When I was young, whenever my grandmother, now passed away, talked about someone about to blow their top, she'd describe them, in her rustic dialect, as, "Sint som en Tørk," or, translated from backwoods Norwegian, "Mad as a Turk."

The word mad, in this context, was, of course, meant to mean angry. But there are times, when the other interpretation seems appropriate.

Turkey has been working for ages now towards the goal of membership in The European Union, complaining bitterly at every set-back or bump in the road, that they are being treated unfairly by European nations that doubt their cultural affinity with the rest of the Union. Then they go off and do things like this.

When the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk stated that "a million Armenians and thirty thousand Kurds had been killed in Turkey," in an interview with a Swiss newspaper in 2004, he was promptly charged with the crime of "denigrating Turkish identity" and put on trial.


Due to Pamuk's high international profile, the case became a cause célèbre, which threatened to grow into a major diplomatic incident, complete with the manhandling of a European Member of Parliament outside the court house.

In the end the whole thing became such an embarrassment, that the trial was dropped, through a legal sleight of hand. So the story ended happily, for Orhan Pamuk. But at the time I wrote the following:

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.

Well, it looks like Turkey may have another cause célèbre on their hands.

TURKEY’S faltering hopes of European Union membership look set to be dealt a blow this week when Elif Shafak, one of the leading members of a new generation of Turkish female novelists, faces charges under the country’s draconian restrictions on freedom of speech.

Shafak, 34, is being tried under article 301 of the Turkish penal code, which makes it an offence to insult “Turkishness”. Her alleged crime is that a character in her latest bestselling novel, The Bastard of Istanbul, describes the massacres of Armenians in the late Ottoman Empire as a genocide — an interpretation which, although widely accepted internationally, is still vigorously denied by the Turkish state.

Although other Turks have faced charges for referring to the events of 1915-16 as a genocide, Shafak is the first writer to be prosecuted for words spoken by a character in a work of fiction.

Ms Shafak, 34, initially argued that the statements in question were made by fictional characters, and thus not subject to prosecution. and in June, a public prosecutor in Istanbul agreed and dismissed the charges. But the case was brought before a high criminal court in Istanbul, which overruled the lower court's decision.

The charges against Shafak, who is due to give birth at the time of her trial, originates at the Union of Jurists, a group of ultra-nationalist lawyers, which has had a hand in a number of other related prosecutions, among them the one directed at Pamuk.

Its main spokesman is a lawyer named Kemal Kerincsiz. His rabidly xenophobic sound-bites have turned him into a celebrity, and his words are echoed by the thugs who have taunted and assaulted defendants in the corridors of the courthouses, denouncing them as traitors and "missionary children" (a reference to the foreign schools many of the defendants attended) and spouting racist slogans that call to mind Berlin in 1935, while the riot police look on.

This comes on the heels of the case of the British artist living in Turkey who faces up to three years in prison after being charged with insulting the Turkish prime minister's dignity with a work of art.

One could perhaps claim that these are simply the shenanigans of a few bad apples, and activist prosecutors, with an agenda contrary to the bulk of the Turkish population. But the thing is, that the members of any society, a democratic one in particular, are, in the end, responsible for the laws passed, and enforced, in their name. Until such time as Turkey, as a nation, faces up to that awesome right, and responsibility, and amends the laws which make trials like this feasible, its protestations of unfair treatment will probably be given the weight they deserve.

Anyone wishing to make their feelings known to the Turkish authorities on the matter, can find the contact information to the Turkish embassy, or representation, in their country, at this web page.