"Free speech on trial in Turkey" (poet, author Pamuk)

I just finished the recent novel by Pamuk entitled "Snow", about a Turkish poet (as Pamuk is) who returns from political exile from Germany (where Pamuk lives) and, as he is stuck in a small turkish backwater due to a snowstorm, tries to keep from being killed by various political factions. It's a farce like PG Wodehouse, except that instead of misunderstandings causing engagements by accident or getting Bertie in trouble with Great-Aunt Agatha, people get bullets in the brain and tortured by the secret police.
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http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1216/p06s02-woeu.html
The case of writer Orhan Pamuk is being watched as a test of political reforms.

By Scott Peterson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

ISTANBUL, TURKEY – Like one of his own characters, trapped between liberal yearnings and the reality of an unforgiving state, Turkey's most celebrated novelist, Orhan Pamuk, is slated to appear in court Friday to face charges of "insulting Turkish identity."
The high-profile free speech trial pits the aims of European-driven reform in Turkey - which began EU membership talks last October - against a fiercely nationalistic tradition that permits little challenge. Mr. Pamuk's trial is one of more than 65 other free speech cases now under way in Turkey, which are being closely watched by European observers, as a test of the recent reforms.


"This is a tug of war in Turkey now, between those who favor democratic and EU values, those who are afraid of such change - the hard-core nationalists who are willing to do anything to stop that trend," says Haluk Sahin, a journalism professor at Bilgi University and columnist for Radikal newspaper, who is also facing trial in February under the same statute.
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Pamuk did not use the word "genocide," which is officially rejected here in favor of an "internecine fighting" formulation to explain the Armenian deaths 90 years ago. Western historians, however, often consider the events in Anatolia during the last years of the Ottoman Empire to be the first genocide of the 20th century
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