Turkish Author, Editor Are Fined

An Istanbul court Thursday fined an author and a journalist for insulting the Turkish state, the latest convictions under a law that European officials say limits freedom of expression and must be changed.

Turkey’s government has indicated that it has no plans to change the law, under which the country’s most famous novelist, Orhan Pamuk, also has been charged.

“Freedoms are not limitless,” Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in an interview broadcast live on CNN-Turk television Wednesday evening.

Zulkuf Kisanak, author of “Lost Villages,” was sentenced to five months in prison, which was immediately converted to a $2,200 fine. Aziz Ozer, editor of the far-left monthly Yeni Dunya Icin Cagri, received a 10-month prison term, which the judge later switched to a $4,400 fine.

Both men were fined under a law that makes it a crime to insult the Turkish republic, “Turkishness” or state institutions. The law has soured relations with the European Union, which insists that Turkey -- which began EU membership negotiations in October -- do more to protect freedom of expression.

Novelist Pamuk was charged with insulting the country after a February interview with a Swiss newspaper in which he said, “30,000 Kurds and 1 million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares to talk about it.”

Kisanak’s book tells the story of 14 Kurdish villages that were forcibly evacuated by the Turkish military in the early 1990s, during the height of clashes with Kurdish rebels seeking autonomy. Human rights groups say Turkish security forces burned thousands of Kurdish villages as part of a strategy to clear the countryside and deny the guerrillas local support.

Ozer was sentenced for two articles that appeared in his magazine -- “80 Years of the Turkish Republic, 80 Years of Fascism” and “No to a Partnership of Invasion in Iraq.”