Turkey’s Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk has said that the situation in his country “is going from bad to worse and even towards terrible” following the government’s attempts to block access to Twitter, as a phalanx of major writers, from Zadie Smith to Günter Grass, line up to state their “grave concern” about “the freedom of words” in Turkey today.
The authors, who also include Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Grass and Pamuk’s fellow Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek, have added their names to a joint letter from PEN Internationaland English PEN which calls last week’s ban on Twitter “an unacceptable violation of the right to freedom of speech”. The Turkish governmentrestricted access to the micro-blogging website, and prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan indicated the ban could be extended further, saying he would not “leave this nation at the mercy of YouTube and Facebook” and pledging to “take the necessary steps in the strongest way”.
The Turkish author Elif Shafak, who was also tried for “insulting Turkishness” following the publication of her novel The Bastard of Istanbul, is one of the authors to sign the letter. “Turkey’s rulers need to understand that democracy is not solely about getting a majority of votes in the ballot box. Far beyond that, democracy is a culture of inclusiveness, openness, human rights and freedom of speech, for each and every one, regardless of whichever party they might have voted for. It is the realisation of the very core of democracy that has been sorely lacking in Turkey today,” said Shafak, whose trial – based on words uttered by fictional characters in her novel – went on for a year before charges were dropped, The Guardian informs.
