ragards and best wishes to all Chomsky supporters.
lg
th.

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Chomsky protests court case against his Turkish publisher

Januray 2002
Source: The A-Infos News Service http://www.ainfos.ca/

Dateline: ISTANBUL, Turkey -- 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.

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