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Court rules Turkey can’t silence genocide discussion
The European Court of Human Rights ruled last week that a Turkish law forbidding use of the word ‘genocide’ to describe the organised killing of more than one million Armenians that began in 1915, violates the right to free expression, writes Sonja Bechian for the Historical Justice and Memory Research Network.
Historian Taner Akçam became the target of harassment after publishing on the Armenian genocide. Although he was not persecuted under the law, he claimed its threat caused him to stop writing on the issue. He brought the case to the European Court of Human Rights in 2007.
Article 301 of Turkey’s Criminal Code has been used to convict writers and journalists, with a penalty of three years prison, for denigrating “Turkishness”. In 2005 Hrant Dink, a journalist and editor of bilingual Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos, was convicted under the law and subsequently shot to death by extremists.
The court found that there had been interference with Akçam’s right to freedom of expression. The Armenian Mirror Spectator quotes from the court ruling: “it was widely believed that Hrant Dink had been targeted by extremists because of the stigma attached to his criminal conviction for ‘insulting Turkishness’.”
After the judgement, Akçam told Today’s Zaman, “If you cannot speak freely on history, you cannot call your country a democracy and you cannot create a society and a future that respect human rights. There is no ‘Armenian’ side or ‘Turkish’ side to history. To discuss what really happened in history is to speak freely and openly about it, without legends or myths.”
Comments
Such issues are seldom two sided. Beside the Turkish and Armenian sides to this story, there are also Greek and Cypriot ones to be told. And this goes beyond what may be said with words.
What the Court’s ruling in Strasbourg means for South Africans is plain: a democratic society is not created by two sides alone. As Taner Akçam pleads, it takes all sides to speak freely and openly about change and, if it’s really to last, this requires our respect for the mutual rights of others.
For me, however, the legends and myths can stay. That’s if we can be critical of them too… see http://www.knotofstone.com/reviews/