TURKEY: A Turkish novelist stands trial today for comments made by characters in her latest book, in a case seen as a showdown between the liberal and nationalist wings in this EU candidate country.
Award-winning Elif Shafak (35) risks three years in jail after an ultra-nationalist lawyer behind scores of similar freedom of speech cases accused her of insulting Turkish identity. "I read this as soon as it came out in March, with a red pen in my hand," Kemal Kerincsiz says, a copy of The Bastard of Istanbul on his Istanbul office desk. "It is part of an orchestrated campaign to brainwash the Turkish people."
Shafak's sixth novel has received praise for its portrait of the rapprochement between an Armenian-American and a Turkish family. Kerincsiz was more interested by its description of the fate of Ottoman Armenians in 1915.
"I am the grandchild of genocide survivors," one character says, using the widely accepted term for deportations that killed about 800,000 people.
Turkey insists the casualties were the result of civil war. The new penal code, updated last year as part of EU-inspired reforms, makes disagreeing with that a potential crime. It is an irony Kerincsiz has seized on, attempting to shut down a conference on 1915 last year and, last December, prosecuting Turkey's most famous novelist, Orhan Pamuk. This time, critics say, he has excelled himself. One compares the case to trying Agatha Christie for murder.
"If things go on like this, novelists will need lawyers to read their manuscripts," says Muge Sokmen, Elif Shafak's publisher.
"What does insulting Turkishness mean anyway?" It is the question all the critics of Article 301 are asking. The slender, soft-spoken Kerincsiz claims to have an answer. "Turkey is eastern and Islamic, incompatible with the West," he says.
"In your country, people wear underpants made of the flag and think nothing of it. Our flag is coloured with the blood of martyrs."
Though bizarrely expressed, it is a unitary view of identity long defended by the Turkish state. It makes him a natural enemy of Elif Shafak, whose novels are peopled by characters who change religion, country and even sex. "Ambiguity, synthesis: these are the things that compose Turkish society," she says. She believes Kerincsiz's real target is not her book, but the future of the country's EU accession process. That sense of being used gives her an added reason to appear in court today.
She gave birth to her first daughter on Saturday, though, and that looks unlikely. Her doctors do not even want her to go outside, let alone to the violent welcome almost certainly awaiting her at court this morning.
Kemal Kerincsiz claims he disapproves of the heckling and physical attacks his supporters greeted Orhan Pamuk with in December. For weeks, though, his website has called on "patriots" to come out in protest of the "princess of capitulationist intellectuals".
Only a tiny minority of Turks approve of such violent antics. Yet, with an angry, introverted nationalism on the up, and euroscepticism growing, Turkey's nominally pro-European government looks unlikely to intervene.
"Are we going to change laws just because Europe wants us too?" justice minister Cemil Cicek said on Tuesday. "Changing laws isn't like changing your tie."