And 5816-1 is about this. Sabri +++++++++++++
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/03/13/europe/EU-GEN-Turkey-Free-Speech.php Turkish professor face charges of allegedly insulting the legacy of Turkey's founder The Associated Press Tuesday, March 13, 2007 ANKARA, Turkey: A prosecutor on Tuesday pressed charges against a professor of political science for allegedly insulting the legacy of the revered founder of modern Turkey. Nationalists had already declared Atilla Yayla a traitor and his university has suspended him for daring to criticize Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, whose ideas are still the republic's most sacred principles 68 years after his death. Prosecutor Ahmet Guven on Tuesday filed charges against Yayla for allegedly "insulting the legacy of Ataturk." Yayla could receive up to three years in prison if tried and convicted. No trial date was set yet. But Yayla was expected to stand trial in the coming days, the state-run Anatolia news agency said.. Turkey, which is aspiring to join the European Union, has been roundly condemned for not doing enough to curb extreme nationalist sentiments and to protect freedom of expression. Loved and idolized, portraits of Ataturk hang in all government offices and his statues adorn parks and squares throughout Turkey. Yayla said in his Nov. 18 speech that the era of one-party rule under Ataturk, from 1925 to 1945, was not as progressive as the official ideology would have Turks believe but was "regressive in some respects." He also criticized the statues and pictures of Ataturk, saying Europeans would be baffled to see the portraits of just one man on the walls. The prosecutor said in his indictment that during his speech Yayla insulted Ataturk's legacy by referring to the leader as "this man" and asked for his punishment. The indictment said there has been eight complaints about Yayla, demanding his trial. Ankara's Gazi University was inundated with fax messages accusing Yayla of treason and demanding that he be sacked after the speech, delivered at a panel discussion organized by the youth wing of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Islamic-rooted party in the Aegean port of Izmir. Gazi's chancellor, Kadri Yamac, bowed to the pressure and temporarily removed Yayla from his teaching post pending the outcome of an investigation. Yayla has insisted that he was not insulting Ataturk but questioning his legacy, as well as the rigid way some followers interpret his principles to oppose liberal reforms and impose strict secular laws such as the ban on headscarves at universities. "As an academic, I must be free to think, to search and share findings," Yayla, 50, has said in an interview at the Ankara-based Association for Liberal Thinking, an organization he co-founded in 1994. "If Turkey wants to be a civilized country, academics must be able to criticize and evaluate Ataturk's ideas." But his ordeal shows how Turkish universities, most of them state- controlled, are not always places of free-thinking. Anyone deviating from the set of principles including a strict interpretation of secularism inspired by Ataturk and closely guarded by the military, the bureaucracy and judiciary, is chastised and in some cases, sacked. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Sucker-punch spam with award-winning protection. Try the free Yahoo! Mail Beta. http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/mailbeta/features_spam.html
