Chomsky protests prosecution of his Turkish publisher

Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit

source  - eric stewart <sonsun2012@yahoo.com
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=02/01/06/4226599

Noam Chomsky protests court case 
against his Turkish publisher

by the Associated Press

ISTANBUL, Dec 12 (AP)--Noam Chomsky, the American linguist and
political dissident, has attacked a court's decision to prosecute his
Turkish publisher over a book that slams Turkey's human rights
record.

In a letter to Istanbul-based Aram Publishing, Chomsky expressed
sympathy with the firm's director Fatih Tas, who faces a one-year
jail sentence if convicted on charges of conducting propaganda
against the state. The trial is due to begin in February.

The charges are "a very severe attack on the most elementary human
and civil rights," wrote Chomsky, a professor of linguistics at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Aram earlier this year published "American Interventionism," a
collection of Chomsky's essays and lectures translated into Turkish.

The book includes a translation of a lecture Chomsky gave at the
University of Toledo, Ohio in March. In the lecture, Chomsky said the
Turkish government had "launched a major war in the Southeast against
the Kurdish population," and described the conflict as "one of the
most severe human rights atrocities of the 1990s."

Chomsky said the lecture was based on material from "the leading
human rights organizations ... the most respected standard
scholarship, and official U.S. government documents."

In an indictment issued last week, Istanbul's State Security Court
said these and other passages in the book constituted "propaganda
against the indivisible unity of the nation."

No charges have been filed against Chomsky himself.

Turkey fought a 15-year war against Kurdish rebels demanding autonomy
in the southeast. The conflict has eased since the Kurdistan Workers'
Party, or PKK, announced a unilateral cease-fire in 1999, but the
government rejected the cease-fire and sporadic fighting continues.

About 37,000 people, mostly Kurdish rebels and civilians, have been
killed as a result of the fighting since 1984.

Dozens of Turkish writers and intellectuals have been jailed under
strict laws that forbid criticism of the state's conduct of the war.

 
=================================================================
  NY Transfer News Collective   *   A Service of Blythe Systems 
           Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us          
              339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012             
  http://www.blythe.org                  e-mail: nyt@blythe.org 
=================================================================
 
nytmed-01.10.02-06:26:58-12619