'Thought Criminals': Writers punished in China and Turkey
Submitted by MichaelVail on Wed, 02/07/2007 - 1:17am.
Epoch Times International
Posted: Feb 5, 2007
BEIJING and INSTANBUL—Fear has engulfed Turkey's intelligentsia since the murder of Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink. Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk has canceled a book tour and more than a dozen other writers have been assigned bodyguards.
Attacks against writers in Turkey are not new. More than 50 journalists have been killed since the 1970s but Dink was the first since 1999, the year Turkey became a candidate to join the European Union and embarked on major human rights reforms. "There's deep disappointment among intellectuals, that we're back to square one," said leftist columnist Cengiz Candar who had a bodyguard for 10 years but no longer.
"There's an uneasiness... Your lifestyle changes when you have a bodyguard," he told Reuters.
Dink was shot outside his newspaper office in Istanbul last month by a teenager apparently inspired by ultra- nationalist ideas. He had angered nationalists with his writings on the mass killing of Armenians in Turkey in 1915.
They want the government to scrap a controversial law that makes it a crime to insult Turkish identity. Article 301 has been used against Pamuk, Dink and many others. The writers say the law makes them a target for nationalist violence, even though few are ever convicted under it. Some, like Dink, say they have received death threats from ultra-nationalist websites.
An official at the Istanbul governor's office said 18 people have been given bodyguards since Dink's death.
Sara Whyatt, a program director at PEN, the global association that fights for writers' interests, says what makes Turkey particularly unusual is the number of fiction writers who are targeted. Novelist Elif Shafak faced trial under article 301 for comments on Armenians and Turks made by one of her fictional characters. Both Shafak and Pamuk have bodyguards.
Turkey's government strongly condemned Dink's murder and vowed to bring the culprits to justice. But it has resisted calls, including from the EU, to scrap 301 and said insulting national identity is a crime in other European countries too.
*****
And in the Peoples Republic of China, the Chinese author of a book about long-dead Peking Opera stars has become the latest challenger to the ruling Communist Party's censors, daring them to explain their secretive ways before the law.
Zhang Yihe won fame in China three years ago for a memoir of her father and other intellectuals who embraced Mao Zedong's revolution only to be purged. That bestseller was banned. Her latest, on the high-pitched masters of traditional opera, appeared to be on tamer ground.
But Zhang's Performers' Pasts and seven other books were yanked from Chinese stores in January on the orders of propaganda officials, according to Zhang and other authors. She has now issued a denunciation of the ban and threatened to sue the publishing authorities.
"It was you who treated me as a thought criminal, who robbed me of my rights to expression and publication as a citizen," Zhang wrote in the letter to a senior publishing official, dated Jan. 28 but made public by her on February 3. "Banning my book should be done through open, just and independent judicial procedures," she wrote. "I will defend to the hilt my rights under the law."
Zhang's challenge may revive a war over censorship that galvanized Chinese intellectuals and journalists last year, and highlight China's strict media controls even as it prepares to host the 2008 Olympics.
A year ago, the closure of the investigative reporting section of the combative China Youth Daily stirred reporters and retired Communist reformers to decry what they called deadening official control of the media.
Among the books ordered off the shelves this time were I Object, a biography of Yao Lifa, a fervent campaigner for free elections and farmers' rights in central China's Hubei province.
"Banning like this lacks any legal basis. It's a dictatorial act stripping away people's freedom without any explanation or documentation," Yao told Reuters by phone.
The General Administration of Press and Publications, which Zhang says banned her book, could not be contacted for immediate comment.
Posted: Feb 5, 2007
BEIJING and INSTANBUL—Fear has engulfed Turkey's intelligentsia since the murder of Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink. Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk has canceled a book tour and more than a dozen other writers have been assigned bodyguards.
Attacks against writers in Turkey are not new. More than 50 journalists have been killed since the 1970s but Dink was the first since 1999, the year Turkey became a candidate to join the European Union and embarked on major human rights reforms. "There's deep disappointment among intellectuals, that we're back to square one," said leftist columnist Cengiz Candar who had a bodyguard for 10 years but no longer.
"There's an uneasiness... Your lifestyle changes when you have a bodyguard," he told Reuters.
Dink was shot outside his newspaper office in Istanbul last month by a teenager apparently inspired by ultra- nationalist ideas. He had angered nationalists with his writings on the mass killing of Armenians in Turkey in 1915.They want the government to scrap a controversial law that makes it a crime to insult Turkish identity. Article 301 has been used against Pamuk, Dink and many others. The writers say the law makes them a target for nationalist violence, even though few are ever convicted under it. Some, like Dink, say they have received death threats from ultra-nationalist websites.
An official at the Istanbul governor's office said 18 people have been given bodyguards since Dink's death.
Sara Whyatt, a program director at PEN, the global association that fights for writers' interests, says what makes Turkey particularly unusual is the number of fiction writers who are targeted. Novelist Elif Shafak faced trial under article 301 for comments on Armenians and Turks made by one of her fictional characters. Both Shafak and Pamuk have bodyguards.
Turkey's government strongly condemned Dink's murder and vowed to bring the culprits to justice. But it has resisted calls, including from the EU, to scrap 301 and said insulting national identity is a crime in other European countries too.
*****
And in the Peoples Republic of China, the Chinese author of a book about long-dead Peking Opera stars has become the latest challenger to the ruling Communist Party's censors, daring them to explain their secretive ways before the law.
Zhang Yihe won fame in China three years ago for a memoir of her father and other intellectuals who embraced Mao Zedong's revolution only to be purged. That bestseller was banned. Her latest, on the high-pitched masters of traditional opera, appeared to be on tamer ground.
But Zhang's Performers' Pasts and seven other books were yanked from Chinese stores in January on the orders of propaganda officials, according to Zhang and other authors. She has now issued a denunciation of the ban and threatened to sue the publishing authorities.
"It was you who treated me as a thought criminal, who robbed me of my rights to expression and publication as a citizen," Zhang wrote in the letter to a senior publishing official, dated Jan. 28 but made public by her on February 3. "Banning my book should be done through open, just and independent judicial procedures," she wrote. "I will defend to the hilt my rights under the law."
Zhang's challenge may revive a war over censorship that galvanized Chinese intellectuals and journalists last year, and highlight China's strict media controls even as it prepares to host the 2008 Olympics.
A year ago, the closure of the investigative reporting section of the combative China Youth Daily stirred reporters and retired Communist reformers to decry what they called deadening official control of the media.
Among the books ordered off the shelves this time were I Object, a biography of Yao Lifa, a fervent campaigner for free elections and farmers' rights in central China's Hubei province.
"Banning like this lacks any legal basis. It's a dictatorial act stripping away people's freedom without any explanation or documentation," Yao told Reuters by phone.
The General Administration of Press and Publications, which Zhang says banned her book, could not be contacted for immediate comment.
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