MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD
By Jean Rafferty
Scotland On Sunday
30 March 2008
Scotland
THE day I met Ragip Zarakolu was the day before one of the many
trials he has had to undergo in the course of his career as a writer
and publisher.
A charming man, he looked like the kindly woodchopper in a fairytale,
with a soft beard and sturdy, strong shoulders. But underneath he
was anxious.
Zarakolu had been to prison before and didn’t want to go again. He
didn’t want to be found guilty, yet he didn’t want to let pass the
opportunity to say what he thought in public. To prepare for the next
day’s trial he was staying the night in a hotel.
Zarakolu and his second wife, American photographer Katherine Holle,
live on the Asian shore of Istanbul. On days when the traffic gets
gridlocked or fog rolls in across the waters of the Bosphorus, it
can take more than two hours to get from one side of the city to
the other. And you don’t want to be late for court. "There’s tension
before a trial," says Zarakolu. "Sometimes you need peace so I stay
at the hotel."
In the 30 years since he and his first wife Ayse started their
publishing house, Belge, he has gone through 40 trials. Although
he says he can generally cope with the pressure, it’s not always
manageable – he spent several months last year in a US hospital
being treated for heart problems. Now, in his late 50s, he faces the
possibility of a three-year jail sentence.
In the past Turkey’s prisons were notorious for their inhumane
conditions and many Turkish dissidents, including Ayse, were
tortured. "They were hanging people by their hands, using electric
shocks, beating people on the soles of their feet. They also tied
people to the bed to stay there one week without going to the toilet,
so it’s a humiliation," says Zarakolu.
Conditions in Turkish prisons have progressed from the filth,
corruption and cruelty shown in the film Midnight Express. One of the
city’s most brutal prisons has now been turned into the five-star Four
Seasons hotel, a palace in marble and gold. It’s hard to believe it
was once a gloomy hell hole.
This week writers from all over the world will come to Glasgow to
pledge their support for brave – and stubborn – people like Zarakolu,
who ignore their personal safety and fight for freedom of expression
in the face of hostile or dictatorial governments.
International PEN’s annual Writers in Prison conference is being
hosted for the first time by Scottish PEN. "We’re proud to be part of
Scotland’s tradition of upholding the rights of the world’s oppressed
and persecuted people," says Robin Lloyd-Jones, chairman of the
Scottish WIP committee.
Scottish PEN campaigns on behalf of Zarakolu. He stands not for himself
alone but for the many creative people being harassed by the Turkish
state – more than 60 writers, journalists and publishers currently
face trial simply for expressing their views.
Most of us think of Turkey as a cheap holiday destination – a place
of sandy beaches, brilliant sunshine and the odd ruin to add a little
culture to our break. We wouldn’t think twice about letting the Turks
into the European Union – Turkey is, after all, a modern, democratic
society, is it not? For all the talk about the oppressed Kurds, every
second carpet seller in Istanbul is Kurdish, so what’s the problem?
But Turkey is not quite like that. Since 1984, 30,000 Kurds have
been burned out of their villages and murdered by death squads. And
no one is allowed to talk about it.
There are five main taboos in Turkish society and Kurdish oppression
is one of them. The others are the Armenian genocide, when more than
a million Armenians were killed between 1915 and the establishment
of the modern Turkish state in 1923; the military; Sharia law,
which the government of this predominantly Muslim country does not
wish discussed because it is determined to keep the state secular;
and lastly, defaming the name of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the
Turkish state. His portrait can still be seen in shops and offices
all over the country, although he died in 1938.
Speaking out about any of these can bring the police to your door.
There could be death threats against you, even murder: on January 19
last year Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian editor of the newspaper
Agos, was shot dead on the steps of his office in Istanbul.
For dissidents such as Zarakolu, struggle has been a way of life.
Born in 1948, he was inflamed by Sixties hippy culture, by the idea
of revolution and the protest songs of Joan Baez and Bob Dylan.
Unlike the radicals of the west, his belief in the revolution was
tested. He was first sent to prison in 1971 for belonging to a
suspicious organisation – Amnesty International.
He and Ayse set up Belge in 1977 and continued to publish in the face
of further imprisonment, the torture of Ayse and the firebombing
of their premises by a right-wing group. "If you accept this is a
struggle for the truth and for freedom of expression, it helps for
me to try and remember what we went through in the past," he says.
"Sometimes we went in prison, sometimes we used the trial as a
platform, sometimes we felt ourselves to be the prosecutors against
the system. We try to force our society to face its history. Without
this hardship we can’t change society. Somebody must pay the bill."
He has been paying the bill for 30 years. Even on the day he buried
his wife – Ayse died of cancer in 2002 – the Turkish authorities
couldn’t leave Zarakolu and his family alone. As Ayse’s coffin was
carried to the grave by eight Kurdish women, they were watching. As
her son Deniz rose to make an emotional speech about his mother’s
work on behalf of the Kurds, they were watching. They waited the
40 days of mourning that is traditional in Turkey and then arrested
Deniz for questioning by the anti-terror team.
"Normally humanity respects death," says Zarakolu. "This was a
psychological problem for me, something like torture, because it’s
very aggressive. It’s the unrespectfulness against the funeral,
against the truth."
It took a change in the laws for Deniz to be acquitted. The charge?
He had dared to suggest that Turkey’s oppressed Kurdish minority
might one day have an independent life. "I think Kurdish women will
be free some day," he said. "And they will not forget my mother."
Six years on, the Kurds have still not forgotten Ayse and how she
fought for them. In one town in the Kurdish region of Turkey, they
wanted to name a public park after her but the authorities refused,
saying she was a convicted criminal.
Such slights are not just a blow on the political front; they are a
huge emotional blow for Zarakolu. "Always it’s hardship for family
life and now my life with Katherine," he says. "It’s my struggle
but family life is affected because always I must make my plans for
the trials. I can take risk but it’s also a risk for the family,
especially over the last year."
During this time Turkey has been in turmoil. The government, perhaps
hoping to make itself more acceptable to the European Union, promised
to repeal its infamous Article 301 (a catch-all amendment to the law
against insults to ‘Turkishness’) but has not done so.
Ultra-nationalist groups who oppose Europe have been plotting
to overthrow the government, in the process planning a series of
assassinations of public figures, including Turkey’s Nobel prizewinner
for literature, Orhan Pamuk.
Saddest of all was the assassination of Dink, one of the foremost
supporters of the move towards Europe. The murder seemed to symbolise
the divisions within Turkish society. In the streets today, right-wing
young men wear white caps like that worn by Dink’s alleged murderer,
while the views of the liberal middle classes are best summed up by the
words of Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy, who delivered the
Hrant Dink memorial lecture at the Bosphorus University in Istanbul:
"Had I been here in Istanbul a year ago I would have been among the
100,000 people who walked with his coffin in dead silence through
the wintry streets of this city, with banners saying, ‘We are all
Armenians’, ‘We are all Hrant Dink’."
"Hrant Dink was a bridge between the two sides of Turkish society,"
says Zarakolu. "They wanted to blow up this spiritual bridge."
He and Dink shared the same ideals, the same struggle. They both
spoke out about the Armenian genocide and were jointly criticised
three years ago for attending a conference in San Francisco organised
by the Armenian community there. "They said the government must take
our passports because we were talking against Turkey," says Zarakolu.
"We never talk against Turkey. We were talking for a better, more
democratic Turkey.
"Last year I was mostly in the States because of my health problems
but I visited him before I left the country and I told him he should
leave temporarily. I wish he had because now we’ve lost him."
Although the Turkish authorities no longer ban as many books and
publishers will no longer be routinely tried for what they publish,
there are still a large number of writers, publishers and translators
before the courts.
If a country represses its intelligentsia it inevitably represses
freedom of thought for all its citizens. Turkey tried 254 people
under freedom of expression laws last year, only a quarter of them
writers or artists.
It is a strange definition of democracy, the so-called rule by the
people, that annexes its population’s thought processes, and it is
one the British government, with its war on terror, its constant
surveillance of its own citizens, might do well to beware.
On April 8 Zarakolu faces what is expected to be his last trial,
the culmination of a four-year process that began in 2004. It is
presented by the Turkish courts as the scrupulous and thorough
pursuit of justice, but to even the most casual observer it looks
like judicial harassment. I ask Zarakolu if he is afraid of going to
jail. It would, after all, be easy for him to stay in the United States
with Katherine. He’s almost 60 now, not an age to be contemplating
going back behind bars. "Generally I forget," he says.
"But sometimes I feel tired – exhausted. It’s another way of
oppression."
In 2003 Scottish PEN campaigned for a Tunisian writer called Zouhair
Yahyaoui, who was arrested shortly after his web magazine asked
readers to vote on whether their country was ‘a republic, a kingdom,
a zoo or a prison’. He was tortured, kept in a cockroach-infested cell
and denied regular drinking water. Within 18 months of his eventual
release from prison he died of a heart attack.
His question remains an essential one, that needs to be answered in
Turkey – as in Britain and in all the countries where PEN works.
Do we allow people to think for themselves, do we harness the creative
tension of differing viewpoints? Or do we wear them out with constant
trials, constant repression? The human and the political costs of
the latter course are high. Republic, kingdom, zoo or prison? Who
decides? r
PEN POWERIN 1921, Amy Dawson-Scott, an English writer and spiritualist,
set up the writers’ organisation PEN. There are now 141 centres in
99 countries.
Scottish PEN joined the movement in 1927, at the instigation of the
poet Hugh MacDiarmid. Its first members included Neil Gunn, Edwin
and Willa Muir, and Naomi Mitchison.
Scottish PEN works towards international understanding as well as
for its core aim of freedom of expression – it holds multicultural
events featuring the work of exiled writers living in Scotland and
has been campaigning to bring at least one of our cities into the
Cities of Refuge scheme, which offers a safe space and support for
a persecuted foreign writer.
Members write and campaign on behalf of persecuted writers, and send
them books or clothing. Scottish PEN also champions women’s writing
and works on behalf of endangered languages.
The organisation’s Penpower project aims to address freedom of
expression issues in schools, colleges and youth groups and is the
key element in the final day of the conference, when the host centre
presents a public session.
But, above all, it is about freedom of thought and expression,
whether in foreign countries or our own.
For further information
FREE SPEECH UNDER SIEGE
YOU can see her on YouTube, a puffy-faced woman whose shallow breath
and downcast eyes speak of the stress she is under. Tran Khai Thanh
Thuy (left) is a 47-year-old Vietnamese writer imprisoned last year
on charges of disseminating information harmful to the state – she
published a number of online articles calling for democracy.
For the past two years Thuy, a novelist, poet and essayist, has been
under constant siege by the authorities. Her imprisonment was the
final stage in the long process of ‘justice’ in Vietnam. In 2006 she
was tried by a ‘people’s court’, which consisted of 300 members of
the public rounded up by the police to insult her.
Thuy has had her home invaded by mobs calling her a traitor and
a prostitute and threatening to beat her; she has been held under
house arrest; and while in prison she was denied medical care for
her diabetes and tuberculosis.
She has now been released and I tried to contact her for the purposes
of this article but the e-mail I received in reply illustrated the
difficulties of her situation:
"Thank you very much for your message and your solidarity with Tran
Khai Thanh Thuy. I am very sorry I am unable to give you Tran Khai
Thanh Thuy’s contact details. Phone communications are not assured
due to great risk of being under government security surveillance.
According to her husband, Tran Khai Thanh Thuy has been hospitalised
since Monday, March 3."
TUNISIAN journalist and editor Sihem Bensedrine (right) spent months in
jail but even on her release was subjected to psychological imprisonm
ent. Teams of plain clothes policemen waited openly outside her home.
They followed not just Bensedrine and her family, but everyone who
visited her. "The police ask, ‘Why do you go there and for what
purpose?’ and so on so that people are afraid to come again," she
says. "We are living in a kind of quarantine."
The Tunisian police shut down her publishing house – all its titles
were academic – in order to cut off her income. Her husband was put
under arrest and lost his farm.
Bensedrine, 56, was beaten on the street, her passport was confiscated
for two years and in 2000 she suffered damage to her eye, broken
ribs and a damaged spine while in prison. They even hanged her
daughter’s dog.
Undeterred, she set up an internet magazine, Kalima. The site is
blocked in Tunisia so people there must use proxy e-mail addresses
to access it. "It’s not in my nature to submit," she says.
The full article contains 2535 words and appears in Scotland On
Sunday newspaper.