ISTANBUL, Turkey (AP) - A Turkish court on Wednesday cleared the publisher of a book by American linguist Noam Chomsky that criticizes Turkey's human rights record and treatment of its Kurdish minority.
At a hearing attended by Chomsky, prosecutors accepted the defense argument that Fatih Tas, director of Istanbul-based Aram Publishing, had not spread separatist propaganda, a charge often leveled at writers who criticize Turkey's treatment of its estimated 12 million Kurds. Tas had faced a one-year jail sentence.
Prosecutor Bekif Rayir Aldemir said he "understood that the book did not seek to divide the Turkish nation" and accepted defense lawyers' demand for an acquittal.
"The prosecutor clearly made the right decision," Chomsky, a political activist, said after the trial. "I hope that it will be a step toward establishing the freedom of speech in Turkey that we all want to see."
Aram last year published "American Interventionism," a Turkish translation of a collection of essays and lectures by Chomsky, a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (news - web sites).
The book includes a translation of a lecture Chomsky gave at the University of Toledo, Ohio, in March, in which he 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."
Tas said he believed that Chomsky's presence at the hearing had helped him escape a jail sentence.
"If Chomsky hadn't been here...we wouldn't have expected such a verdict," he said.
No charges were filed against Chomsky himself. Lawyers for the defense had requested that he be included in the case as a co-defendant, but the prosecution declined to charge him.
Chomsky said before the hearing that Americans had a responsibility to monitor and protest human rights abuses in Turkey, a close U.S. ally.
Turkey fought a 15-year war against Kurdish rebels demanding autonomy in the southeast. 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 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.
Earlier this month Turkey's parliament passed reforms to allow wider freedom of expression to boost the country's bid to join the European Union (news - web sites). The recent reforms probably didn't influence Wednesday's verdict, lawyers said.
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