Essay by Orhan Pamuk on his trial

Taken from the New Yorker:
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/051219ta_talk_pamuk

COMMENT
ON TRIAL
Issue of 2005-12-19
Posted 2005-12-12

In Istanbul this Friday—in Şişli, the district where I have spent my whole life, in the courthouse 
directly opposite the three-story house where my grandmother lived alone for forty years—I will stand before a 
judge. My crime is to have “publicly denigrated Turkish identity.” The prosecutor will ask that I be 
imprisoned for three years. I should perhaps find it worrying that the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was tried 
in the same court for the same offense, under Article 301 of the same statute, and was found guilty, but I remain 
optimistic. For, like my lawyer, I believe that the case against me is thin; I do not think I will end up in jail.

This makes it somewhat embarrassing to see my trial overdramatized. I am only too aware that 
most of the Istanbul friends from whom I have sought advice have at some point undergone much 
harsher interrogation and lost many years to court cases and prison sentences just because of 
a book, just because of something they had written. Living as I do in a country that honors 
its pashas, saints, and policemen at every opportunity but refuses to honor its writers until 
they have spent years in courts and in prisons, I cannot say I was surprised to be put on 
trial. I understand why friends smile and say that I am at last “a real Turkish 
writer.” But when I uttered the words that landed me in trouble I was not seeking that 
kind of honor.

Last February, in an interview published in a Swiss newspaper, I said that “a million Armenians and thirty 
thousand Kurds had been killed in Turkey”; I went on to complain that it was taboo to discuss these matters 
in my country. Among the world’s serious historians, it is common knowledge that a large number of Ottoman 
Armenians were deported, allegedly for siding against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, and many of 
them were slaughtered along the way. Turkey’s spokesmen, most of whom are diplomats, continue to maintain 
that the death toll was much lower, that the slaughter does not count as a genocide because it was not systematic, 
and that in the course of the war Armenians killed many Muslims, too. This past September, however, despite 
opposition from the state, three highly respected Istanbul universities joined forces to hold an academic 
conference of scholars open to views not tolerated by the official Turkish line. Since then, for the first time in 
ninety years, there has been public discussion of the subject—this despite the spectre of Article 301.

If the state is prepared to go to such lengths to keep the Turkish people from knowing what happened to the Ottoman Armenians, that 
qualifies as a taboo. And my words caused a furor worthy of a taboo: various newspapers launched hate campaigns against me, with some 
right-wing (but not necessarily Islamist) columnists going as far as to say that I should be “silenced” for good; 
groups of nationalist extremists organized meetings and demonstrations to protest my treachery; there were public burnings of my 
books. Like Ka, the hero of my novel “Snow,” I discovered how it felt to have to leave one’s beloved city for a 
time on account of one’s political views. Because I did not want to add to the controversy, and did not want even to hear 
about it, I at first kept quiet, drenched in a strange sort of shame, hiding from the public, and even from my own words. Then a 
provincial governor ordered a burning of my books, and, following my return to Istanbul, the Şişli public prosecutor 
opened the case against me, and I found myself the object of international concern.

My detractors were not motivated just by personal animosity, nor were they expressing hostility to me 
alone; I already knew that my case was a matter worthy of discussion in both Turkey and the outside world. 
This was partly because I believed that what stained a country’s “honor” was not the 
discussion of the black spots in its history but the impossibility of any discussion at all. But it was 
also because I believed that in today’s Turkey the prohibition against discussing the Ottoman 
Armenians was a prohibition against freedom of expression, and that the two matters were inextricably 
linked. Comforted as I was by the interest in my predicament and by the generous gestures of support, there 
were also times when I felt uneasy about finding myself caught between my country and the rest of the world.

The hardest thing was to explain why a country officially committed to entry in the European Union 
would wish to imprison an author whose books were well known in Europe, and why it felt compelled to 
play out this drama (as Conrad might have said) “under Western eyes.” This paradox 
cannot be explained away as simple ignorance, jealousy, or intolerance, and it is not the only 
paradox. What am I to make of a country that insists that the Turks, unlike their Western neighbors, 
are a compassionate people, incapable of genocide, while nationalist political groups are pelting me 
with death threats? What is the logic behind a state that complains that its enemies spread false 
reports about the Ottoman legacy all over the globe while it prosecutes and imprisons one writer 
after another, thus propagating the image of the Terrible Turk worldwide? When I think of the 
professor whom the state asked to give his ideas on Turkey’s minorities, and who, having 
produced a report that failed to please, was prosecuted, or the news that between the time I began 
this essay and embarked on the sentence you are now reading five more writers and journalists were 
charged under Article 301, I imagine that Flaubert and Nerval, the two godfathers of Orientalism, 
would call these incidents bizarreries, and rightly so.

That said, the drama we see unfolding is not, I think, a grotesque and inscrutable drama peculiar to 
Turkey; rather, it is an expression of a new global phenomenon that we are only just coming to 
acknowledge and that we must now begin, however slowly, to address. In recent years, we have witnessed 
the astounding economic rise of India and China, and in both these countries we have also seen the 
rapid expansion of the middle class, though I do not think we shall truly understand the people who 
have been part of this transformation until we have seen their private lives reflected in novels. 
Whatever you call these new élites—the non-Western bourgeoisie or the enriched 
bureaucracy—they, like the Westernizing élites in my own country, feel compelled to follow 
two separate and seemingly incompatible lines of action in order to legitimatize their newly acquired 
wealth and power. First, they must justify the rapid rise in their fortunes by assuming the idiom and 
the attitudes of the West; having created a demand for such knowledge, they then take it upon 
themselves to tutor their countrymen. When the people berate them for ignoring tradition, they respond 
by brandishing a virulent and intolerant nationalism. The disputes that a Flaubert-like outside 
observer might call bizarreries may simply be the clashes between these political and economic programs 
and the cultural aspirations they engender. On the one hand, there is the rush to join the global 
economy; on the other, the angry nationalism that sees true democracy and freedom of thought as Western 
inventions.

V. S. Naipaul was one of the first writers to describe the private lives of the ruthless, murderous 
non-Western ruling élites of the post-colonial era. Last May, in Korea, when I met the great 
Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe, I heard that he, too, had been attacked by nationalist extremists after 
stating that the ugly crimes committed by his country’s armies during the invasions of Korea and 
China should be openly discussed in Tokyo. The intolerance shown by the Russian state toward the Chechens 
and other minorities and civil-rights groups, the attacks on freedom of expression by Hindu nationalists 
in India, and China’s discreet ethnic cleansing of the Uighurs—all are nourished by the 
same contradictions.

As tomorrow’s novelists prepare to narrate the private lives of the new élites, they 
are no doubt expecting the West to criticize the limits that their states place on freedom of 
expression. But these days the lies about the war in Iraq and the reports of secret C.I.A. prisons 
have so damaged the West’s credibility in Turkey and in other nations that it is more and 
more difficult for people like me to make the case for true Western democracy in my part of the 
world.

(Translated, from the Turkish, by Maureen Freely.)
        
        
— Orhan Pamuk