Propaganda or Turkey.

[mattd]

   A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
             http://www.ainfos.ca/
  ________________________________________________ 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 Court
said 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.