[NYT] In Turkey, Press Restrictions Are Called Matter of Security

Thu Sep 4 07:50:00 BST 1997

Date: Mon, 1 Sep 1997 11:56:19 -0700 (PDT)
Message-Id: <199709011856.LAA08787 at igc6.igc.org>
From: Tom Burghardt <tburghardt at igc.apc.org>
To: ozgurluk at xs4all.nl
Subject: [NYT] In Turkey, Press Restrictions Are Called Matter of Security

          http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/world/
 
                              -----
_________________________________________________________________
 
   IN TURKEY, PRESS RESTRICTIONS ARE CALLED MATTER OF SECURITY
_________________________________________________________________
 
     The New York Times      
     September 1, 1997
 
     By STEPHEN KINZER
 
 
     ISTANBUL, Turkey -- In a sunlit office near the Bosporus
shore, Erol Canozkan spends his days reading newspapers in search
of terrorist propaganda.
     
     Canozkan is a government prosecutor assigned to help enforce
Turkey's press laws. Many critics here and abroad say the laws
limit free speech and penalize writers who speak frankly about
social and political problems. But Canozkan is proud to be on the
front line of what he calls a war against subversives who seek to
destroy Turkey.
     
     "We have special laws here because a war is being fought in
this country," he said, referring to the 13-year-old conflict
between the army and separatist Kurdish guerrillas. "As part of
their strategy, the terrorists have set up all kinds of little
newspapers that openly advocate the violent destruction of
Turkey. The people who write for these papers are not real
journalists, but spokesmen for terrorist groups."
     
     When Canozkan finds an article that he deems an incitement
to violence or that he thinks insults the security forces or the
memory of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Turkish Republic,
he puts it in a pink folder with the offending passages
underlined. Then he forwards it to his superiors for possible
prosecution.
     
     "I get a very good feeling doing this work," he said. "I'm
defending the Turkish nation and its unity. My only regret is
that we have not been able to explain to our friends in the West
why it is so urgent that we do this."
     
     Although there is no prior censorship in Turkey, laws that
restrict press freedom are considerably tighter than those in the
United States and most Western countries. Foreign governments and
international press organizations have condemned the laws, saying
they are used to suppress not only libel of state institutions
but also legitimate criticism.
     
     It is difficult to ascertain how many Turkish journalists
are currently in prison for actions that would be considered
legal in most Western countries. The Publishers' Association of
Turkey estimates the number at more than 100. The New York-based
Committee to Protect Journalists, which sent a delegation here in
July to urge loosening of press laws, said there were 78 before
the release of six this month.
     
     "We want to save Turkey from the shame of being a country
where writers and intellectuals suffer in prisons," Sezer Duru,
chairman of the writers' organization PEN-Turkey, said in a
recent speech. "Our greatest wish is to live in a modern,
civilized, democratic and peaceful environment."
     
     The two-month-old government of Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz
has pledged to take steps toward greater press freedom; past
governments also made such promises and failed to keep them.
Powerful political forces, among them the military, insist that
restrictive press laws are necessary to fight subversion.
     
     "We are not going to allow debates in which the Turkish flag
is called 'a piece of cloth,' the national anthem is called 'a
piece of music,' and the Turkish Republic's founder and leader,
Kemal Ataturk, is exposed to humiliation," Adm. Guven Erkaya,
commander of the Turkish navy, recently told the Istanbul
newspaper Milliyet. "Debates like these aim to create a vacuum
which would be exploited by those who wish to replace the current
regime with an outdated model."
     
     This month, the Turkish Parliament passed an amnesty that
resulted in the release of six editors who had been jailed for
permitting the publication of illegal articles. Conditions of the
amnesty were very narrow; the laws under which the editors had
been imprisoned were not changed. The six warned that they would
be sent back to prison if they wrote or published more articles
deemed illegal.
     
     Asked a few days after his release why he thought Turkish
governments had been so reluctant to allow broader press freedom,
one of the editors, Ocak Isik Yurtcu, who spent more than three
years in prison, smiled wanly and replied: "I can't really say.
Please understand that I'm on probation. You know what that
means."
 
     One of the most relentless challengers to Turkey's press
laws is a publisher named Ayse Nur Zarakolu. She opened the Belge
International Publishing House in 1976 and now operates it from a
cluttered basement in downtown Istanbul. She describes her
mission as challenging taboos, and she has done that as
relentlessly as anyone in this country.
     
     In the last few years, Ms. Zarakolu has published books that
denounce the government's war against Kurdish guerrillas, accuse
the security forces of involvement with death squads and document
mass killings of Armenians in the early years of the century. She
has served four prison terms since 1982 and was most recently
convicted for publishing a human rights report that quoted an
unnamed diplomat describing some Turkish soldiers as "thugs."
     
     Twenty-two cases are currently pending against Ms. Zarakolu,
but she shows no sign of weakening. After her most recent
conviction, she vowed to continue her work even if it meant more
prison time.
     
     "If we are going to have real democracy in Turkey," she
said, "we have to break away from the official ideology . As long
as people cannot express their identities and their views, they
are not really free."
     
     Some Turks, including Oktay Eksi, president of the Press
Council, an independent group that works closely with the
government, assert that the figures on imprisoned journalists
given by the Publishers' Association of Turkey and the Committee
to Protect Journalists are too high.
     
     "We have looked at every case," Eksi said in an interview,
"and after eliminating journalists who were convicted of crimes
like rape and fraud, and those who directly advocated terror or
violence, we came up with 24 who were truly imprisoned for simply
expressing peaceful beliefs. With the recent releases, we now
count 18. I am not going to tell you that 18 is not a big number.
One is too many. But it's important to give a true picture."
     
     Like many Turkish journalists, Eksi was not very excited by
the recent release of six jailed editors.
     
     "Of course it's a first step," he said, "but it's not
enough. It was done under pressure, and the goal was only to
create some good will, not to change the situation in any serious
way. We are still at the beginning stage."
 
     Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company
 
     +:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+
     +:        A N T I F A   I N F O - B U L L E T I N        :+
     +:          NEWS * ANALYSIS * RESEARCH * ACTION          :+
     +:     RESISTING FASCISM    *  BY ALL MEANS NECESSARY!   :+
     +:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+
 
        to subscribe e-mail Tom Burghardt <tburghardt at igc.org>
 
          ++++ stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal ++++
   ++++ if you agree copy these 3 sentences in your own sig ++++
  ++++ see: http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/spg-l/sigaction.htm ++++

List info: english-request at ozgurluk.xs4all.nl