The SanityPrompt

This blog represents some small and occasional efforts to add a note of sanity to discussions of politics and policy. This blog best viewed with Internet Explorer @ 1024x768

Saturday, October 22, 2005

Free Trade and Freedom

There has to be at least some minimum standard of democracy involved in joining the EU, eh non Giscard?

Novelist stands by Armenian massacre remarks - Yahoo! News:

"FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk said on Saturday he stood by remarks about the massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Turks and about the deaths of Kurds in Turkey that could land him in jail for three years.

Pamuk goes on trial in December for 'insulting and weakening Turkish identity' after talking about the massacre, a taboo in Turkey. He also said Turkish forces were partly to blame for the deaths of more than 30,000 Kurds in the 1980s and 90s.

'I repeat, I said loud and clear that 1 million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed in Turkey, and I stand by that,' Pamuk told a news conference in Frankfurt, where he is due to receive a major literary award on Sunday.

Turkey's most prominent writer said he had not used the word 'genocide' to describe the mass killings of Armenians in 1915. 'Whether it should be called 'genocide' or 'mass murder'... or something else, has to be decided by experts.'"