Not quite free speech in Turkey

Today’s New York Times has an article predicting that Turkey will introduce changes to a law known as Article 301, which forbids publicly insulting Turkey and ‘Turkishness’, among other things. These restrictions on free speech constitute one of the most significant barriers to Turkey’s acceptance, in general, by the community of nations as a modern enlightened country, and in particular to its chances of getting accepted by the European Union. Several high-profile cases involving Article 301 have brought international attention to focus on Turkey, most memorably the prosecution of the Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk, who had mentioned in the Swiss Das Magazin that ‘thirty thousand Kurds, and a million Armenians, were killed in these lands, and nobody dares to talk about it’.

But the alterations that the government appears ready to make to Article 301 only go so far, the New York Times reports. Given the conservatism and nationalistic pride of many modern Turks, the government will not abolish the law; they will only ‘weaken’ it to try to reduce frivolous prosecutions under it. Furthermore—and possibly more importantly—the whole corpus of laws restricting free speech are spread over the legal code, and some of them are not even part of it. Liberals in Turkey apparently wanted the government to take some action to clean up this confusing legal patchwork, but the government won’t go there.

As I have noted previously, a nation cannot truly be called a democracy if it restricts the free speech of its citizens. If Turkey has any aspirations to being known as a democracy, in any meaningful sense of the word, it will have to give up these insulting and xenophobic restrictions on questioning the official history of the state. Let’s hope that this weakening of Article 301 is only the first step in a process leading to true freedom of speech in Turkey.