Ragıp Zarakolu
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ragıp Zarakolu (born Büyükada 1948) is a Turkish publisher who has long faced legal harassment for publishing books on controversial subjects in Turkey, especially on minority and human rights in Turkey. Several books he published on the Armenian Genocide—such as George Jerjian's book History Will Free All of Us/Turkish-Armenian Conciliation and Professor Dora Sakayan's An Armenian Doctor in Turkey: Garabed Hatcherian: My Smyrna Ordeal of 1922—brought new criminal charges in 2005.
In 1968 he began writing for "Ant" and "Yeni Ufuklar" magazines. In 1971 a military junta assumed power in Turkey and convicted Zarakolu of working with an international communist organisation. He was imprisoned for three years. On his release Zarakolu refused to abandon his campaign for freedom of thought, striving for an "attitude of respect for different thoughts and cultures to become widespread in Turkey". Unable to publish certain works within Turkey, Zarakolu turned to the international market, while he circumvented the ban on criticism of Turkey's military regime by turning his attention to abuses of human rights by governments in South America and elsewhere.
The Belge Publishing House, established in Istanbul in 1977 by Zarakolu and his wife Ayse Nur, has been a focus for Turkish censorship laws ever since. Charges brought against the couple—at one point there were over thirty government-brought actions—resulted in imprisonment for both Nur and Zarakolu, the wholesale confiscation and destruction of books and the imposition of heavy fines. In 1995 the Belge Publishing House offices were firebombed by an extremist rightist group, forcing it to be housed in a cellar. Since his wife's death in 2002, Zarakolu continued to face further prosecutions.
