Turkish court delays novelist’s trial
A Turkish court put off the trial of a prominent novelist after a brief hearing Friday, giving the government until Feb. 7 to decide whether to go ahead with criminal proceedings against him for mentioning the Armenian genocide by the Turks in 1915 in a magazine interview in which he also said 30,000 Kurds had been killed since the late 1980s.
Angry nationalists booed and jostled the heavy police escort that took the best-selling writer, Orhan Pamuk, into the packed courthouse, where observers from European Union countries Turkey hopes will admit it to the 25-nation group were present.
“I am sorry that I could not testify,” Pamuk said in a statement issued by his publisher after the court decided that the Justice Ministry in Ankara had to give authorization for the trial to proceed.
“Dragging out cases of thought crimes which shouldn’t be begun in the first place and starting new ones are not good for Turkey, for our democracy,” he said. He remains free while awaiting trial but could face a jail term of six months to three years if convicted.
Policemen with plastic shields escorted Pamuk, 53, from the courthouse into a minivan under a barrage of eggs and invective by angry protesters, and as shouts of “Traitor Pamuk” echoed in the narrow streets.
Pamuk is accused of ‘insulting Turkish identity’ by telling Das Magazin, a Swiss publication, in an interview last February that the mass killing of Armenians by the Ottoman empire in 1915 and the deaths of Kurds in Turkish operations against the PKK separatist group in the 1980s were still forbidden subjects in Turkey.
Source: IHT.
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