Censorstinople

Thanks to the internet, my knowledge of Turkish is expanding in ways and directions I never imagined. Yesterday, for example, trying to log onto Blogstantinople, I found the following banner splashed across my screen, in unimaginative 24-case crimson-red font:

Bu siteye erişim mahkeme kararıyla engellenmiştir

Just so you know exactly how far I’ve progressed in my Turkish, let me point out that I managed to get through the first two words of the message – “this” and “website” – without even having to reach for a dictionary. No kidding. (In related news, I recently astounded my language teacher, a full month into my beginner’s course, by putting together a whole sentence. The fact that it amounted to nothing more and nothing less than, “There is a dish made from pieces of dry bread and broth inside my pants” is, as far as I’m concerned, irrelevant).

Anyway... Seeing as how the words which followed “this” and “website” turned out to mean “vermicelli”, “court”, “decision” and “to hinder”, I knew I had a sizeable problem on my hands. Either: (a) Blogger.com had decided to hinder a court decision on vermicelli; or (b) that my dictionary was even crappier than I suspected.

To the relief of vermicelli worldwide, the answer was (b). The sentence, after further review, added up to:

“Access to this site has been denied by court order”

As the Ottomans used to say – Shit.

A court in Diyarbakir, the small writing beneath the red banner went on to reveal, had decided to cut off access to Blogger all across Turkey. The culprit, apparently, was Digiturk, a TV company that owns the rights to live broadcasts of football games. As Bianet reported, Digiturk had asked Blogger to take down several posts containing links to pirated transmissions of the games. Blogger failed to respond, Digiturk took the case to court and – hokus pokus, now you see it, now you don't – managed to have access to the website suspended altogether.

Had this been the first time something like this has happened, you could try to pin the blame on an incompetent judiciary or flawed intellectual property legislation. But it wasn’t the first time. It was, to be precise, the 1112th time. And the blame lies not with laws on intellectual property, but with Turkish restrictions on free speech.

1112 is the number of websites that have been banned in Turkey just this year. Some of these include porn and gaming sites, shut down on account of “being harmful to children”, and “encouraging gambling or prostitution”. Draconian as it might sound, a decision to shut down a website on bestiality might be defensible on moral grounds – arguably speaking. What isn't, by any stretch of the imagination, is the ban on YouTube.

Earlier this year, a group of “Greek nationalists” (in all likelihood, a few teenage nitwits with too much time on their hands) posted a few videos on YouTube, in which they depicted Ataturk, the revered founder of modern Turkey, as – gasp – a homosexual.

Traveler's tip #1. Question the sexuality of your average Turkish male, and you are assured of the ass-kicking of your life.

Traveler's tip #2. Question the sexuality of the founder of the Republic, the Father of All Turks, the best, brightest, bravest and most handsome man to ever walk the dominions of Rumelia and Anatolia, and you are assured of 73 million ass-kickings, to be administered hourly till the sore and miserable end of your life.

Needless to say, Turks were outraged. Given local sensitivities, that was to be expected. Outrage is one thing, though. An officially sanctioned blanket assault on free speech – spurred by nationalist paranoia – is quite another. Rather than negotiating the removal of the material, or simply putting up with it, the Turkish judiciary decided to ban access to YouTube altogether.

Embarrassingly for the authorities, the YouTube ban was to prove better than any court case, prison sentence or political assassination in exposing what many Turkish journalists, writers and politicians had been saying all along: the fact that in Turkey free speech often takes a back seat to national pride.

A few nights ago Tansu, ferocious smoker, ferocious drinker and ferocious critic of the ruling AKP party, complained to me about the outside world’s (which was a nice way of saying, my own) “indulgent” attitude towards the Turkish government. While they play up the threat of nationalism and Kemalism to Turkish democracy, she said, Western liberals – desperate as they are to showcase Turkey as a role model for the Middle East – seem totally impervious to the country’s “creeping Islamization”, particularly under the AKP.

When I questioned the creeping Islamization theory – a rallying cry for Turkish secularists – Tansu began to put forth about the Sivas massacre. (Fifteen years ago in Sivas a mob of radical Islamists, outraged that atheist writer Aziz Nesin had arrived in town for a cultural festival, set fire to his hotel. Thirty seven people were burned alive.) “Did you know that the police just stood by?” Tansu asked. I didn’t. “Did you know that some of them actually helped beat up Nesin when he escaped the fire?” No. “Or that local officials helped incite the mob?” Again, all this was news to me.

Still, I tried to argue, the Sivas massacre – coming as it did a full decade before the AKP’s rise to power – was less a symptom of Turkey’s Islamisation than the country’s general incapacity to accommodate a few nonconformist voices.

For all its faults, for all its tensions between conservative Muslims, Islamists, liberals and secularists, for all its problems with military involvement in politics, Turkey is a functional democracy. What gives it a bad name, and understandably so, is the existence of entire areas of political discourse that are not only taboo, but also effectively prohibited by law. First, Kurdish nationhood. Second, the killings of Armenians during the First World War. Third, criticism of Ataturk. And fourth, qualms about the secular nature of the Republic. Challenging the official line on any of these issues – referring to the Armenians' fate as genocide, for example, as opposed to “the alleged genocide” or the “so-called genocide”, as the Turkish press dubs it – invites not only ostracism, not only recrimination, but also a jail term of up to three years… for the crime of “denigrating Turkishness”.

On this much, then, I could agree with Tansu: that if I were to walk around Fatih, a conservative neighborhood in Istanbul, wearing a “God is dead” T-shirt, I’d probably get my ribs kicked in by a crowd of angry Islamists. But that’s just half the story. Because if I were to yell, “A homeland for the Kurds!” in the heart of downtown, I’d probably get my ribs kicked in by a cop – and a few pedestrians. And if I stood opposite the Dolmabahce Palace with a sign saying, “Own up to the Armenian genocide”, it’d be a matter of seconds before I received an equally generous whooping from a gang of nationalists. And so forth.

The problem, then, doesn’t come down to “Islamization” or Islam as such. The problem comes down to the power of taboos – ones that the state is either unable to confront or, in the worst case, eager to uphold. As long as continues to do so, the prospect of a truly pluralist Turkey will remain out of reach.

Me? For the time being, I’ll leave it to someone more qualified (and gutsier) to push the envelope on issues like atheism, the Kurds and the Armenians. I’m an outsider for now, and will remain one for some time to come. If there’s anything at all I can ever add to the free speech debate in Turkey, it’ll have to wait.

Unless, that is, kindly asking the Turkish authorities not to f-ck with my blog again already counts as a legitimate contribution.