RIGHTS-TURKEY: Journalist Faces Maximum 12 Year Jail Term

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Jaya Ramachandran

PARIS, Jul 10 2000 (IPS) - Turkey’s prominent writer-journalist, Nadire Mater – formally indicted nine months ago for the crime of “belittling and insulting” the Turkish armed forces – is now faced with the prospect of up to 12 years in prison.

Her publisher, Semih Sokmen may have to pay a heavy fine.

The accusation follows the seizure in June last year of ‘Mehmed’s Book’, a compilation of interviews with 42 veterans of the 16-year old war between the Turkish army and Kurdish guerrillas.

The Kurds are an agricultural people, squeezed between Iran, Iraq and Turkey and struggling to build a state of their own.

Mater, who is a regular contributor to the global news agency Inter Press Service (IPS), said Monday: “Since I was formally accused last September, things have got worse – in fact, the situation is the worst I could have imagined.”

She was reporting on the sixth hearing of the court case against her in Istanbul’s Beyoglu District Penal Court No. 2.

The court is expected to deliver its verdict on August 24 after hearing Mater and Sokmen as well as the public prosecutor.

The public prosecutor demanded last Thursday that Mater and her publisher be sentenced twice for having gone to the press with the third and fourth editions of the controversial book.

In the hearing last Friday, the public prosecutor invalidated a specialist report by Professor Koksal Bayraktar that “the charge against Mater is irrelevant and that Mehmed’s Book aims at an objective evaluation of the south-east conflict.”

Bayraktar was appointed by the court to examine and report on the book’s conformity with the law.

The public prosecutor said: “The report (by Bayraktar) is contradictory. The specialist’s conclusion of the book’s objectivity is contradicted by the exclusion of interviews with the relatives of the victims of massacres in the south-eastern villages directed at civilians mostly children and women.”

“The criticisms (in the book )are an extension of Western traditions since the Ottoman times to blame any action by the (Turkish) authorities for national defence with irrelevant charges to campaign against the country’s security forces.”

Mater’s “Mehmed’s Book’ is based on exclusive interviews with retired soldiers and officers who have fought in the south-east conflict and aims at conveying the experiences of rank-and-file soldiers to the public.

Renewing the indictment that they had aimed at “belittling and insulting the armed forces”, the public prosecutor demanded that Mater and Sokmen be punished twice for the third and fourth editions of the book and the prosecution against first and second editions be suspended in tune with a partial amnesty covering “crimes” committed before May 1999.

“Thus, I am faced with the prospect of a prison sentence of between two to twelve years if the judges find me guilty of the charges,” Mater told IPS.

Mater, Sokmen and their lawyers have confirmed the specialist’s report and pleaded not guilty.

Meanwhile, according to reports, in Turkey’s southern province of Mersin, Guler Yildiz, a reporter for local Cinar newspaper is also charged with indicted with “belittling and insulting” the country’s armed forces.

Yildiz indicted with violating Article 159 of the Turkish Penal code for having quoted some passages of ‘Mehmed’s Book’.

The trial of Mater and her publisher has aroused protests from Turkish journalists and international organisations.

In her defence statement last September Mater told the judges that, “indeed who are being tried in this court room are not myself and my publisher but the 42 veterans who for the first time after 15 years of bloody fighting were provided a channel to express themselves, their frustrations, fears and hopes.”

“All I have done, as a genuine journalist, is to hold a microphone for these young men and reflect their words truthfully.

The indictment is ironic in the sense that not even a single word of mine is presented as an evidence of my ‘guilt’. The indictment is based on deliberately isolated quotations from the statements of the soldiers,” she added.

“The prosecutor is indeed indicting the men once exalted as ‘heroes'” – Mater stressed. “I reject the charges.”

Publisher Sokmen also rejected the accusation. “I am extremely proud of what we have done. For the first time since the beginning of the war, we have been able to convey the perceptions and feelings of blood-and-flesh soldiers to the public,” he said.

“This may be different than the official perception but this is not a crime. To the contrary, it provides feedback to the Army in order to correct its conduct,” he added.

Since its first edition in April, ‘Mehmet’s Book’ has had four reprints, for a total of 20,000 books sold, until it was banned in June last year by a local Istanbul court in compliance with a special request by the Army’s deputy chief of staff.

“As I was reading ‘Mehmed’s Book’ what I heard was the cry ‘no more blood for blood,’ not any insult against any institution,” said Zeynep Oral, a literary critique at ‘Milliyet’ an Istanbul daily.

“‘Mehmed’s Book’ expresses the truth. And the book is being tried. Our civilian generals are summarily executing the truth,” said columnist Necati Dogru of Sabah, another Istanbul newspaper.

The leader of the Freedom and Solidarity Party , Ufuk Uras, also attended the hearing in support of the accused.

“Nadire Mater’s book has provided us with abundant facts about the other side of the war, the most valuable material for our party’s campaign for peace,” Uras told IPS.

Mater’s case is has already drawn the attention of the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), London-based rights groups Index on Censorship and Article XIX and Paris based Reporters Without Frontiers (RSF), which Mater represents in Turkey.

The journalist “has done no more than practice her profession, which is to inform the public independently and objectively,” said RSF chair Robert Menard in a letter to prime minister Bulent Ecevit.

“Turkey has a press that, in many ways, is as lively as any in Europe. But when they write about issues at the heart of modern Turkish politics – political Islam and Kurdish nationalism in particular – Turkey’s journalists cross into a minefield. In their zeal to control national discourse, political and military leaders have criminalised journalism,” CPJ said in a press release.