Dateline: ISTANBUL, Turkey Noam Chomsky, the American linguist and political dissident, has attacked a court's decision to prosecute his Turkish publisher over a book that slams Turkey's human rights record.

In a letter to Istanbul-based Aram Publishing, Chomsky expressed sympathy with the firm's director Fatih Tas, who faces a one-year jail sentence if convicted on charges of conducting propaganda against the state. The trial is due to begin in February.


The charges are "a very severe attack on the most elementary human and civil rights," wrote Chomsky, a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


Aram earlier this year published "American Interventionism," a collection of Chomsky's essays and lectures translated into Turkish.


The book includes a translation of a lecture Chomsky gave at the University of Toledo, Ohio in March. In the lecture, Chomsky said the Turkish government had "launched a major war in the Southeast against the Kurdish population," and described the conflict as "one of the most severe human rights atrocities of the 1990s."


Chomsky said the lecture was based on material from "the leading human rights organizations ... the most respected standard scholarship, and official U.S. government documents."


In an indictment issued last week, Istanbul's State Security Courtsaid these and other passages in the book constituted "propaganda against the indivisible unity of the nation."


No charges have been filed against Chomsky himself.


Turkey fought a 15-year war against Kurdish rebels demanding
autonomy in the southeast. The conflict has eased since the
Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, announced a unilateral cease-fire in 1999, but the government rejected the cease-fire and sporadic fighting continues.


About 37,000 people, mostly Kurdish rebels and civilians, have been killed as a result of the fighting since 1984.


Dozens of Turkish writers and intellectuals have been jailed under strict laws that forbid criticism of the state's conduct of the war.