Hakan Aydin

George Orwell once said: ‘There is no such thing as a genuinely nonpolitical literature.”

Many people around the world claim that such is the case for Pamuk’s Nobel Prize, first Nobel Prize awarded to a Turk. Pamuk has been a candidate for Nobel prize since 2002 for his novels, but unfortunately, he is best known for being charged in Turkey for his aggressive stance on issues such as the Armenian claims of genocide: “30000 Kurds and 1 million Armenians were killed in this country and no one dares to talk about it except me”.

The law that triggers these charges is not effectively enforced in Turkey for a long time. (This is similar to the law on death penalty in Turkey; even though there was a law that allowed it, there was a de facto moratorium on death penalty as the last execution took place in 1984. The death penalty was completely removed from law in May 2004 Turkey). The charges against Pamuk were dropped eventually without any punishment.

It would be naive to think that Pamuk’s Nobel Prize isn’t politically motivated, as Pamuk is now the third consecutive literature laureate with heavy political baggage. Last year’s winner, British playwright Harold Pinter, is equally well known for his strident leftist politics. The 2004 honoree, Elfriede Jelinek, is a fierce critic of Austria’s conservative establishment.

The prize announcement came on the same day that the French parliament embarrassed themselves by voting to make denial of the Armenian genocide a criminal offence, a decision that infuriated many Turks and other EU nations. The culture whose ancestors refined the novel and defined free speech has now become the ‘disperser of de facto truth’.