International PEN greets with shock the news that the world-famous Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk, will be brought before an Istanbul court on 16 December 2005 and that he faces up to three years in prison for a comment published in a Swiss newspaper earlier this year.
The charges stem from an interview given by Pamuk to the Swiss newspaper "Das Magazin" on 6 February in which he is quoted as saying that "thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it." Pamuk was referring to the killings by Ottoman Empire forces of thousands of Armenians in 1915-1917. Turkey does not contest the deaths, but denies that it could be called a "genocide". His reference to "30,000" Kurdish deaths refers to those killed since 1984 in the conflict between Turkish forces and Kurdish separatists. Debate on these issues have been stifled by stringent laws, some leading to lengthy lawsuits, fines and in some cases prison terms.
http://www.ifex.org/en/content/view/full/68998/