The novelist is accused of having insulted the identity of the country in his last opus.
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Incorrigible Turkey, where Orhan Pamuk, the first Turkish Nobel Prize of Literature, is again charged with having insulted the Turkish identity. Monday, November 8, Istanbul’s prosecution has reopened a survey against the novelist, suspected of having insulted Mustafa Kemal, says Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, as well as the national flag in his book Vaba Geceleri (“Nights of plague “, not translated into French), published by Yapi Kredi editions in March.
In his novel, the writer brushes a purely imaginary situation, namely the inhabitants of an island occupied to fight against the plague at the time of the Ottoman Empire ending. The novel fell sharply to Tarcan Tülük, a lawyer of the city of Izmir, on the banks of the Aegean Sea, who filed a complaint, persuaded that the book contains offenses towards “the father of the Turks”.
Examined for the first time, the case resulted in a non-place. The judge then let him convince by the statements of Orhan Pamuk, who, in a testimony addressed to the prosecutor’s office, assured that at no time he had sought to represent Mustafa Kemal in his novel, not to mention the insult.
Pugnace, Izmir’s lawyer, other Local Democratic Party Manager (DP, Opposition), returned to the charge. The litigation carries, among other things, on the hero of the novel, whose complainant has the impression that he could be Atatürk. This time, the judge complied with, considering that certain phrases of the book could indeed be qualified as insults. Orhan Pamuk will have to answer his writings before justice. The publishing house, Yapi Kredi, being located in Istanbul, that’s where the case will have to be judged on appeal.
Old Antienne
Judge the intellectuals is a full-time occupation in Turkey, where writers, caricaturists, journalists are sometimes imprisoned for their articles, their books or for the sentences they have been able to pronounce. The writer Ahmet Altan, the winner of the Femina Foreign Award 2021, spent several years in prison (2016-2021) for broadcasting “subliminal messages” on a television channel on the eve of the Putsch missed July 16, 2016.
For Orhan Pamuk, who now lives between New York, where he teaches literature at Columbia University, and Istanbul, his hometown, these prosecutions are an old antienne. A year before receiving the Nobel Prize, in 2005, the famous novelist had already been confronted with justice for reporting a Swiss weekly than in Turkey, “1 million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed.” Considered as an “insult to Turkish identity”, the sentence had earned him several appearances. Under the pressure of the European Union, that Turkey then hoped to join, the file had finally been classified.
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