The Irish Times
September 24, 2005
Court ruling could harm Turkey’s bid to join EU
Nicholas Birch in Istanbul
TURKEY: In a decision widely seen as an attempt to sabotage Turkey’s
European Union hopes, an Istanbul court yesterday forced a major
state university to suspend a three-day conference on the fate of the
Ottoman Empire’s Armenians, for the second time.
Another university has said it would try to host the event.
Due to start today, the meeting would have been the first in the
country’s history to question official claims that it was
inter-ethnic war, not a deliberate state policy of mass murder, that
led to the deaths of up to one million in 1915.
The conference had been planned for this May, but was postponed after
Turkey’s justice minister accused organisers of “stabbing the country
in the back”. “If only I had not dispensed with my right to take them
to trial,” Cemil Cicek added.
Mr Cicek’s message was not lost on the judges of Istanbul’s 4th
Administrative Court.
Late on Thursday they informed Bosporus University the meeting
represented a potential breach of the peace and gave organisers 30
days to provide details about participants, speeches and funding,
information that has been known for months.
The writ is disingenuous, analysts say, and probably
unconstitutional.
Late on Thursday prime minister Tayyip Erdogan angrily described the
court’s decision as “incompatible with democracy, freedom and
modernity.”
With Turkey looking likely to start EU accession proceedings on
October 3rd, analysts describe the court’s involvement as evidence of
the depth of opposition to democratisation in bureaucratic and
judicial circles.
“It’s a copybook example of Turkey’s old political ideology”, said
political analyst Dogu Ergil. “Rather than accepting that the state
serves citizens, some still think everything citizens do must be
permitted by the state.”
Nowhere is the mentality that national interests supersede individual
freedoms clearer than in attitudes towards history.
Outside the gates of Bosporus University on Friday morning a group
opposed to the conference distributed leaflets describing
participants as “agents of imperialism . . . working to destroy the
country’s unity.”
“Turkey has the maturity and will to discuss 1915 democratically,”
said Bedri Baykam, opposition deputy and leader of the Patriotic
Movement. “Unfortunately, the other side has neither the courage nor
the brains.” Another protester dismisses conference participants as
agents of the Armenian genocide lobby.
It is a claim historian Aykut Kansu fiercely denies. His speech, he
points out, was due to be about Turks who saved Armenians.
“History in Turkey is too often seen as a matter of public policy,
adhering to ideology rather than free debate,” he says. “The taboo on
1915 is just an extreme version of that.” He knows all about the
political pressures on Turkish universities.
In July he was sacked from his history chair at a well-respected
private university for openly questioning near-hagiographical
official accounts of Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
The conference decision comes less than a month after another court
charged Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s best-known novelist, with “slandering
Turkey’s name.”
Pamuk could face up to three years in prison for telling a Swiss
newspaper this February that “one million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds”
had been killed in Turkey.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress