Turkish fury as Erdogan, champion of free speech, sues over cartoon

[emad]

By Susan Frazer in Ankara
03 March 2005


Turkey's Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has presented himself in the past as a champion of free speech, is facing an embarrassing storm of criticism for suing a political cartoonist who poked fun at him.

Mr Erdogan, once imprisoned for reciting a poem that was deemed to be anti-state, took Musa Kart and his newspaper, Cumhuriyet, to court after he was portrayed as a cat entangled in a ball of wool.

He also launched a lawsuit against a small, local newspaper, Sakarya, which reprinted the cartoon. The result has been an untimely debate about freedom of expression in Turkey, just as Mr Erdogan is desperately trying to accelerate the timetable of the country's accession to the EU.

A court in Ankara last week found Kart guilty of "publicly humiliating the Prime Minister" and fined him 5,000 lira (£2,000). Another court, however, threw out the case against Sakarya - and had a sharp word of advice for Mr Erdogan.

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