AUTHOR FACES JAIL FOR SAYING HERO DRESSED AS WOMAN
>From Suna Erdem in Istanbul
The Times, UK
Sept 4 2006
THE author of this summer’s Turkish bestseller is to stand trial for
allegedly insulting Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the country’s revered
founding father, in her popular revisionist biography of Latife,
his wife.
The case is the latest in a series of high-profile lawsuits initiated
against writers and intellectuals that has brought attention to the
shortcomings of the supposedly reformed Turkish legal system with
regard to freedom of expression in the European Union candidate
country.
Ipek Calislar, the respected journalist and writer, has been charged
by an Istanbul prosecutor over an anecdote in Latife Hanim in which
Ataturk dons a woman’s chador to leave his besieged house with a
party of women and children, bringing back reinforcements to foil an
assassination attempt. Latife remains inside and communicates with
the attackers to give them the impression that Ataturk is still there.
The previously unrecorded version of the attack by "Lame Osman",
which took place in April 1923, was told to Mrs Calislar by one of
Latife’s surviving relatives, who heard it from her sister, Vecihe,
an eyewitness.
However, it aroused the ire of a reader of Hurriyet newspaper, which
ran extracts of the book. The reader, Huseyin Tugrul Pekin, applied
to the prosecutor’s office in the Istanbul district of Bagcilar,
on the grounds that "To claim and write that Mustafa Kemal Pasha,
whose courage no man, nor any of us, could dare to doubt, did such
a thing is the greatest insult to him, his nation and particularly
to myself". Mrs Calislar now faces 4½ years in jail for infringing
the special laws in place to protect Ataturk. The trial begins on
October 5. An editor of Hurriyet will also be tried.
Mrs Calislar said that her book was not intended to belittle
Ataturk, lamenting that "the most striking report in the book for our
male-dominated society turned out to be of Ataturk disguising himself
in a chador in order to evade an assassination attempt". She told The
Times: "If a leader is under siege, his ability to break this siege
with an ingenious method does not diminish him ."
Mrs Calislar’s account of Ataturk’s wife overturns the long-held
belief that Latife was a shrewish woman whose tantrums ended their
marriage. Instead, we get the portrait of a Western-educated woman
who spoke several European and Oriental languages, played the piano
to concert standard and was a driving force behind many of Ataturk’s
reforms for the emancipation of women, including giving them the vote
well before some EU countries. The book has had nine print runs in
two months.
Mrs Calislar joins Elif Safak, who will go on trial next month over her
popular novel The Bastard of Istanbul, in which a fictional Armenian
character refers to "Turkish butchers" who killed large numbers of
Armenians in Turkey during the First World War. Similar charges of
"insulting Turkishness" also put Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s most famous
author, in the dock this year. Perihan Magden, a journalist, stood
trial for her support of conscientious objection.
Mrs Calislar said that Turkey did not deserve such trials as hers.
Most are thrown out of court but the violent environment created
outside the courthouse makes writers’ lives very difficult, she
added. At Mr Pamuk’s trial, supporters were heckled not just by
protesters but also by violent nationalist lawyers in the courtroom
itself.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Government points to the
high acquittal rate from these trials. Ms Magden and Mr Pamuk were
both acquitted, but a High Court decision this month to convict a
Turkish-Armenian journalist on similar charges proved that the show
trials are not just empty threats.
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