Turkey declares publishing Chomsky is terrorism from Counterpunch:
- Scarcely two months after the European Union praised Turkey for passing new laws protecting freedom of expression, the authorities in Ankara are using anti -terrorism legislation to prosecute Mr Chomsky’s Turkish publisher. …
Mr Chomsky plans to visit the Turkish city of Diyarbakir to meet Kurdish “activists” and it will be a test of Turkey’s freedoms to see if he is allowed to visit the area.
In one of his essays, originally a university lecture, he says that “the Kurds have been miserably oppressed throughout the whole history of the modern Turkish state … In 1984, the Turkish government launched a major war in the south-east against the Kurdish population … The end result was pretty awesome: tens of thousands of people killed, two to three million refugees, massive ethnic cleansing with some 3,500 villages destroyed.”
This, according to the Turks, constitutes an incitement to violence. Mr Chomsky has been suitably outraged, regarding the trial as part of a much broader wave of repression directed against Kurds appealing for greater use of the Kurdish language. Bekir Rayif Aldemyr, Turkey’s chief prosecutor, claims that the Chomsky essay “propagates separatism”.
Of course, Turkey is one of the United States’s biggest allies. The US government has had a long history of turning a blind eye to repression around the world. All the rhetoric about supporting freedom and democracy is hot air.