I refer to a case which has inched its way into the headlines and which has the reedy sound of a referee’s whistle in the current squabble in Turkey over who is a democrat and who is not.Michael Dickinson is a long-time resident of Turkey, political activist and member of a self-declared art movement known as “Stuckism.” Stuckists regularly show up to protest the British Turner Prize awards dressed as clowns. However, Mr. Dickinson’s own form of protest was no laughing matter. In 2006, he designed a poster called “Best in Show” which depicted the Turkish prime minister’s head adorning a dog’s body and being awarded a rosette by George Bush. He was charged under defamation legislation but acquitted. Unrepentant, Mr. Dickenson went on to design another dog poster of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, this time tied to a stars-and-stripes leash. He was briefly detained, tried and again acquitted in 2008. The prosecutor appealed and in 2009 Mr. Dickinson was convicted and received a sentence, commuted to a fine whose amount will be decided by a final hearing in March. The artist has promised to go to prison rather than pay a penalty, but would probably face deportation instead.
If I dwell on this case, it is because it has revived strange memories of my own. Very shortly after starting to write a column for the Sabah newspaper I found my own head stuck to the body of a canine on the cover of a nationalist scandal sheet that dug up media gossip. I confess I even thought of seeking redress in the courts for the accompanying article of half-truths, but after a reality check realized that in my new profession of criticizing others, I would have to learn to suffer a few taunts. Libel laws and laws against defamation provide redress for those without the power to reply -- and certainly not prime ministers.
This is not the first cartoon controversy in which Mr. Erdoğan has been involved. In 2004 he initiated a successful prosecution for criminal libel against Musa Kart, the caricaturist for the Cumhuriyet newspaper. The cartoonist depicted a startlingly life-like Erdoğan head on a kitten’s body. The cat was snarled up in a ball of wool representing the political jumble of the time. Compared to the way certainly British cartoonists depict their own politicians (c.f. Steve Bell in the Guardian), the cartoon was almost complimentary. The prime minister was much criticized at the time for allowing the case to proceed. Commentators were quick to point out that someone who had served time in jail for the public recitation of a poem should be the last person to try to restrict the rights of others to express an opinion. The incident did a good deal of harm to Mr. Erdoğan’s reputation by raising the uncomfortable proposition that simply by fighting against people who oppose democracy does not make you a democrat yourself.
This same sort of discussion has resurfaced with a vengeance in a Turkey trying to digest an almost daily ration of news about plots and coups. Indignation is real and palpable. For years we have assumed that there were people in the armed forces and bureaucracy whose job it was to work out how to bring down the elected government, and it is a strange feeling to now be able to put faces to these suspicions. Yet all these years, too, we have known that Turkey festers at the bottom of so many league tables that measure its democratic credentials -- things like gender equality and freedom of the press. This, too, has raised the prospect that those who demanded space and tolerance for their own views and ways of life might be happy to see authoritarianism persist. As long as this is the case, the determined Mr. Dickinson will retain his power to irritate.
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