ISTANBUL: Not every Kurdish man hauled before a Turkish security court on terrorism charges has a famous American intellectual like Noam Chomsky in his corner demanding to be declared a co-defendant, and dozens of human rights activists and foreign reporters crowded into the courtroom to scrutinize the response.

So when a three-judge panel this week acquitted Fatih Tas, a 22-year-old student and book publisher, on charges that he had published a lecture by Chomsky that threatened “the indivisible unity” of Turkey, Tas said he felt he had definitely dodged a bullet. Temporarily, at least.

“It’s only because Noam Chomsky was here that I was acquitted. I don’t think this was a sincere decision,” said Tas, a third-year journalism student at Istanbul University. “I still have six more trials (for publishing allegedly seditious ideas), and I’m expecting to be punished.”

Wednesday’s case was just the latest of many high-profile freedom of expression cases in Turkey, which over the years has used tough anti-terrorism laws to ban books, plays, movies, speeches, and radio and television broadcasts that it deems threatening to its public security. The laws are specifically aimed at quashing support for Kurdish nationalism, a cause that fuelled a 16-year conflict in southeastern Turkey in which about 30,000 people were killed.

That conflict ended in February 1999, most analysts agree, when the country’s top Kurdish rebel — Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the Kurdish Workers’ Party, or PKK — was captured and ordered his followers to lay down their arms. But despite two years of almost complete calm and a general sense that the military’s fight against the PKK was over, many people here think the terrorist threat remains, and they do no want laws curbing civil liberties removed from the books.

Turks are also bitterly divided over laws that prohibit broadcasting and teaching in the Kurdish language, and teaching the language itself. About 20 per cent of Turkey’s 68 million people are Kurdish, according to the CIA.

Tas, the head of Aram Publishing in Istanbul, was accused of publishing “propaganda against the indivisible unity” of Turkey for publishing a Turkish-language translation of a lecture Chomsky delivered in Toledo, Ohio, in March 2001 that briefly touched on the Kurdish issue. Tas’ indictment specifically cited 11 sentences from Chomsky’s lecture, including one declaring that “In 1984, the Turkish government launched a major war in the Southeast against the Kurdish population.”

Chomsky, a renowned leftist and professor of linguistics at MIT who has gained worldwide fame for his blistering attacks on US foreign policy, showed up at the trial and filed a petition to be named a co-defendant. His request was denied by the court, but his presence at the hearing guaranteed a huge turnout of local and foreign reporters.—Dawn/The Washington Post News Service.