Dear Friends,

Fatih Tas, editor of the Istanbul-based Aram
Publishing Company, has been indicted by a Turkish
prosecutor for publishing a collection of essays by
Noam Chomsky (see Background Information below).
The indictment alleges that the book is "Propaganda
against the indivisible unity of the country,
nation, and State of the Republic of Turkey." His
trial is scheduled to begin on 13 February 2002.

The group stopcensorship.org has posted an Urgent
Action on their website to protest Mr. Tas's
prosecution and to help prevent Fatih Tas from being
imprisoned for exercising his right of free
expression. We urge you to visit the site at:
 http://www.stopcensorship.org On the site,
stopcensorship.org has posted a letter you can sign
in protest against Mr. Tas' prosecution that will be
automatically sent to key Turkish officials
including Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit, Justic
Minister Hikmet Sami Turk and Foreign Minsiter
Ismail Cem.

Sally Eberhardt
Public Relations Officer
Kurdish Human Rights Project (KHRP)
162-168 Regent Street
Suite 319
London W1B 5TG
Tel. +44 207 287 2772
Fax +44 207 734 4927
E-mail:  khrp@khrp.demon.co.uk
www.khrp.org

Prevent the Imprisonment of Fatih Tas - Background
Information

On March 4, 2001, American linguist and political
commentator Noam Chomsky gave a lecture in Toledo,
Ohio entitled "Prospects for Peace in the Middle
East," in which he criticized the US government for
its support of human rights abuses perpetrated by
Turkey against its Kurdish minority. Chomsky's
lecture, the First Annual Maryse Mikhail Lecture
sponsored by the University of Toledo's College of
Arts and Sciences, was attended by approximately
1,200 people and widely covered in local media,
including The Toledo Blade.

In September 2001, Aram Publishing Company, a
Turkish publishing house known for its defense of
Kurdish human rights, published a translated
collection of Chomsky's essays and lectures under
the title "American Interventionism." The
collection included the transcript the Toledo
lecture.

In November 2001, Bekir Rayif Aldemyr, Turkey's
chief anti-terrorism prosecutor, issued an
indictment against Fatih Tas, owner and editor of
Aram Publishing Company, which accuses Tas of
violating Turkish law by publishing "Propaganda
against the indivisible unity of the country,
nation, and State of the Republic of Turkey." The
indictment quotes two passages from the Toledo
lecture: first, Chomsky's description of Turkey's
treatment of the Kurds as "one of the most severe
human rights atrocities of the 1990s," and second,
his remark that the Kurds "have been miserably
oppressed throughout the whole history of the modern
Turkish state but things changed in 1984. In 1984,
the Turkish government launched a major war in the
Southeast against the Kurdish population. . . The
end result was pretty awesome: tens of thousands of
people killed, two or three million refugees,
massive ethnic cleansing with some 3500 villages
destroyed."

Turkey is a party to many agreements protecting
freedom of expression, including the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights and the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Its
decision to prosecute Fatih Tas has elicited
protests from human rights organizations, including
Human Rights Watch, Index on Censorship and
International P.E.N. Chomsky has said he is
"appalled" by the indictment and has called on the
Turkish authorities to withdraw the charges,
describing them as "a very severe attack on the most
elementary human and civil rights." He plans to
attend Fatih Tas' trial, which is scheduled to begin
on 13 February 2002.