TURKEY: International controversy surrounding the trial of Turkey's best-known novelist looks set to grow after an Istanbul judge yesterday ordered a postponement amid angry scenes inside and outside the courthouse.
The case against Orhan Pamuk, who faces up to three years in prison if convicted of "belittling Turkish identity", is seen as a litmus test of new European Union candidate Turkey's commitment to free speech.
"It is not Orhan Pamuk who will stand trial tomorrow, but Turkey," EU enlargement commissioner Olli Rehn said on Thursday.
The decision to halt judicial proceedings pending the approval of the justice ministry does not come as a surprise.
While the case against Pamuk stems from a magazine interview he gave this February in which he said one million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds had been killed in Turkey, he is being charged under a new criminal code that came into force only in June.
Nevertheless, foreign observers at the hearing were critical of what they saw as Judge Metin Aydin's preference for evading responsibility.
"We had hoped for an immediate acquittal," said Henry Sajemirokun, a member of the US- based Human Rights Watch. "Instead the judge deferred making a decision to avoid embarrassment."
The European Parliament's Turkey rapporteur, meanwhile, called on Turkey's political establishment to intervene.
"Turkey's image has already been damaged by the government's failure to prevent this trial starting," Camiel Eurlings said. "It must now step in."
The author of sweeping reforms which won Turkey EU candidacy this October, Turkey's conservative government has been ambivalent in its reactions to the Pamuk case. Foreign minister Abdullah Gul ruefully admitted this month that "no country can shoot itself in the foot like Turkey can".
Despite being imprisoned himself for reciting a poem deemed to "incite hatred", prime minister Tayyip Erdogan has been less forthcoming. There was no sign of outrage back when he was on trial, he complained last week.
His unwillingness to intervene appears based in part on his anger at European leaders' failure last month to take action against a Denmark-based TV station which most Turks see as a wing of the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK.
For Ibrahim Kaboglu, a Turkish constitutional expert who faces jail under the same article as Orhan Pamuk, Mr Erdogan's insistence on judicial independence is not enough.
"The new criminal code is the work of this government," he says. "It must now get rid of those articles that are in contradiction to the European Human Rights Convention Turkey has signed."
To do so will not only fly in the face of a long tradition of jailing dissident thinkers: 16 journalists and 37 authors have faced criminal charges in the last 18 months alone.
It will also prove Turkey's willingness to address that most sensitive of subjects, its past, whose capacity to raise Turkish passions was evident in the angry scenes outside court yesterday.
Orhan Pamuk is not the first Turk to call for open discussion of 1915, when between 600,000 and 1.2 million Armenians died in what most historians call the 20th century's first genocide.
However, that did not stop one woman from hitting him on the head with a folder as he walked into the court yesterday morning.
Other bystanders chanted "Traitor" and "Collaborator." When he tried to drive off an hour later, nationalist protesters pelted his car with eggs.