Fighting words from Turkey's Nobel author

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Orhan Pamuk: the Turkish writer and now Nobel laureate who has been sued for his views on his home country's history.
Photo: AP

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His subject is the clash of civilisations, or rather, the strange and subtle interweavings of contradictory cultures in Turkey past and present. In his historical novels — The White Castle and My Name is Red — he presents dark metaphors that illuminate the contradictions of contemporary life. In his contemporary novels, he pierces the silences enforced by state ideology to expose the truth about power and its masters.

But like all important writers in Turkey, he has often been asked to speak on matters of political principle. He has spoken most consistently and eloquently on free expression.

For many years, his high profile in the West allowed him more freedom than most. That ended in February 2005 when he told a Swiss journalist that though a million Armenians had been killed in the country of his birth, no one talked about it. The firestorm in the Turkish press was so fierce that he briefly left the country.

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PARIS -- Infuriating Turkey, a thin turnout of French legislators approved a bill yesterday that would make it a crime to deny that mass killings of Armenians in Turkey during the First World War era amounted to genocide.

In Ankara, angry Turks threw eggs at the French embassy amid growing calls to boycott French goods, although the bill could face an impossible struggle to become law -- or even to reach the upper house for further discussion.

"No one should harbour the conviction that Turkey will take this lightly," Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said.

The bill passed 106-19, but the majority of the 557 legislators in France's lower house did not take part in the vote.

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The lesser known genocides of Turkey's Assyrian (Syriac/Aramean) population and Pontic Greek population which also occured between 1915-1918. The latter genocide is disputed, the link explains the controversy.

Also on Turkey's platter is the persecution and ethnic cleansing of its Kurdish population in the south east which reached its peak in the 1990's (with Clinton's backing)

Further, Turkey has to bear responsibility for the invasion of Cyprus and the ethnic cleansing of 250,000 Greek Cypriots (of course with Kissinger's full support)