DAR AL ISLAM - TURKEY: 'DEEPLY CONSERVATIVE' TURKEY DEMANDS PEOPLE KEEP THEIR MOUTHS SHUT OR THEY WILL PAY FOR IT

Turkey to alter speech law
By Sabrina Tavernise

When Atilla Yayla, a maverick political science professor, offered a mild criticism of Turkey's first years as a country, his remarks unleashed a torrent of abuse.

"Traitor!" a newspaper headline shouted. His college dismissed him. State prosecutors in this western city, where he spoke, opened a criminal case against him. His crime? Violating an obscure law against insulting the legacy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey's founder.

"I need thoughts to counter my ideas," Yayla said. "Instead they attacked me."

Turkey's government has taken on the issue of free speech and is expected as early as Friday to announce a weakening of a law against insulting Turkishness, an amendment that is considered a key measure of the democratic maturity of this Muslim country as it tries to gain acceptance to the European Union.

But while that law, called Article 301, is known to many in the West — Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist, was prosecuted under 301 — it is just one of many laws that limit freedom of expression for intellectuals in Turkey. The law under which Yayla was prosecuted, for example, dates from 1951 and is not even part of the penal code.

While the change in Article 301 is likely to stop the wanton application of that law, the single most common statute used against critics of Turkey's official line, the government was unable to remove it from the books completely, as liberals here had wanted.

The reason goes to the heart of the state of Turkey Friday: Despite its booming economy, gay pride parades and ambitious European aspirations, a large part of Turkish society is deeply conservative. When it comes to free speech, many Turks support the limitations.

As nationalism has been rising in Turkey in response to the broad changes sweeping society, so have the number of court cases against writers, publishers and academics. The European Union, in a report in November, said the number of such people prosecuted almost doubled in 2006 over the year before, and rose further in 2007.

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