KeghartRagip Zarakolu and Büşra Ersanli
I’ve written about the courageous Turkish writer, publisher and academic Ragip Zarakolu at various drnes in these pages, most recently in May 2010.
Zarakolu is renowned for publishing books that arc considered controversial in Turkey. He was first detained in 1971, accused of involvement with a communist organisation and sentenced to three years in prison after refusing to abandon a campaign advocating freedom of expression and ‘respect for different thoughts and cultures in Turkey’. Between 1971 and 1991, Zarakolu was banned from travelling outside Turkey. He co-founded a publishing house with his wife in 1977, but found that his own writings and those he tried to publish were repeatedly banned. In recent vears he has been judiciallv harassed for translating books from Armenian and Greek into Turkish and for publishing books by political prisoners.
Ragip Zarakolu and Büşra Ersanli
I’ve written about the courageous Turkish writer, publisher and academic Ragip Zarakolu at various drnes in these pages, most recently in May 2010.
Zarakolu is renowned for publishing books that arc considered controversial in Turkey. He was first detained in 1971, accused of involvement with a communist organisation and sentenced to three years in prison after refusing to abandon a campaign advocating freedom of expression and ‘respect for different thoughts and cultures in Turkey’. Between 1971 and 1991, Zarakolu was banned from travelling outside Turkey. He co-founded a publishing house with his wife in 1977, but found that his own writings and those he tried to publish were repeatedly banned. In recent vears he has been judiciallv harassed for translating books from Armenian and Greek into Turkish and for publishing books by political prisoners.
On 28 October 2031, Zarakolu and Büşra Ersanli, a professor based at Marmara University’s faculty of Political Science and International Relations in Istanbul, were detained as part of this crackdown. Ersanli is an expert on constitutional law and at the time of her arrest she was working with the BDP’s Constitutional Commission.
In the davs running up to his arrest, Zarakolu had been campaigning for the release of his son, Deniz Zarakolu, who had been imprisoned three weeks earlier on 7 October, also in the KCK operation. Deniz is a PhD student of political thought and has translated various academic works including Thomas Hobbes’s De Cive.
On 1 November, Zarakolu and Ersanli were formally charged with ‘membership of an illegal organisation’ under Turkey’s anti-terror law. The Turkish news website Bianet.org reported that during their hearing, hundreds of people gathered outside the Istanbul courthouse in protest, holding copies of Ersanli’s book Peace and History and chanting slogans demanding their release.
The following day, Zarakolu released an open letter from prison stating:
The police forces that searched my home found nothing more than what you would normally find in a writer’s home and confiscated these items as ‘evidence’.
I believe that it is time to show a collective opposition to this wave of arrests, winch has become a campaign of mass lynching, and that all moves by the auThorities that go against the law and principles of due legal process must now cease.
Appeals to be addressed to:
His Excellency Mr Ahmet Ünal Çeviköz
Turkish Embassy
43 Belgrave Square
London
SW1X8PA
Fax: 020 7393 0066
Keghart
Keghart