good news for orhan Pamuk, the acclaimed Turkish writer (whose novel snow i happen to be reading at the moment) - a turkish court has dropped the case against him for "insulting turkishness" after the justice ministry refused to say whether the case should stand. good to see that authoritarian regimes aren't resorting to authoritarian style "crimes" to silence dissidents. according to the beeb:

Mr Pamuk was accused under Article 301, which makes it illegal to insult the republic, parliament or any organs of state - and can lead to a sentence of up to three years in jail.

i bet stalinist pig-dogs would love it there.

pamuk was initially also charged with "insulting the turkish armed forces" but this was dropped last december. the trial was suspended amidst ugly scenes as nationalists demonstrated against the author.

so what did pamuk say to enrage the turkish powers-that-be so? he dared to draw attention to turkey's massacre of armenians and kurds, saying that "One million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares talk about it." but the problem is that others have spoken about it and remain on trial for the same charge. more than 60 other writers and publishers are facing similar charges, but perhaps because they haven't sold as many books as pamuk and therefore won't be able to muster as many western allies, their cases may go unheard.

the decision of the turkish justice ministry to say "no comment" seems to be part of the state's ongoing determination to become part of the EU, and therefore to be seen to be cleaning up its act, regardless of the reality. the announcement occurred in a week when the EU was scheduled to begin a review of the Turkish justice system, which surely cannot be a coincidence.

the armenian genocide of 1915-17 is, in most parts of the world, considered a fact, the result of ultranationalism by the young turks who strove to revitalise the declining ottoman empire by deporting the non-turkic armenians towards the syrian desert. victims were usually made to walk to these destinations and the 'resettlements' were really cover for death marches. mass executions of able-bodied young armenian men first made the process easier. the armenians' property was left intact for plunder by the turks. up to 1.5m are thought to have perished during the period.

the systematic oppression of the kurds, another non-turkic people, continues into the present. as turkey is an ally of western powers like britain and the usa in their "war on terror", little pressure is exerted for a genuine solution for the kurds who continue to face oppression. mark curtis puts it this way:

Turkey has destroyed 3,500 Kurdish villages, made hundreds of thousands of people homeless and killed thousands more in its war against Kurds. Atrocities have decreased since the late 1990s but hundreds of thousands of Kurds are unable to return to their villages. Ankara-appointed "village guards" occupy much of their lands; villagers attempting to return have recently been shot dead. Turkish police torture remains systematic.

Britain has been an apologist for these crimes while conducting business as usual. Arms exports flow, while Turkish military officers and the police, guilty of the worst human rights abuses, receive training in Britain. London aided Ankara by closing down the Kurdish TV station, MED-TV, in the same month that BAE Systems, Britain's largest arms company, struck an arms deal with Turkey. Whitehall is bending over backwards to support Ankara's bid to join the EU.

it seems likely that only cosmetic changes will be encouraged by britain, as we seem to be making far too much money out of this conflict to really want to stop it.

it is poetic that orhan pamuk should straddle the east-west divide in all this, as this is what his books and characters seem to be all about. snow's central character, ka, is an exile who's spent most of his adult life in frankfurt, and returns to rural turkey to find himself torn between the yearning for european life and the poetry and love he finds in the east. reading about pamuk's own turbulent crises the line between reality and fiction blurs as the fervent nationalists and homicidal generals could come from either. whatever you think of pamuk, snow is a book that has some important questions about the nature of religion, of god, and relations between europe and the muslim world. sadly, in this profoundly sad story i suspect that there will be no last minute reprieve.