Penal Code 301

I had just made myself a cup of tea, tuned into election coverage, and typed in alizahrose.blogspot.com as I formulated a new post. Instead of my blog, I got a white page with sharp red font stating this message in Turkish and English.

“Access to this web site has been suspended in accordance with decision no: 2008/2761 of T.R. Diyarbakır 1st Criminal Court of Peace.”

This same message appears when I try to access youtube, imeem, and many other sites that have been shut down in Turkey due to content deemed inappropriate or offensive by the government. My mind reeled. Had I inadvertently offended the Turkish Repubic? I mentally scanned my blog posts. Was it because I once wrote that Turks don’t know how to make a decent burrito or spicy tuna roll? Or that one post that maligned Turkish men on the metro for their incessant staring? Or did I write something far more offensive embedded in a benign travel narrative or an anecdote of culture clash? Over the past year, I have written about walking across the boarder from Northern to Southern Cyprus, internationalism, and women who were required to remove their hijab during university courses. Controversal, perhaps, but I had done so in a tasteful way, lauding these experiences as personal eye openers, not as politcal indictments of any nation (except perhaps my own). Had I been too acerbic, too liberal, too (gasp) culturally insensitive? Was I the Palin of the blogosphere, compleley unware of my lack of awareness?

If anything were to be considered offensive about my blog, I would think it would be my occasional ruminations about love or odes to Madonna, not the posts that serve as a way of filtering and anaylzing new information and perspectives incongruent with my own, a means of tracing the trajectory of my experience abroad, a forum to dispel all the rumors and miscoceptions about Turkey, a medium through which I can reach an approximate truth in the moral and social relativity of lived experience, and, in doing so, recognize that my worldview is not all-encompassing and what I hold to be unequivocably true is not absolute. Or maybe my blog is just a place to talk about myself.

As it turns out, my blog was not specifically censored. The entire operation was kaput. No blogger.com, no blogspot.com, no googling specific blogs and and clicking on the link. When I googled “blogger.com shutdown in Turkey” I discovered the potential problem: many blogs mentioned the most controversial article in the Turkish penal code. Needless to say, I was unable to follow the links to read more.

According to Article 301 of the Turkish penal code, it is illegal to insult Turkey, be it ethnicity or government institutions. This article has played into my life in a very oblique way, if at all. I am strongly advised not to mention anything controversial that could potentially be misconstrued as an insult to Turkey: the Kurdish (people who rightfully deserve a homeland or terrorist usurpers), the Armenian (massacre or genocide) the Northern Cyprus (Turkish occupation or Turkish Republic of) In fact, the most directly incendiary offense to date has been the shutdown of youtube, the easiest place to access replays of Saturday Night Live.

I guess this brand of censorship is difficult to grasp, coming from a a country where insulting goverment institutions is practically a national pasttime, where criticism of and rebellion against the systems of domination that manufacture notions of national identity (albeit in a socially sanctioned way that reinforces the status quo) is practically a rite of passage in certain sectors of society. While I may think the censoring of blogspot is absolutely ludicris, no longer do I privlege my outlook above the one that direct affects me, where I stand. There are other things - values, history, fears, and goals - that make such censorship,while no less ridiculous, slightly more understandable. Cleary, I know all about proxy servers and how to bypass regulations. I know a few things about Turkey, maybe even the world, but at times like these I feel I know nothing at all.