received as such."
Due out in September in the UK from Faber & Faber, The Museum of Innocence is the story of one man's lifelong unrequited love. "It's about virginity, about the policing of women who don't follow the rules," said Freely. "It's very controversial in its way, putting down things that have never been admitted to before by a male writer."