We the undersigned call upon democrats throughout the world as well as those who care about the future of Turkey and the region in which it exerts a leading role, to protest the vendetta, which the government is waging against its brightest thinkers and writers who may not share their point of view.
 
The background to this letter is the coup attempt on July 15, 2016, which mercifully failed and was quickly subdued. Had the Turkish people themselves not resisted this assault on their institutions, the result would have been years of misery. In the aftermath of that coup, it is understandable that the government would have imposed a temporary state of emergency.  However, the failed coup should not be a pretext for a McCarthy style witch hunt nor should that state of emergency be conducted with scant regard for basic rights, rules of evidence or even common sense.
 
We as writers, academics and defenders of freedom of expression are particularly disturbed to see colleagues we know and respect to being imprisoned under emergency regulations. Journalists like Sahin Alpay, Nazli Ilicak or the novelist Asli Erdogan have been outspoken defenders of democracy and opponents of militarism or tyranny of any sort.
 
We are particularly disturbed to see the prominent novelist Ahmet Altan, and his brother, Mehmet Altan, a writer and distinguished professor of economics, being detained in a dawn raid on September 10, 2016.  The pair stands accused of somehow giving subliminal messages to rally coup supporters on a television panel show broadcast July 14th, the night before the coup-attempt.
 
Ahmet Altan is one of Turkey’s most important writers whose novels appear in translation and sell in the millions. He was also editor in chief for five years of the liberal daily newspaper Taraf. The paper championed the public’s right to know. He has been prosecuted many times over his career –in the 1990s for trying to get a Turkish readership to empathize with the country’s Kurds or more recently for trying to force an apology from the prime minister for the 2011 Roboski massacre in which 34 villagers were bombed. He appeared in court as recently as September 2, charged with handling state secrets based on an indictment that was in large part copy pasted from two entirely different cases.
 
Mehmet Altan is a professor at Istanbul University, a columnist whose numerous books campaigned to rebuild Turkey’s identity not on race or religion but respect for human rights. Like his brother and others now in jail his crime is not for supporting a coup but for the effectiveness of his criticism of the current government whose initial progress in broadening democracy is now jammed in reverse gear.
 
We therefore call upon the turkish government to cease its persecution of prominent writers and to speed the release of Ahmet and Mehmet Altan as well as so many of their colleagues wrongly accused.
 
Daron Acemoglu, professor of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
 
Professor Rosental Calmon Alves, Knight Chair in Journalism & UNESCO Chair in Communication; director, Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, University of Texas at Austin
 
Chloe Aridjis, writer, Mexico / United Kingdom
 
Hans Jürgen Balmes, Editor, S. Fischer Verlage
 
John Berger, writer
 
Breyten Breytenbach, writer, South Africa / France
 
Daphné Breytenbach, Independent journalist, France
 
Peter Carey, writer
 
Catherine Farin, Editor, S. Fischer Verlage
 
Elena Ferrante, writer
 
Sandra Ozzola, publisher, edizioni e/o, Europa editions
 
Sandro Ferri, publisher, edizioni e/o, Europa editions
 
Maureen Freely, Writer; president of English PEN

Professor Anthony T. Grafton, historian, Princeton University
 
Jim Hicks, executive editor of the Massachusetts Review; professor at University of Massachusetts, Amherst
 
Adam Hochschild, journalist, historian
 
A.L. Kennedy, writer
 
Laurens van Krevelen, Writer and publisher, The Netherlands
 
Wolf Lepenies, Professor, Sociology, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin; Freie Universität
 
Mark Lilla, Writer, Professor of Humanities, Columbia University
 
Clementina Liuzzi, literary agent
 
Alberto Manguel, writer, director of the National Library of Argentina
 
Claudia Mattalucci, Professor, Anthropology, University of Milan-Bicocca
 
Hisham Matar, writer
 
Allan Megill, professor of History, University of Virginia
 
Laurent Mignon, associate professor of Turkish; fellow of St Antony’s College, Oriental Institute, University of Oxford
 
Rick Moody, writer
 
Dirk Moses, Professsor, History, University of Sydney
 
Glenn W. Most, Professor of Classics, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa; The University of Chicago, Committee on Social Thought
 
Orhan Pamuk, Nobel laureate in Literature
 
Tim Parks, writer

Daniel Rondeau, writer; former ambassador
 
Professor Philippe Sands QC, University College London and Matrix Chambers

Anya Schiffrin, Director (IMAC) at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University
 
Eugene Schoulgin, vice president, PEN International
 
Professor Salvatore Settis, Art Historian, President of Louvre Museum’s Scientific Board ; Former President of Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
 
Adam Thirlwell, writer
 
Regula Venske, General Secretary, PEN Germany

Elif Shafak, writer

Vittorio Roda, Università di Bologna