ISTANBUL Turkey
As punk rock goes, a song bemoaning a high school exam
hardly sounds like the stuff of anarchy. But in Turkey
it can land you in court, as an Istanbul
rock band has discovered.
All the song does is lash out against Turkey’s
equivalent of the SAT, the exam that all
Turkish high-schoolers must pass to have a shot at getting into college.
High-schoolers the world over may sympathize, but to Turkish prosecutors it’s
an insult to the state and its employees.
The troubles besetting the five-man group called
“Deli,” or “Crazy,” as they head to trial Thursday are
typical of the extremes endured by a country historically torn between cultures
Islam and secularism, Europe and Asia, democracy and military dictatorship, and
a reverence for institutions of state that frequently collides with basic civil
liberties.
The song is several years old and may have gone unnoticed
were this not the Internet age. It came to prosecutors’ notice only after a
teenager lip-synched the song and posted it on youtube.com last year for the
whole world to see.
Now the musicians, along with their manager and a former
band member, will go on trial on July 19 in the Turkish capital, Ankara.
If convicted, they face up to 18 months in jail, although they could get off
with a fine or a warning.
Turkey,
which seeks European Union membership, retains strict limits on expression.
Several intellectuals, notably Nobel Prize winning author Orhan Pamuk and
Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, were prosecuted on charges of “insulting
Turkishness” for comments on mass killings of Armenians a century ago.
Dink was subsequently assassinated and 14 suspects are on trial.
