RIGHTS-CULTURE: Norwegian Writers Focus on Human Rights

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Asbjoern Thomassen

OSLO, Aug 17 1999 (IPS) - Instead of debating their prose and verse from a vacuum, Norwegian writers and publishers met this year with colleagues from around the world to discuss issues such as why a Kurdish writer has been jailed in Turkey for the crime of publishing flowers’ names in his mother tongue.

The plight of Kurds and Norway’s Gypsies, as well as freedom of expression around the world were the issues debated ate the week- long Bjoernstjerne Bjxrnson Festival of Literature in the Norwegian town of Molde, which closed last weekend.

The gathering started with the announcement that imprisoned Peruvian writer Yehude Simon Munaro had been awarded the Norwegian Writers Unions prize for free expression.

The right of free expression was the hub of this annual festival, named after one of Norway’s most renown authors, Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson (1832 -1910). This year the even featured writers from Kurdistan, Israel, Palestine, Nigeria and the United States among others, who exchanged with their local peers.

“The author should be the society’s consciousness”, Norway’s minister of development Hilde Frafjord Johnson said in her opening speech on Sunday August 8.

The minister referred to Bjoernson, who during his life wrote more than 30,000 letters and was highly respected by European leaders for his courage and political insights, and she urged today’s writers to dedicate themselves to the fight for free expression.

“We need the intellectuals. They can – and should – help us all to put things more into a perspective. And we must all listen to those who risk life and health for the case of free expression around the world”, she continued.

The festival’s president, Norwegian poet Knut Oedegaard, highlighted the plight of the Kurdish people, spread between Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria.

“In Turkey the authorities arrested a writer because he published a collection of flowers’ names in Kurdish. Why does not anyone outside act against the injustice in Turkey”? asked Oedegaard, pointing to the fact that Kurds are struggling for the same rights as the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

The book he referred to was shown at an exhibition during the festival together with many other works banned by the Turkish government. Among the written materials was also “Mehmets Book” (Mehmed in Kitab) by IPS’ Istanbul correspondent Nadire Mater.

The book is a series of interviews with 42 former Turkish soldiers who fought in the war between the Kurdish rebels and government forces, in which a critical perspective of this war is for the first time provided to Turkish readers, by some of their own.

The book sold 10,000 copies before being banned by the authorities, while Mater is now expected to face trial before a state security court.

As to Kurdish writers, most of them have to live in exile, especially those from Turkey as their language and culture are forbidden by Turkish authorities.

Most of them live in Sweden, the country where most Kurdish literature is published in the world, according to author Nedim Dagdeviren, director of the Kurdish Library in Stockholm. The library is a political and religious independent institution founded in 1996.

“There are about 100 active Kurdish authors living in Sweden, half of them from the Turkish part of Kurdistan, Dagdeviren told IPS. “Some of them write in the Kurdisk language, and other in Turkish or the language of the various countries with Kurdish population”.

Kurdish writer Rafik Sabir from Iraq and Ahmet Altan from Turkey also took part in debates about the situation for the Kurds.

Peruvian author Yehude Simon Munaro has spent more than six years in prison, Norwegian Writers Union’s leader Karsten Alnaes said, accused of alleged contacts with the rebel Revolutionary Tupac Amaru Movement (MRTA).

“Yehude is innocent, as thousands of others in his country”, Alnaes said in a speech. The prize of about 12,987 US dollars will be handed over to Simon Munaro in the Castro-Castro high security prison in Lima by Alnaes next September.

Alnaes has translated some of Simon Munaros poems and read them at the festival opening day.

The festival also revealed a dark side of the Norwegian society – the treatment of the “travellers” or “tatere,” a group related to Gypsies.

At a panel debate, a representative from the tatere and a former secretary general of the “Mission Among Homeless” – a voluntary Christian group accused of abducting Gypsy children to assimilate them into the Norwegian cultural mainstream – filled the participants’ eyes with tears, as “Klassekampen” daily reported.

Harald Franz Martinsen, himself a “tater”, says he and his sister were kidnapped as infants by Mission officials and placed “by mistake” in a home for mentally-retarded children.

Martinsen, one of about 1,500 “abandoned” children the Mission took care of, told the audience how mission officials lied to him about his alleged father’s death and his mother’s rejection. They also told him he was a single child.

With tears in his eyes Martinsen said that postcards and gifts mailed by his parents for Christmas and birthday had been confiscated or returned by the Mission, which was later wound up. Only seven years ago could Martinsen, now 62, see the letters he was supposed to receive as a child, kept in the National Archives.

Jahn Otto Johansen, a prominent Norwegian radio and TV reporter who organised the seminar about the travellers, underlined that the Norwegian Gypsies must be compensated for what they have been trough, like the Jews.

“If pride can not be reconstructed, only the monument of shame is left”, he said and underlined that the Norwegian church has yet to officially regret what happened. Ministers of the Norwegian State Church often cooperated with the Mission.

Also the situation of Israeli and Palestinian writers was discussed. Israeli writer Amoz Oz and the president of Palestinian Writers Union, Izzat Ghazzawi, planted each an oak in the festival’s “Grove of Peace” in Molde.

The tree-planting tradition is only two years old. Last year the Irish Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney planted a tree together with the former president of Iceland, Vigdis Finnbogadottir.

The Bjoernson Festival of Literature has been an annual event since 1992, and has developed into one of the most important cultural events in Norway. Sources said that the motivated writers are planning to discuss China and the Balkans at next year’s gathering.