Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends,
Today for the first
time they let me out into the sun.
For the first time
in my life, I am
so very much astonished
that the sky is so far away from
me
that it is so very blue
that it is so very expanding
I stood without moving.
Afterwards, I sat on the earth with awe,
leaning my back against the wall.
In this moment, I neither thought
of the falling of the waves,
nor of dispute,
nor of freedom, nor of my wife.
The earth, the sun and myself…
I feel overjoyed…
This poem was written by Nazim Hikmet who spent decades in various Turkish
prisons. Turkey does not treat its poets decently. On the 19th of January
of this year, the publicist Hrant Dink was shot by a Turkish nationalist,
a seventeen years old stripling pushed forward in well-tried manner by elder
persons.
Hrant Dink was the publisher of the Turkish-Armenian magazine Agos. He was
an Armenian and had been living with threats to his life for quite a while
already. There had been days when he would not leave his house. He was an
Armenian grown up in a children’s home who learned about his family’s
fate only as a grown-up. The genocide of the Armenians is denied in Turkey
up to this very day. And it does not stop there: the victims are even branded
the offenders. The descendants of the few survivors learn in school that their
ancestors had been traitors of their country and had massacred Turks.
Five days prior to being murdered, Hrant Dink was interviewed by the magazine
Stern. The question whether he was not scared he answered by: “Yes,
of course I am scared. If you want to know exactly, fear is my every-day companion.
Did you ever happen to watch a dove? Permanently, it keeps jerking its head,
it jerks upon hearing any loud noise”.
The interviewer charged him with the fact that he could have left the country.
He turned angry: “Don’t you approach me in this manner. This is
the country of my ancestors, here is where my roots are and I am entitled
to die in the land where I was born.”
He did not say: “I am entitled to live in the land where I was born“.
He knew he was going to die and he is not the only author who has been murdered
in the first six months of this year.
The statistical data of the International Writers-in-Prison Committee for the first half year of 2007 |
1st half of 2007 |
|---|---|
| Killed |
29 |
| Killed, investigation not completed yet |
10 |
| Disappeared |
31 |
| Persecuted and arrested (main cases) |
152 |
| Arrested, investigation not completed yet |
58 |
| Legal objections against proceedings or suspicion |
6 |
| Not arrested prior to proceedings or pronouncement
|
142 |
Sentenced to other punishments (no prison sentence) |
53 |
| In hiding |
4 |
| Short-term imprisonment |
66 |
Threatened for their lives |
57 |
| Threatened in other ways |
170 |
| Abducted |
4 |
| Forced into exile, deported, fled |
1 |
| Total number of cases recorded |
781 |
| Releases |
42 |
As proceedings against Chugunov are still pending, his renewed arrest in case of a conviction has to be feared.
Katja Behrens, German Vice President in Charge of Writers in Prison
Charter