Editors,
Having just returned from the 4th International Symposium Against Isolation held in Paris, France, I feel compelled to add my personal footnote to a story you ran last week about an author and journalist who were sentenced to prison and later fined by an Istanbul court for dissing the state (Writers fined for “insulting” Turkey, December 23, 2005). The four-day conference dealt with the imprisonment of political and cultural activists and the increased application of isolation and torture as a means of suppressing legal and democratic rights opposition, particularly in Turkey. I was part of a Canadian delegation of poets (including Elias Letelier, Jorge Etcheverry and Endre Farkas) invited to participate in the struggle of a dedicated group of Turkish people committed to speaking out against such injustices.
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| Bahar Kimyongur, Endre Farkas, Carolyn M. Souaid. Paris 2005 |
Your story mentioned that the writers in question were fined under a law that makes it a crime to “insult the Turkish republic, ‘Turkishness’ or state institutions.” But if these authors are anything like the stout-hearted people I met in Paris, fighting to overturn a barbaric, Draconian prison system, then what is their crime? Trying to improve the human condition?
There is a world of difference between criticizing state institutions and criticizing the culture of a people. The closing night of the symposium, we— the four Canadians— recited our poems about resistance and about the power of the human spirit to an audience of roughly 400 people. We received a standing ovation. And in the heat of that moment up on stage, I thought about how we, in this country, take for granted the rights and freedoms we have guaranteed to us by our own Canadian Charter. I thought about how complicit we are—particularly those of us living in the so-called “free” world— if we don’t find hands-on ways of expressing our solidarity with the people in this world who most need our help. I thought about American author Herman Melville who once said: “We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibres, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.”
Carolyn Marie Souaid, Poet
Montreal, Canada
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This unpublished letter was written in response to a story published in The (Montreal) Gazette on Friday, December 23, 2005, entitled Writers Fined for ‘Insulting’ Turkey, by Suzan Fraser / Associated Press
A Belgian citizen of Turkish origin, Bahar Kimyongür (who appears in the photograph) was sentenced to five years of prison in Gand because of a new “anti-terrorist” law adopted by Belgium in 2003 (in response to new U.S. laws) making it unlawful to express dissenting political views. His lawyer has consistently maintained that Kimyongür has never committed a violent act but is being detained for opposing the war in Iraq and in the Middle East, and for opposing the American “hold” on Turkey. The organization that has been lobbying for Kimyongür's liberation, CLEA, has pointed out that the judgment which sentenced him, rendered on November 7, 2006, was also signed by none other than George W. Bush.
