RETRIAL FOR AUTHOR?
By Steven Mcelroy
New York Times
May 18 2009
The Nobel Prize-winning Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk said he may face
a new civil trial for remarks he made to a Swiss magazine in 2005,
Reuters reported. A Turkish Court of Appeals overturned a lower court
decision that had dismissed the claims, and Mr. Pamuk could possibly be
tried again, he said, speaking at a book fair in Torino, Italy, over
the weekend. In the 2005 interview with Das Magazine, Mr. Pamuk said
"30,000 Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands,
and nobody but me dares to talk about it." He was prosecuted for
insulting "Turkishness" at the time, but the case was dropped partly
as the result of outrage within the European Union. The plaintiffs
in the civil suit are seeking 36,000 liras ($23 million) in damages,
and the group includes members of a support group for families of
soldiers killed fighting Kurdish separatists as well as a lawyer who
brought the criminal case against Mr. Pamuk in 2005.