TURKEY: In a decision widely seen as an attempt to sabotage Turkey's European Union hopes, an Istanbul court yesterday forced a major state university to suspend a three-day conference on the fate of the Ottoman Empire's Armenians, for the second time.
Another university has said it would try to host the event.
Due to start today, the meeting would have been the first in the country's history to question official claims that it was inter-ethnic war, not a deliberate state policy of mass murder, that led to the deaths of up to one million in 1915.
The conference had been planned for this May, but was postponed after Turkey's justice minister accused organisers of "stabbing the country in the back". "If only I had not dispensed with my right to take them to trial," Cemil Cicek added.
Mr Cicek's message was not lost on the judges of Istanbul's 4th Administrative Court.
Late on Thursday they informed Bosporus University the meeting represented a potential breach of the peace and gave organisers 30 days to provide details about participants, speeches and funding, information that has been known for months.
The writ is disingenuous, analysts say, and probably unconstitutional.
Late on Thursday prime minister Tayyip Erdogan angrily described the court's decision as "incompatible with democracy, freedom and modernity."
With Turkey looking likely to start EU accession proceedings on October 3rd, analysts describe the court's involvement as evidence of the depth of opposition to democratisation in bureaucratic and judicial circles.
"It's a copybook example of Turkey's old political ideology", said political analyst Dogu Ergil. "Rather than accepting that the state serves citizens, some still think everything citizens do must be permitted by the state."
Nowhere is the mentality that national interests supersede individual freedoms clearer than in attitudes towards history.
Outside the gates of Bosporus University on Friday morning a group opposed to the conference distributed leaflets describing participants as "agents of imperialism . . . working to destroy the country's unity."
"Turkey has the maturity and will to discuss [ 1915] democratically," said Bedri Baykam, opposition deputy and leader of the Patriotic Movement. "Unfortunately, the other side has neither the courage nor the brains." Another protester dismisses conference participants as agents of the Armenian genocide lobby.
It is a claim historian Aykut Kansu fiercely denies. His speech, he points out, was due to be about Turks who saved Armenians.
"History in Turkey is too often seen as a matter of public policy, adhering to ideology rather than free debate," he says. "The taboo on 1915 is just an extreme version of that." He knows all about the political pressures on Turkish universities.
In July he was sacked from his history chair at a well-respected private university for openly questioning near-hagiographical official accounts of Turkey's founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
The conference decision comes less than a month after another court charged Orhan Pamuk, Turkey's best-known novelist, with "slandering Turkey's name."
Pamuk could face up to three years in prison for telling a Swiss newspaper this February that "one million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds" had been killed in Turkey.