As we all know, Turkey's most famous novelist, Orhan Pamuk, is on trial for saying "one million Armenians were killed in Turkey." Almost every newspaper in the world has written on Pamuk's trial, yet Pamuk is not alone in his country. There is a more dramatic case, which I want to mention here. The person in this case is not a writer, let alone a famous one like Pamuk.

The person I am talking about is Erkan Akay, an ordinary Turk who cannot stand the Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide. This person, according to the Turkish BIA News Center, was "sentenced […] to a year in prison" on 14 December 2005 (yet only one or so newspapers reported this). The "crime," indeed, was the same: he "insulted the Turkish identity and the Republic." What reader Akay had dared to say in a letter to a magazine was "Turks massacred the Armenians and committed genocide, [and] the murderers were then presented as heroes," and "the roots of the Republic of Turkey, which is called the New Turkey, stand in past murders, and the state was established on dirty secrets."

Indeed, a brave human. Braver than Pamuk, braver than the rest of the 60 million Turkish citizens.
Brave job, Erkan Akay. Teşekkürler… (thank you in Turkish).