Mr. Türk is the head of the Democratic Society Party (DTP), and the offense for which he was sentenced this week to six months in prison was to refer to the convicted leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), Abdullah Öcalan, as Sayın Öcalan. “Sayın” means “esteemed” but in the sense of “esquire” or even “mister.” An MP addresses the speaker of the house as Sayın Speaker. Mr. Türk committed this willful act of courtesy in a speech January 2006 in the municipal theater in Diyarbakır. “In the current situation where we are trying to silence the sound of weapons once and for all, aggravating Sayın Öcalan’s isolation is only deepening popular anxieties.”This is an opinion that others might not share, but at the risk of contravening Article 288, which makes it an offense to criticize the court in hopes of prejudicing its decision (Mr. Türk will no doubt take his verdict to appeal) or even contravening good old 301 again (which also protects the reputation of the judiciary), it doesn’t strike me as conducive to the public good to put a man into prison for calling for restraint in order to prevent bloodshed.
The court in the wording of its judgment responded to the potential criticism of the harshness of its verdict by stressing that Türk had compounded his offense by repeating the expression “sayın” more than once in his speech and that he was under an obligation as the leader of a political party to weigh his words more carefully than most. This, of course, would be more credible were it not for the fact that the Turkish Parliament still maintains immunity from prosecution for elected MPs.
The rights and wrongs of this much-abused legal safe haven is often discussed, but clearly one justification for the practice is that it allows elected officials to say exactly what they want. The assumption is that they should be accountable to their electorate and not the courts.
The judges’ words would carry more conviction as well were this prosecution an isolated event. According to newspaper reports, members of Mr. Türk’s party are fighting what would appear to be a legal vendetta. He is himself, along with DTP co-founder Aysel Tuğluk, appealing another one-and-a-half-year prison sentence for a statement issued to a DTP Woman’s League in Yalova, outside Istanbul on the occasion of International Women’s Day. As of Jan. 30, some 19 members of his party have been placed under arrest, a further 59 are in custody pending the prosecutor’s decision and 18 face legal proceedings in court.
There is little doubt that the DTP draws its support from an ethnic Kurdish base and that the underlying message it gives is one of Kurdish nationalism. This was true of the political parties of which it is the direct successor, including the Democrat Party (DEP), four of whose members, including Leyla Zana, languished in jail for nine years. Mr. Türk was one of those initially convicted of having links to the armed separatist PKK but then was released on appeal.
At the time, many observers knocked their heads against the wall in the frustration of seeing Turkey drive Kurdish nationalism underground rather than welcome it into the democratic arena. They argued it was far cleverer to make the DEP accountable for their views rather than give them the painful luxury of being persecuted. They accurately predicted that Turkey would find itself embarrassed in the international arena for selectively withdrawing the parliamentary immunity of the DEP MPs and locking them up for long years in jail even though they had committed no act of violence or financial impropriety but had merely spoken out.
It is hard not to think what was true then is any less convincing now.
