“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,” writes Orhan Pamuk, commenting on the international furore over his recent statements about the contested Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks and Turkey’s subsequent arraignment of Pamuk on charges of having “publicly denigrated Turkish identity.”

Pamuk sparked the controversy with his comment to a Swiss newspaper in which he claimed that “30,000 Kurds and 1 million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it,” referring to the Turkish killings of Armenians in 1915 during their forced march out of Anatolia.  Pamuk faces trial and up to three years in prison for his statement. Pamuk’s trial was suspending minutes after it was convened on last Friday, on the basis that the Justice Ministry must approve the case before it proceeds further.

Turkish and Armenian historians differ in their accounts of what happened in 1915. It is a fact that Armenians were driven out of eastern Anatolia, their ancestral homeland. It is also a fact that many Armenians died during this forced march out of Anatolia. The unresolved question is whether this incident — what amounted to a death march for the Armenians — was planned and orchestrated by the Ottoman government. The traditional Turkish answer to the Armenian accusations of state-sponsored massacre has been that the Armenians, with the backing of czarist Russia, rebelled against Ottoman rule. The deaths that resulted from the resultant conflict in 1915 must be placed in their appropriate historical context of World War I and the twilight years of the soon-to-be-abolished Ottoman Empire.

Cemil Cicek, Turkey’s Justice Minister, is responding tetchily to the disapprovingly watchful eye of the EU, but he must surely know that there is no faster way to ruin Turkey’s bid to join the European club than imprisoning an internationally acclaimed author for what the EU considers and exercise of his freedom of speech in order to address the issue of state-ordered genocide.

Mimi Hanaoka