Steun Turkse Chomsky-uitgever

De linkse Turkse uitgever Aram Publishing House wordt weer eens bedreigd wegens het uitgeven van goede boeken. Het gaat nu om de Turkse vertaling van ‘Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass media’, geschreven door Noam Chomsky en Edward S. Herman.

De eigenaar van de uitgeverij, Fatih Tas, twee redacteuren, Ömer Faruk Kurhan en Lütfi Taylan Tosun en de vertaler Dr. Ender Abadoglu zijn in juli 2006 aangeklaagd en moeten binnenkort terechtstaan. De aanklager eist dat ze bestraft worden met gevangenisstraffen van tussen de 1,5 en 6 jaar.

Manufacturing Consent wordt beschouwd als een standaardwerk over de rol van massamedia in de Westerse maatschappij.

Volgens de aanklacht hebben de uitgevers van de Turkse vertaling zich echter schuldig gemaakt aan het ‘publiekelijk te schande maken van de Turkse staat en (…) het opstoken van bevolkingsgroepen tegen elkaar’. In het boek wordt onder meer uiteengezet hoe media omgaan met begrippen als ‘genocide’ en dat bloedbaden tegen dezelfde etnische groepen in het ene geval (Saddam Hussein in Irak) heel anders belicht worden dan in het andere (Turkse staat tegen Koerden).

De originele engelse teksten waar het om gaat staan onderaan dit bericht.

De uitgever en medewerkers vragen om internationale steun. Er is een website gemaakt, waar mensen een petitie kunnen ondertekenen. Dat is wel het minste wat je kunt doen! Ook kun je dit bericht verder verspreiden.
De website met de petitie en achtergrondinformatie is hier te vinden.

Zie ook meer achtergrondinformatie op Znet.

Meer uitleg en de geincrimineerde tekst in het Engels:

Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s book “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of The Mass Media” which is considered as a masterpiece on media analysis and critique is published by Aram Publishing House in March 2006, in Turkey. A lawsuit has been brought against the book in July 2006. The indictment demands that publishing house owner Fatih Tas, the editors Ömer Faruk Kurhan and Lütfi Taylan Tosun and the translator Dr. Ender Abadoglu should be punished with a prison sentence from 1,5 to 6 years. They are charged with publicly humiliating Turkish Republic, Turkish Grand National Assembly etc. and inciting hatred and hostilities among the population.
Here below we’re submitting a translation of those parts of the indictment where the charged passages are quoted and also the law articles the indictment is based upon.
[…] When the above mentioned book is examined, it’s observed that there are chargeable passages especially in the “Introduction”. Under the title of “Updating The Case Studies” beginning on the page 24, It’s stated under the sub-title of “worthy and unworthy victims” on page 26 that “… ‘Genocide’ is an individous word that officials apply readily to cases of victimization in an enemy state, but rarely if ever to similar or worse cases of victimization by the United States itself or allied regimes. Thus, with Saddam Hussein and Iraq have been US targets in the 1990’s, whereas Turkey an ally and client, and the United States its major arms supplier as it engaged in its severe ethnic cleansing of Kurds during those years, we find former US Ambassador Peter Galbraith stating that ‘while Turkey reppresses its own Kurds, its cooperation is essential to an American-led mission to protect Iraq’s Kurds from renewed genocide at the hands of Saddam Hussein.” And on the same page, it’s stated that “… Turkey and Indonesia have long been US allies and client states and recipients of military and economic aid. In consequence and just as the propaganda model would predict, the media not only gave minimal attention to the severe abuse of Kurds by Turkey troughout the 1990’s and to the Clinton’s administration’s lavish help to Turkey’s implementation of that ethnic cleansing program, they rarely applied tho word ‘genocide’ to these Turkish operations” and these facts are shown in a table. Again under the same sub-title, on page 29, it’s written that “… despite the great media attention to and indignation over the abuse of Kosovo Albanians by the Serbs in 1998-1999, this mistreatment was almost certainly less severe than that meted out to the Kurds in Turkey in the 1990’s […]. Deaths in Kosovo on all sides in the year before the NATO bombing were estimated by US and other Western sources to number no more than 2,000 […] (an intensive postwar search for graves had yielded some 3,000 bodies by August 2000 […]). Deaths in the Turkish war on the Kurds in 1990’s were estimated to be 30,000 or more, a large fraction Kurdish civilians, with refugee numbers running to 2 to 3 miilons.”
The passages quoted above contain expressions that are humiliating Turkishness and Turkish Grand National Assembly, which are the criminal acts prohibited by Article 301 of Turkish Penal Code (TPC). These passages are also constituting the crime of inciting people to hatred and hostilities or humiliating mentioned in the first paragraph of the Article 216 of TPC. On the one hand, they are accusing Turkish Republic of genocide against its own population and on the other hand inciting population living in Southeast to hatred and hostilities. [.,..]
Law articles
[Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code]: the first paragraph prohibits the public humiliation of Turkishness, Turkish Republic or Turkish Grand National Assembly and prescribes imprisonment from 6 months to 3 years.
[Article 216 of Turkish Penal Code]: the first paragraph prohibits the incitement of one sector of population with different social class, racial, religious, secterian and regional features to hatred and hostility against another sector. In case there emerges an open and immediate danger with regard to public security, those who are committing this crime shall be convicted to prison sentence from 1 to 3 years.

(Dit artikel was oorspronkelijk op GlobalInfo gepubliceerd door globalinfo.)