Turkey must cease
hunting down Pinar Selek
In : Le Monde, January the 31th, 2013

Michael Burawoy, Pekka Sulkunen, Didier Vrancken…

Like many sociologists around the world, Pinar Selek choose to work about and with those who are oppressed by society. Devoted to the excluded, a committed researcher, a feminist and a pacifist, she has actively dedicated herself to the acknowledgment and rights of people she investigates about (street children, transgender people, women, the Kurds). In July 1998 the Turkish police arrests her and demands the names of some sixty Kurdish militants she has recently interviewed in the context of an historical and oral project addressing the problem of war in Kurdistan. Pinar would not give their names. The reason for this refusal is a simple one. She would not disregard one the fundamental rules of the sociologists’ scientific deontology, which is the anonymity of the people inquired on. In order not to betray the confidence of those who accepted to answer her questions and not to be the one who would put them in danger, she will endure the agony of torture for seven days : beating, electric shocks, suspension hands tied behind the back, and so forth.
The prosecutor of the State Security Court then accuses her of being a member of the PKK and, a few weeks later, of being responsible for a bombing that never occured, an explosion in the spice market of Istanbul, which was caused, on July 19th, 1998, by a gas leak, as experts found very early. It was no issue for the Turkish justice, who maintained their charge and harassed Pinar Selek for fifteen years. Released in 2000 after two and a half years in jail, Pinar is acquitted in 2006, 2008 and 2011. But her proved innocence is readily contested by the Turkish authorities. The prosecutor – who conducts proceedings in behalf of the State –, appeals to each of the acquittals.
One would think the acme of this judicial harassment was reached on November 22, 2012. The 12th Criminal Court of Istanbul, who had acquitted Pinar three times, quashed this very day its own judgment of February 9, 2011, for procedural error. This was an incomprehensible reversal (even though the titular President of the Court was not sitting, being on sick leave…). Above all, it was an unfounded decision and an illegal one since the 12th Criminal Court thus substituted themselves for the Supreme Court. This as well was thought irrelevant by the Turkish judiciary. At the following hearing of December 13th, the very same charges were brought against Pinar Selek and the same indictment called for : life sentence – for a bombing that never existed.
Much was then expected from the hearing taking place this Thursday, January the 24th, which might have been the last chapter of a persecution lasting for fifteen years. Were expected the return to compliance with criminal procedure, the return to a rightful and impartial trial, the return to the truth of innocence, so far outrageously denied by the Turkish State’s prosecutors, the return to a normal life for Pinar, next to her kin by the Bosphorus. But the Court decided otherwise: by two votes against one (the titular President, detained in November, due to sickness, and sitting again), they sentenced Pinar Selek to life imprisonment with thirty-six years of unconditional detention, and issued an arrest warrant against her. Actually, since there can be no doubt that France – where Pinar is living – will protect her, the researcher is doomed to exile and perpetually at risk to be caught again by an arbitrary and violent system.
Pinar Selek is not the only one to have dearly paid the will to understand the workings of exclusion of those referred to as “minorities” inside the Turkish society, the will to make known the situation of these people, and her commitment to stay by their side. Innumerable researchers, journalists, lawyers, writers have been intimidated and prosecuted on account for similar circumstances and dozens languish in jail. Her case is nevertheless emblematic and could be sociologically analyzed. Within the Turkish State a powerful group exerting strong pressure on the judicial system – conservative Kemalists and ultranationalists timely reconciled – stubbornly condemn Pinar’s alleged original offence: to be a young Turkish woman, furthermore from a well-off family, scientifically and independently interested in the condition of the outcast, the most stigmatized sexual minorities, and in the Kurdish issue.
But there is a time when distance and objectivity, continuously necessary, will not suffice anymore. Pinar’s colleagues at Strasburg’s University, sociologists in France, Europe and round the world as well as the international scientific community will not accept Pinar Selek to be convicted for the crime of sociology. Therefore do we call for the constitution in Universities and Research Centers of Pinar Selek’s Committees for the freedom of research, in order to obtain from Turkey that they put an end to this judicial masquerade and clearly establish, as their justice has already done so three times, the innocence of this researcher. This is a fight for Pinar, a fight for the freedom of research warranted by article 19 of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Humankind.

Michael Burawoy, President of the International Sociology Association (AIS/ISA) ; Pekka Sulkunen, President of the European Sociologists Association (ESA) ; Didier Vrancken, President of the International Association of French speaking Sociologists (AISLF) ; Didier Demazière, President of the of the French Sociology Association and the Group of AFS Executive Committee ; Laurent Willemez, President of the Higher Education Sociologists Association (ASES) ; Olivier Martin, President of the Sociology and Demography Section of the National Council of Universities (CNU, France) ; Philippe Coulangeon, President of the Sociology and Law Sciences Section of the CNRS (France) ; Christophe Jaffrelot, President of the Politics, Power, Organization Section of the CNRS (CNRS) ; Michel Wieviorka, administrator of the Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme (FMSH) and former President of the International Association of Sociology (ATS/ISA 2006-2010) ; the Members of the Support Committee to Pinar Selek at Strasburg University, France.