10 Oct 14 | Azerbaijan, Azerbaijan News, News and features
Arzu Geybulla
Journalist Arzu Geybulla has received a growing number of threats on social media following an interview with Azerbaijani news site modern.az.
Geybulla has been subject to ongoing intimidation because of her work at Istanbul-based Armenian paper, Agos. The interview has led to Geybulla being accused of treason by the Azerbaijani media.
Despite calls from the European Parliament in September, Azerbaijan has still failed to release prominent political prisoners Leyla and Arif Yunus, Rasul Jafarov, Intigam Aliyev and Hasan Huseynli.
Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of Index on Censorship, said: “Azerbaijan portrays itself internationally as a country that values human rights and respects the freedom of its citizens to express themselves. In reality, anyone who seeks to speak or act freely in Azerbaijan is targeted, imprisoned and harassed. The international community needs to take a far tougher stance on Azerbaijan to help defend individuals like Arzu and the defenceless individuals to which her work gives voice.”
Geybulla wrote for Index on Censorship about her thoughts on free expression in Azerbaijan on July 30, the day Leyla Yunus was detained.
Leyla and her husband have now been imprisoned for 73 days. Javarov has been in prison for 70 days since August 2, and Aliyev has been detained for 64 days, since August 8. Huseynli, who has been detained for 195 days since March 30, is serving a six year sentence.
Take action to support Arzu Geybulla, Leyla and Arif Yunus, Rasul Jafarov, Intigam Aliyev and Hasan Huseynli.
Post on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit or share with your friends. Let @PresidentAZ know you ware watching.
Please send appeals immediately:
— Condemning the campaign of intimidation directed at Arzu Geybullayeva for her legitimate work as a journalist at Agos;
— Calling on the Turkish and Azerbaijani authorities to investigate any threats of violence against her and to ensure her safety;
— Reminding them that they have the obligation to safeguard Geybullayeva’s right to freedom of expression under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which they are both state parties.
Appeals to:
Mr Ramil Usubov
Minister of Internal Affairs for the Republic of Azerbaijan
7 Husu Haliyev Street
Baku, Azerbaijan
AZ1001
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @PresidentAZ
Mr Efkan Ala
Minister of Interior for the Republic of Turkey
T.C. İçişleri Bakanlığı
Bakanlıklar
Ankara, Turkey
Email: [email protected]; [email protected]
Twitter: @efkanala
If possible, please copy appeals to the diplomatic representative for Azerbaijan and Turkey in your country. Let us know of any actions you have taken and responses you receive.
This article was posted on 10 October 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
19 Jan 12 | Uncategorized
With grim symmetry, French politicians are preparing to debate a law criminalising denial of the Armenian genocide just five years after the murder of Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink.
Dink, editor of Agos was passionately opposed to laws restricting discussion of what happened to thousands of Armenians in 1915. In Turkey, it was illegal for him to describe the events as genocide. In France, they hoped to make it illegal to say it was not. When this law was first mooted in 2006, Dink commented:
“When this bill appeared first, we were fast to declare as a group that it would lead to bad results…As you know, I have been tried in Turkey for saying the Armenian genocide exists, and I have talked about how wrong this is. But at the same time, I cannot accept that in France you could possibly now be tried for denying the Armenian genocide. If this bill becomes law, I will be among the first to head for France and break the law. Then we can watch both the Turkish Republic and the French government race against eachother to condemn me. We can watch to see which will throw me into jail first…I really think that France, if it makes this bill law, will be hurting not only the EU, but Armenians across the world. It will also damage the normalising of relations between Armenia and Turkey. What the peoples of these two countries need is dialogue, and all these laws do is harm such dialogue.”
Genocide denial is not a simple issue of differing versions of history; it is a calculated insult, a degeneration of a people’s memory and history. Ultimately, it is calculated to exterminate a people by other means. As novelist Howard Jacobson put it in a magazine in 2009, addressing attempts to downplay or deny the Jewish Holocaust:
“[O]ne day, if they have their way, whoever they are, these people, there will be no Holocaust either. No Holocaust. No Israel. No Jews.”
A similar impulse is at play with the use of Turkey’s Article 301, which outlaws “insulting Turkishness”. The law is used against Kurds and Armenians, because in the Kemalist vision that shaped the country, there are no Kurds or Armenians. There are only Turks, united in a single vision and a single story.
This impulse is unexceptional, particularly in 20th century nationalism. As empire disintegrated, projecting a single vision became important. In this way, Turkish “genocide denial” may be different from Holocaust denial, driven by fierce nationalism alone, rather than the combination of nationalism, classic and modern anti-Semitism and paranoid conspiracism which drove the Holocaust. But both are driven by distrust of the other, and by seeing diversity and cosmopolitanism as stumbling blocks on the path to perfection.
But while the two may differ, there is no difference in the free speech argument on laws covering them. Proscribing speech —whether it confirms or denys historical truths — is an offence to history, a barrier to dialogue and an insult to memory.
22 Sep 10 | Uncategorized
This is a guest post by Kaya Genç
“Finally now I am appealing to the European Court of Human Rights,” Hrant Dink wrote in his last article for Agos, the newspaper he had edited since 1996. “I don’t know how many years this case will take. But at least I am relieved by the fact that until the end of this case I’ll continue living in Turkey. I’ll be happy, no doubt, if the court’s verdict is positive – this will mean that I will never have to leave my country again.” On 19 January 2007, a week after the article appeared, Hrant Dink was assassinated outside his newspaper. Last week’s decision from the European Court of Human Rights (which condemned Turkey for failing to protect Dink’s life or conduct a proper investigation into his murder, and ordered it to pay Dink’s family 105,000 euros in compensation) may seem like good news, but it is not quite the birthday present the Turkish state apparatus would like it to appear.
Turkish officials announced that they would not appeal to the Grand Chamber of the Court and that they would immediately accept the verdict, which was announced on Dink’s birthday. Yet rather than being the sincere and democratic impulse of the Erdoğan government, the state’s response actually appears to be the afterthought of a criminal – aiming to divert attention from the defence Turkey presented to the court.
Defending the decision of the local court (which found Dink guilty of insulting “Turkishness”, following Article 301 of the penal code), the Turkish state defended itself in the European Court of Human Rights by comparing Hrant Dink to “leaders of national socialism in Germany”.
“In democratic societies,” the Turkish defence read, “the sort of articles that are similar to Dink’s amount to crimes of provocation and they are a danger to public order.” Turkey’s official defence then reminded the court that the European Council had agreed to the suppression of “hate speech”. The defence also noted that it was the same court that had found the leader of a Nazi organisation guilty, because of an article that advocated national socialism. “Dink’s article, also, amounts to ‘hate speech,’” the defence concluded.
When news of the government’s defence made headlines last August, supporters of the governing AKP were shocked by the realisation that there was in fact no real distinction between the bureaucratic, nationalist old guard of the system and the neo-liberal AKP government, whose economic “shock doctrine” they had so vigorously defended.
When Turkey’s defence became public, the Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu found himself in a very uncomfortable position. The day after the press coverage, he told reporters “I cannot accept this. I believe we can have an agreement with Dink’s family.” Davutoğlu assured the family that the state would not defend its current position and would not appeal if the court ruled against Turkey.
But neither Davutoğlu nor the Turkish President Abdullah Gül, who met Hrant’s brother Hosrof to express his sympathies, seem to be concerned with a fundamental issue in the Dink case – the role of the state apparatus, under the rule of AKP, in helping to foster the climate that led to Dink’s murder. Dink had never been sympathetic to the right-wing agenda of the Armenian diaspora and the article he wrote in 2004 about Turks and Armenians, that famously antagonised his enemies and led to his prosecution, was misinterpreted: it was actually a criticism of Armenian hardliners and not Turks. When Dink wrote that “the purified blood that will replace the blood poisoned by the ‘Turk’ can be found in the noble vein linking Armenians to Armenia, provided that the former are aware of it,” he was urging the Armenian authorities to be more active in strengthening ties with the country’s diaspora, as a basis for a healthier national identity. As a socialist, Dink was irritated by what he called “the English-French alliance” and “imperialist forces” that had historically been motivated by self-interest, causing humanitarian catastrophes in countries like Turkey. Arguing against the right-wing members of the diaspora in the US, Dink wanted Armenian people to get rid of “the blood poisoned by the ‘Turk’” – meaning the hatred against the Turk.
Only a Turkish or an Armenian racist could have a problem with this sentence, and they both did. Dink’s sentence was deliberately misinterpreted in an effort to represent the socialist, anti-imperialist editor as an imperialist who defended the religious and capitalist demands of the Armenians. Perhaps this misinterpretation served right-wingers in Armenia as well as in Turkey. Perhaps it was a useful campaign, eventually destroying a socialist voice demanding a just peace.
Happily, there are Turkish intellectuals who are not afraid of criticising the state apparatus. One such figure is Rıza Türmen, a former judge at the ECHR, who advised the state to admit its mistake instead of defending it. “It is not necessary to defend every case. Sometimes it might be better for the state in moral and legal terms to admit a mistake instead of clinging to a defence. If this case is bothering the government that much, they could conclude the case before it is decided,” he wrote in his column in the daily Milliyet.
The court’s decision coincides with the publication of the first biography of Dink. Entitled “Hrant”, the book was written by the journalist Tûba Çandar, who worked on it for more than three years, interviewing 125 people, including Dink’s family members, close and distant relatives, his university friends and colleagues. The first edition of the book is on the way to becoming a bestseller.
I asked the writer Maureen Freely, who has already translated excerpts into English, about the decision and Turkey’s defence. “I hate the distortions of the government and I also hate seeing how effective they are abroad,” she says. “I hope with this decision that they will begin to understand that they should stop this, for this sort of defence is an anti-democratic insult to the people of Turkey.”
Kaya Genç is a novelist and journalist. You can read his article about Kurdish musicians in the latest issue of award-winning Index on Censorship magazine, Smashed Hits 2.0, by subscribing to the magazine or buying a single issue on Amazon. Listen to Kaya’s playlist choices of Kurdish music on iTunes and Spotify
20 Apr 10 | Index Index, minipost, Uncategorized
The investigation into alleged police involvement in the assassination of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink is to be reopened. Dink was the editor of Agos, a bilingual newspaper which challenged the official Turkish version of the 1915 Armenian genocide, which holds that hundreds of thousands of Armenians perished because of hunger and suffering in World War One. He was murdered in 2007 by Ogün Samast. During the trial, concerns were raised over photos which showed Samast posing with Istanbul police officers. In October 2008, the officers were acquitted. At the time the court claimed that it could no “solid and convincing evidence” to convict them. The Provincial Administration Board has now decided that the investigation can take into consideration evidence relating to four police officers, former Police Chief İbrahim Pala, Chief Inspectors Volkan Altınbulak and İbrahim Şevki Eldivan and police officers Bahadır Tekin and Özcan Özkan, although four other officers involved in the case will not be investigated.
