Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist who was charged with "denigrating Turkish identity" for having stated that “a million Armenians and thirty thousand Kurds had been killed in Turkey”, in an interview with a Swiss newspaper, has seen the charges against him dropped. Following a statement from the Turkish Justice Ministry to Istanbul's Sisli court that it had no authority under the revised penal code to try the novelist, the court dropped the case yesterday.

Justice Minister Cemil Çiçek had earlier called on the famous novelist to apologise to the nation. Such an act of contrition could have allowed the authorities to drop the case with no loss of face. But the chances of Pamuk going to Canossa and repudiating his earlier statements were always slim.

The trial in Istanbul was adjourned shortly after it began on December 16, under an increasing cloud of international condemnation.

Pamuk, 53, was put in the dock last month in Istanbul amid ugly scenes, charged with a criminal offence and facing a potential three years in jail for saying to a Swiss magazine that 30,000 people had died in the conflict between Kurdish nationalists and Turkish security forces, and that a million Armenians had died in Turkey during the first world war - "and nobody but me dares to talk about it".

If the writer's observations may seem commonplace outside Turkey, they were met with protests in the country, which is sensitive to any charge of genocide, which it rejects, in relation to Armenia, and has struggled with armed Kurdish separatism. The decision to try Pamuk, author of the acclaimed novels Snow and My Name Is Red, shocked Istanbul liberals, outraged rights activists and the European Union, and embarrassed the reformist wing of the Turkish government.

In the end it was the Turkish authorities that had to knuckle under. They simply could not run the risk of the court actually convicting Pamuk, as the case had become such a high profile one that a conviction was likely to materially harm the country's chances of gaining membership in The European Union. So Çiçek was forced to directly intervene in the case.

The sad part is that having done away with this one high profile case, the many others, lacking international household names, who either have been convicted or charged under the same laws, are now likely to be forgotten.



This article is also available at The European Tribune.